ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, the smart contract platform Waterfall Network has announced the completion of a new round of financing totaling $11.6 million, with investments from Bolt's Capital, Alpha Token Capital, and Enflux. This new funding will be used to strengthen the platform's infrastructure through node simplification and further improvements.

ChainCatcher news, according to IBTimes, the smart contract platform Waterfall Network announced the completion of a new funding round of $11.6 million, with participation from Bolt's Capital, Alpha Token Capital, and Enflux. The funds will be used to strengthen the platform's infrastructure, simplify nodes, and further improvements.Waterfall Protocol, launched in July 2024, is a Layer 1, scalable, decentralized smart contract platform developed by the software development company BlueWave based on DAG technology and fast finality PoS consensus. It is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, Cardano has announced the completion of integration with the smart contract platform BitcoinOS, bringing over $1.3 trillion in Bitcoin liquidity to its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.It is reported that the integration will utilize zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography technology to achieve a trustless connection between Bitcoin assets and Cardano through the BOS Grail bridging protocol. This protocol employs BOS's ZK BitSNARK verification protocol, allowing Bitcoin transactions and assets to bridge to the Cardano blockchain without sacrificing decentralization and security.Ken Kodama, CEO of Emurgo, the leading organization in Cardano's Web3 adoption, stated that this integration "has the potential to unlock new cross-chain functionalities" and may drive the adoption of DeFi. He emphasized that BOS's bridging and zero-knowledge technology will provide a secure and trustless access route for Cardano's "users, projects, and developers" to Bitcoin.Notably, BOS has partnered with the layer two scaling solution Merlin Chain to deploy the BitcoinOS Grail bridging protocol on September 10. Merlin Chain founder Jeff Yin stated that this collaboration will provide users with "trustless, decentralized" bridging services for Bitcoin native assets, enabling cross-chain transactions without centralized security measures through zero-knowledge proofs directly written to the Bitcoin blockchain.

ChainCatcher news, the European tokenization platform Tokeny announced a partnership with 21X DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) trading and settlement system (DLT TSS). This is the first platform to operate under the new EU DLT ecosystem. Tokeny's DINO is an open distribution network for tokens compliant with the ERC-3643 standard. This collaboration will connect DINO to 21X.21X is a smart contract-based trading platform that offers compliant trading of financial instruments under the EU DLT framework. The company is said to be collaborating with several tokenization firms to facilitate the matching, trading, and settlement of tokenized assets.By connecting with DINO, Tokeny will be able to facilitate the trading of digital securities and real-world assets (RWA). DINO is reportedly collaborating with over 50 liquidity platforms.

ChainCatcher news, the official Cosmos cross-chain smart contract platform Neutron has announced that block production has resumed, and a related review report will be released next week. The network is currently operating stably, and related activities have resumed.

ChainCatcher news, OKX Ventures announced an investment in the Bitcoin-native application and smart contract platform Arch Network.OKX Ventures founder Dora stated, "We are excited to invest in Arch Network, a Bitcoin-native application platform that draws inspiration from SVM (Solana Virtual Machine), utilizing parallelization and integrated zero-knowledge proof (ZK Proof) technology to facilitate dynamic, Turing-complete smart contracts on Bitcoin. This novel approach greatly enhances user experience and the trust assumptions of Bitcoin users, achieving a smooth, frictionless experience while maintaining a trustless relationship with dApps and protocols."It is reported that Arch is the first Bitcoin-native application platform—offering cross-chain-free DeFi on the world's largest blockchain. The Arch Network is a parallelized proof-of-stake network that uses zk-proofs to enhance Bitcoin's native programmability. The network consists of a Rust-based zkVM (called ArchVM) and a decentralized validation network. These components together form a trustless execution environment directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, enabling a bridge-free transaction experience.

ChainCatcher news, according to VentureBeat, Stellar has launched the smart contract platform Soroban, and the Stellar Foundation has initiated a $100 million ecosystem incentive program to encourage developers to create applications for its platform.Previously, Stellar was only used for processing cryptocurrency payments, and the launch of Soroban allows developers to create blockchain applications on-chain. Soroban will conclude its two-year testing phase in January 2024.

