Industry News & Reports
Global Markets Stage A Recovery As mentioned in last month's report, most financial markets fell by roughly 30% in the month from February 20th to March 20th. This included the S&P 500, NYSE, DJIA, Nasdaq, and, of course, digital asset markets. Through the end of March and all of April, virtually all of these markets staged a significant recovery. Composite indexes of the S&P 500, NYSE, DJIA, and Nasdaq all rose by at least 30% from March 23rd to April 30th. Many major digital currencies experienced a similar rebound. On April 1st, BTC was hovering around $6,350, down 38% from this year's high of about $10,250 reached out on February 13th. At the same time, this figure was an increase of 34% from this year's low of roughly $4,650, which was touched on March 13th. Throughout all of April, Bitcoin and other digital assets markets mostly held steady. Then, over the past week, Bitcoin climbed quickly, briefly breaking $9,300 on April 30. Now, at the time of writing, BTC sits at $8,750 — up a full 38% from April 1st. Some commentators are attributing the recent rise of BTC to the rapidly-approaching Bitcoin halving. Bitcoin Halving The Bitcoin halving is now less than two weeks away. On May 12, Bitcoin block rewards will drop from 12.5 BTC per block to just 6.25 BTC per block. All other things held equal, this means that miners will soon be taking a 50% pay cut. This could potentially lead to smaller mining operations becoming unprofitable, forcing them to close shop for good and drop off the network. It's also possible that the price of BTC will rise relative to USD, as miners become less willing to sell their BTC at lower prices to compensate for the lower block rewards. After the last Bitcoin halving in July 2016, when the price of BTC was around $650 USD, Bitcoin steadily increased for more than a year, reaching an all-time high of over $19,000 USD in December 2017. That's an increase of 3000% in just 17 months. Of course, there is no guarantee that the 2020 Bitcoin halving will be followed by a similar bull run. A great deal of uncertainty remains in the wake of COVID-19 and some experts predict that the worst of the economic fallout has yet to come. And while the cryptosphere has been speculating about the impact of the Bitcoin halving for years now, nobody can know for certain what will happen. Fortunately, we won't have to wait much longer to find out. The halving will be here in just a few short weeks. Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann provided commentary to a reporter from US News for an article on the upcoming Bitcoin halving. "Onlookers should pay attention because bitcoin has a direct global market influence over most altcoins," says Kadan Stadelmann, chief technology officer of Komodo, a multichain architecture project in the blockchain space. An altcoin is every cryptocurrency alternative to bitcoins, which were the first of their kind. "If the market demand remains at the same levels, this halving can mean a natural price increase for most cryptocurrencies besides bitcoin," Stadelmann says. Read the article on US News here. More Trouble For The Ethereum DeFi Space In the March monthly report, we noted some of the issues that the Ethereum DeFi space was experiencing. Specifically, a hacker exposed a vulnerability in the bZx protocol to launch a "flash loan attack," which resulted in nearly $1 Million USD of users' funds being stolen. In addition, when the markets went into a freefall on March 12, congestion on the Ethereum network caused serious issues with Maker collateralized debt positions (CDP). Oracle transactions reporting the price of ETH were not reaching the smart contract, so collateralization rates were mispriced for more than an hour. Even worse, the CDP liquidation logic completely failed. When a CDP becomes undercollateralized, users can bid on the locked ETH, liquidating the CDP. Unfortunately, most of those bids simply didn't go through due to the congestion, and one unknown individual was able to liquidate other users' DAI CDP with bids of 0 DAI The only payment the liquidator had to put up were the high gas fees to ensure that his transactions were prioritized by the network, allowing him to swoop up nearly $4 Million USD worth of ETH. In April, the Ethereum DeFi space had another major vulnerability exposed for big losses. A DeFi project called dForce lost approximately $25 Million USD worth of crypto when someone was able to drain funds from smart contracts belonging to Lendf.Me, a product built by dForce. In short, they were able to quickly make many withdrawals of imBTC tokens before the balance had been updated to show the contract no longer had any funds. In other words, they were able to withdraw the same tokens over and over and over again, even when the contracts were empty. In a strange turn of events, the same individual who made off with the $25 Million in funds apparently returned all of the funds to the dForce team. Some speculated that the individual had been identified by law enforcement agencies and was forced to return the funds, willingly or not. An important thing to note about all of these massive losses is that they aren't really hacks. Rather, every move was made in accordance with rules established by the code. These 'hackers' simply took advantage of massive vulnerabilities in the architectural design of various DeFi smart contracts and of the Ethereum network itself. The flaws weren't created, they were exploited. While the DeFi space is generating a lot of buzz and is certainly one of the most prominent use cases for blockchain technology, the structural problems with a single-chain architecture and a virtual-machine-based smart contract model continue to cause problems for the ETH DeFi space. An article published in Finance Magnates on April 24th quoted Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann as he cited the need for decentralization as a security solution for the DeFi space. "According to Kadan Stadelmann, chief technical officer at Komodo, it is critical that DeFi platforms take as many steps as possible toward assuring that their platforms do not have any exploitable vulnerabilities. "DeFi platforms should not offer any sort of central attack surface," he said. "By not offering any point of central attack, hackers can only target specific nodes and network participants," Stadelmann explained. In other words, "their attack would be against a single individual instead of directly against the entire DeFi platform."" Read the article on Finance Magnates here.
