Tag Archive for: Protocol

Coinbase Backs First Enterprise-grade Liquid Staking Protocol

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Coinbase, America’s largest crypto exchange, is venturing deeper into the realm of digital asset staking with its latest pledge of support.

The exchange published a company blog post stating that its cloud division would be supporting the development of the first-ever enterprise-grade liquid staking protocol.  

Coinbase Cloud is collaborating with staking platform Figment and software development firm Alluvial Finance to support a group of experienced founders and operators building the institutional-grade protocol.

Alluvial already operates a staking platform that it intends to expand and become decentralized through DAO governance.

Coinbase says liquid staking is growing  

Coinbase stated that liquid staking is a niche market and an “industry gap.” While there are already existing platforms such as Lido offering Ethereum staking, one for financial institutions has yet to be launched.

Traditional staking methods require tokens to be locked up or bonded for a set period in order to be eligible for yields. This is the case with the Ethereum consensus layer which began staking operations in December 2020, with ETH remaining locked in the smart contract. It will not be released until several months after the Merge which is slated for this summer.

Liquid staking opens up opportunities to efficiently utilize staked assets as collateral to trade, lend, and provision quickly and strategically, the blog post stated. Stakers receive equivalent tokens representing their collateral that can be used elsewhere.

“They can stake their tokens, receive back receipt tokens that evidence ownership of their staked tokens and use those receipt tokens to participate in the broader Web3 economy,” says the company.

According to Dune Analytics, liquid staking penetration has gone from less than 1% penetration in January 2020 to more than 35% today. Dune also reports that Lido staking represents almost a third of all ETH staked on the Beacon Chain with 4.1 million ETH staked.

Coinbase stated that these staking solutions do not meet the needs of institutions or mature regulated businesses which require enterprise-grade reliability, security, and KYC/AML processes.

“As part of the initial…

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Decentralising end-to-end encryption with a new security protocol

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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a new security protocol to decentralise E2E, enabling users to store their messages in a more flexible network.

Messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram use end-to-end encryption (E2E) to secure messages sent and received. Their systems uses a single company’s server to store encrypted information.

Complete dependence on a single firm’s server prevents users from being able to control how their private messages are being handled.

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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a new security protocol to decentralise E2E, enabling users to store their messages in a more flexible network.

The system is an extension of the steady group key settlement (GKA) — a previously developed safety protocol that permits a group of people to send and receive messages without relaying on a message group supervisor. “If your message is routed through one server and the company raises the prices or shuts down, you could switch to another server seamlessly,” the team noted.

Also Read | Quantum computers pose security threats, report says

If users are using a central server run by a company to communicate, but it gets blocked or shut down, they could switch to a self hosted server that is physically in one of their homes, the team noted.

“If that’s blocked too, or if the whole Internet is shut down, they could switch to using a mesh network in which nearby devices connect over Bluetooth,” the team said in a paper titled ‘Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees’.

“Right now, messaging app companies are in charge of users, when really it should be the other way around,” one of the researchers noted. “Users should have the freedom to choose how their messages are handled.

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Message to the Senate of the United States on the Protocol Supplementary to the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft – Whitehouse.gov

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Message to the Senate of the United States on the Protocol Supplementary to the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft  Whitehouse.gov
“HTTPS hijacking” – read more

Wired for sound: How SIP won the VoIP protocol wars

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Wired for sound: How SIP won the VoIP protocol wars

(credit: Dan Brady)

Update: We’re in the last throes of winter break 2019, which means most Ars’ home office phones can stay dormant for a few more days. As such, we’ve been resurfacing a few classics from the archives—the latest being this look at how SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) won the VoIP protocol wars once upon a time. This story first appeared on December 8, 2009, and it appears unchanged below.

As an industry grows, it is quite common to find multiple solutions that all attempt to address similar requirements. This evolution dictates that these proposed standards go through a stage of selection—over time, we see some become more dominant than others. Today, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is clearly one of the dominant VoIP protocols, but that obviously didn’t happen overnight. In this article, the first of a series of in-depth articles exploring SIP and VoIP, we’ll look at the main factors that led to this outcome.

A brief history of VoIP

Let’s go back to 1995 in the days prior to Google, IM, and even broadband. Cell phones were large and bulky, Microsoft had developed a new Windows interface with a “Start” button, and Netscape had the most popular Web browser. The growth of the Internet and data networks prompted many to realize that it’s possible to use the new networks to serve our voice communication needs while substantially lowering the associated cost. The first commercial solution of Internet VoIP came from a company called VocalTec; their software allowed two people to talk with each other over the Internet. One would make a local call to an ISP via a 28.8K or 36.6K modem and be able to talk with friends even if they lived far away. I remember trying out this software, and the sound was definitely below acceptable quality. (It frequently sounded like you were attempting to speak while submerged in a swimming pool.) However, the software successfully connected two people and introduced real-time voice conversation for a bandwidth-constrained network.

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