ChainCatcher news, January 8, ZTC Global officially announced the first issuance of the inscription ZTCY, and opened up free trading on the secondary market. Users holding the ZTCY inscription will receive airdrops of mainnet tokens and enjoy whitelist eligibility for GameFi and SocialFi. The first snapshot will take place this month.It is reported that ZTC Global is a smart contract platform based on the Bitcoin Layer2 network, aiming to feedback results to the mainnet. The founder is Alexander Ingold, a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Utah. ZTC Global is developing a brand new BTC Layer2 network using the BRC-Y technology protocol, enabling Dapps from the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems to be deployed on the ZTC network.

ChainCatcher news, the oracle project Pyth Network announced that the Pyth price feed service has been fully deployed and launched on the Bitcoin smart contract platform Stacks. Stacks developers can now access over 400 real-time price feed data for digital assets, forex pairs, ETFs, commodities, and stocks in their applications without permission.

ChainCatcher message, Casper Network is a Layer1 and Turing-complete Wasm smart contract platform, supported by the uniquely operable CBC-Casper Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm (known as Highway). This network is a permissionless, decentralized public blockchain.Currently, Casper has launched over 11 developer incentive programs, where developers can shape the future of the Casper ecosystem by proposing innovative ideas and solving existing challenges.The eligible rewards cover: NFT, DeFi, software development tools, distributed applications, document management systems, etc., with individual rewards of up to $1000, and participating in multiple tasks allows for reward stacking and doubling.

ChainCatcher news, the access control and governance platform for smart contracts, Llama, has completed a $6 million seed round financing, with participation from Founders Fund, Electric Capital, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.Llama aims to enhance the efficiency of governance in blockchain protocols, enabling protocols to encode roles and permissions for executing on-chain operations, such as fund transfers or changing protocol parameters, addressing some inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities that could lead to poor performance or even worse, hacking attacks and exploits.

ChainCatcher news, LayerZero Labs tweeted that the cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero has launched the Horizen public EVM-compatible sidechain and smart contract platform Horizen EON. Developers based on Horizen EON can now interact with over 40 chains that support LayerZero and the smart contracts deployed on these blockchains. (Source link)

ChainCatcher news, according to the official announcement, Binance will launch Neutron (NTRN) at 8 PM tonight, and open trading for the NTRN/BTC, NTRN/USDT, and NTRN/BNB spot trading pairs.According to the crypto data platform RootData, Neutron is a permissionless smart contract platform built using the Cosmos SDK, allowing developers to easily build cross-chain applications through the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC). It announced the completion of a $10 million funding round in June, led by Binance Labs and CoinFund.

ChainCatcher news, according to Fortune crypto, the AI smart contract platform Giza has completed a $3 million funding round, planning to apply artificial intelligence to smart contracts. This round of financing was led by CoinFund, with participation from StarkWare, TA Ventures, and Arrington Capital.It is reported that Algaba is building a platform that allows AI developers to easily generate zero-knowledge proofs for AI models. In addition, the company plans to release the infrastructure behind the platform next week and fully launch the platform by the end of 2023.

ChainCatcher news, Astar Network founder Sota Watanabe posted a discussion on the community forum to reconsider Astar's inflation rate, stating that the Astar team is working with third parties to review and develop a new token economic model, as Astar Network's current inflation rate is quite high.Sota Watanabe mentioned that it would be best to lower the inflation rate in the coming months and that all potential options will be carefully considered. Ideally, we could change this within a month. The current methods being considered to reduce the inflation rate include: deciding on a fixed total supply, making the inflation rate smaller over time (similar to the Bitcoin model); determining the inflation rate (automatically) based on network usage (similar to the Ethereum model); hybrid models, etc. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, the smart contract platform Firechain announced the completion of a $3 million seed round financing, with participation from Genblock Capital, MGNR, Cogitent Ventures, 1NVST, and Ankr. The new funds will be used to expand the team, accelerate the development roadmap, and launch its innovative blockchain platform.Firechain is a heterogeneous blockchain smart contract platform that has built a heterogeneous, event-driven hybrid ledger model architecture to support features such as fee-free transactions, and plans to launch a public testnet for its DLT network in June. (source link)