Wed 01/24

Good Morning. NITI Ayog has launched a blockchain initiative with a major company as its partner, you can get paid to crack a bitcoin wallet and Robinhood just launched a Metamask competitor wallet! Wednesday is here and I can't wait for the weekend honestly. Is it just me who thinks this week has been way too long?🙃

Government Launches Blockchain Initiative With 5ire: Govt's public policy think tank, NITI Aayog, has launched a blockchain module in partnership with crypto-focused 5ire and Network Capital, a mentorship and career exploration platform, they said Monday. The project is under the aegis of NITI Aayog's Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), which has Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) in more than 10,000 schools in India. 5ire, which is among the fastest-growing blockchain unicorns, has lent its technical expertise and knowledge in the writing of the module. Network Capital, which is a mentorship and career exploration platform, has enabled the curation of the module and its conceptualization.

Robinhood Rolls Out Its MetaMask Wallet Competitor to 1 Million Users: The company today launched the Robinhood Wallet, a smartphone app that allows users to swap and transfer crypto, and view owned NFTs and crypto. It’s currently being slowly rolled out to over 1 million waitlisted users via an access code, according to Robinhood. The Robinhood Wallet uses Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain, to offer swaps without network fees. It also added support for Ethereum today. “This is much more than just a wallet—think of the Robinhood Wallet as a ‘browser’ for Web3,” Robinhood’s General Manager Johann Kerbrat said.

Crypto Infrastructure Firm Blockstream Raises $125M for Bitcoin Mining: The company said in a press release Tuesday that it will use the proceeds from the new capital to expand its mining facilities to meet strong demand for large-scale hosting services. Blockstream was founded in 2014 with a focus on building infrastructure and applications based on the Bitcoin network. The firm was co-founded by CEO Adam Back (inventor of Hashcash, a system for discouraging spam emails that influenced Satoshi Nakamoto's proof-of-work consensus mechanism design for Bitcoin) and nine others, including Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell. The company has over 500 megawatts of power capacity underway for its mining services.

Wasabi Wallet Will Pay You to 'Crack' a Bitcoin Wallet: Bitcoin wallet company Wasabi Wallet has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged Bitcoiners around the world to “crack” a bitcoin wallet and collect whatever bitcoin (BTC) it holds. The challenge, which kicked off yesterday, is part of a week-long global treasure hunt dubbed “Hunting Sats” – a gamified educational bootcamp on best practices for private key protection. The Hunting Sats wallet has been funded with 3,454,811 satoshis or "sats" (0.03454811 BTC) and counting. Participants from anywhere in the world will attempt to correctly guess the wallet’s passphrase and 12-word seed phrase in order to claim the funds.

What are Oracles: An oracle is any application that provides data from outside the blockchain or vice-versa. Blockchains can only access data available on their own chains, and so need oracles to add outside or off-chain data. A typical use case is smart contracts that need to incorporate real-world data or bridges that require information from another blockchain to perform an exchange.