Bitcoin’s upcoming Taproot activation, Ethereum network figure ATHs.

Learn about industry news, development updates, community happenings, and other aspects of the PoW world!

Mining industry

Bitcoin

The 8th consecutive positive difficulty increase just came to Bitcoin on November 1, 2021, at a rate of 7.85%.

With increasing hashrate competition and some price fluctuations, the unit mining revenue is back to $0.37 where it was 20 days ago when the price was $57,384.

Ethereum

The Ethereum network has continued its growth towards new ATHs, with the network difficulty hitting 10,488 T on November 3.

The number of Ethereum tokens burnt in the past 7 days has also reached a new high at just over 100,000 ETH at the beginning of November. The total burn token has surpassed 762,000 ETH with a rate of 5.8 ETH per minute at the time of writing.

Dev and network

Bitcoin

Taproot is approaching its activation on Bitcoin block height 709632, which is estimated to be in mid-November. Five months ago, the Taproot protocol was locked in after miners’ completed signaling their support for the upgrade.

Show your love for Taproot with our eye mask avatar at taproot.fish. You can view our countdown clock here and a detailed Taproot preparation list here.

Here is a brief explanation about what Taproot will bring, by Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille.

Bitcoin Core 0.20.2 (backports) is released. This minor release includes various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.

Ethereum

A number of topics were discussed at the latest Core Dev Meeting #125, including the Merge, the Arrow Glacier upgrade, and more.

As for the timeline of the Merge and difficulty bomb, Tim Beiko explained in his recently released AllCoreDevs Update 007.

Ethereum Classic

ETC Cooperative announced they will soon be switching their ETC mainnet endpoint to use Rivet servers for improved uptime and service guarantees.

Litecoin

Litecoin’s core dev David Burkett posted the October progress of MWEB, including the final audit report and testnet.

Dogecoin

Dogecoin devs are now preparing the release of v1.14.5. You can view a list of open items about it here.

Application and adoption

Ethereum

ENS is decentralizing governance and calling for DAO delegates. Its governance will be passed over to the community via the creation of a DAO and the $ENS governance token.

Optimism introduced EVM Equivalence – suggesting that complete alignment with the Ethereum Virtual Machine specification will become the next universal standard across the L2 space. It will be coming to the Optimistic Ethereum network on November 11 with the release of OVM 2.0.

Beam

Beam Web Wallet Alpha 6.2 was released with features like sending and receiving Beam coins using different types of addresses and more. You may find detailed release notes here.

Horizen

​​Horizen announced a partnership with GameStation, a decentralized multi-chain gaming launchpad, and marketplace, to elevate play-to-earn gaming through enhanced decentralization and security.

Ergo

Ergo has announced a partnership with Conceal Network. A bridge has been established, which brings the ability to token swap between each other.

Nervos

Godwoken, an EVM compatible Layer 2 blockchain on Nervos, is now live on mainnet beta. With Godwoken and Force Bridge live, Ethereum developers can use their existing codebases to begin porting their dapps to Nervos.

Community

Bitcoin

The community celebrated the 13th anniversary of the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper. The peer-to-peer cash system designed by Satoshi laid the foundation for today’s blockchain technology, and has grown to over a $1 trillion market cap, and is now secured by about 160 EH/s days and nights from miners around the world.

Happy birthday Bitcoin, we are all gonna make it!

Ethereum

The first Merge Community call is scheduled on November 5, at 14:00 UTC, and is calling for discussion amongst those who work in the space, including wallets, apps, explorers, and Infra providers.

Decred

A new proposal for the Decred DAO about a program of economic education and outreach, is now up for community feedback.

Ravencoin

The Ravencoin community celebrated the coin’s 4 year anniversary, by sharing Ravencoin stories on Twitter.

Firo

Firo has partnered with Finstreet, India’s first crypto education platform to gain crypto awareness in the Indian community.

Beam

Beam’s latest roadmap update was released, covering the main plans for Beam, BeamX, and related dapps until Q2, 2022.

Digibyte

Digibyte’s October update includes progress on community engagement and more.

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The PoW Round-Up is our bi-weekly report on the major news and mining insights in and around the Proof of Work ecosystem. Monitor and help secure the PoW world with f2pool.