Komodo's Development Update 
Notary Node Elections Are Coming To An End Komodo's Fourth Annual Notary Node Elections began on April 12th and have been in full swing since. To see which candidates are leading in each of the 4 regions, you can check out the VOTE2020 token rich lists here and here. Voting will come to a close in just a few days. On May 4th at 12:00 UTC, the voting period will end. If you haven't yet cast your votes, please make sure to do so over the weekend! You can cast your ballots by sending the VOTE tokens to the address(es) of your preferred candidate(s). We have started a new topic on the community portal to collect all Notary Node proposals and highlight the Notary Node Candidates on Twitter. You can check out all of the candidate's proposals here. Komodo wishes all candidates good luck! AtomicDEX Updates Beta testing for AtomicDEX mobile continues and the Komodo developers have released version 0.214 for Android and iOS. This new version contains the following changes: If you haven't already done so, you can download AtomicDEX mobile now and try it out. Download AtomicDEX for Android on Google Play here. Download AtomicDEX for iOS through Test Flight here. In addition, Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann announced the public alpha version of AtomicDEX PRO this week. AtomicDEX PRO is the desktop version of AtomicDEX. It's currently available for Windows and MacOS. A Linux version will be released in the coming weeks. If you're interested in trying out AtomicDEX PRO, you can download the app from the AtomicDEX PRO Github repo. Please remember that this product is in the very first phase of alpha testing so you may experience bugs. If you do have issues or find bugs, please report them to the team here on Github or in the #atomicdex-pro channel on Discord. You should not use large sums with AtomicDEX PRO at this time. Instead, just use small amounts to try it out and make some test swaps. The Komodo team is also working on a full redesign of the UX/UI so expect major improvements to the look and feel of the product in the coming months. Python Support Is Coming To Antara The Komodo Dev Team is working on adding Python support to the Antara Framework. This will enable developers to code Antara modules in Python, one of the most popular programming languages in the world today. It's also widely considered one of the easiest languages to learn. Thus, adding Python support will greatly lower the barrier to using Komodo's technology. This project is still in a prototypal stage, but stay tuned for more details. The Komodo team will make an announcement once Python module support is ready for testing. Subatomic Swaps Over the past few months, Komodo Lead Dev James 'jl777' Lee has been working on developing a way to make atomic swaps from shielded addresses. Now, there has been a major breakthrough in shielded address swaps. Just this past week, some of the very first z-adress to z-address subatomic swaps were successfully completed. 
Tweet from @techloverhd (SHossain #0007 on Discord) If you're interested in helping the team test fully shielded subatomic swaps, check out this video tutorial posted by Kaks and join the conversation in the #dev-subatomic channel on Discord. Komodo Welcomes New Team Members The Komodo team would like to formally welcome four new people to the team: -
Sergey Boyko, AtomicDEX API developer -
Yurii Khiznichenko, frontend developer and Flutter developer -
Yaroslav Yanushevskiy, Junior QA Engineer -
Igor Govyashov, QA Automation Engineer Welcome to the team, guys!
Community Highlights 
Komodo Technical Marketing Manager Torsten Sándor published another explainer video this week. He explains the differences between centralized exchanges, decentralized smart contract exchanges, smart contract-based instant swaps, and Komodo's atomic swaps. This is a complex topic and, for this reason, Torsten includes Alice (from Alice in Wonderland) and Bob (from Bob the Builder) to make it easier to understand. "All of them have advantages and disadvantages. But I also think that after years of research, atomic swaps are finally ready for prime time!" Watch the full video here. April Bounty Awards We love to see independent projects and community effort that through which we can highlight Komodo technology or that otherwise support the Komodo project.
Here is a shortlist of April's bounty awards. Head over to the announcement post for the full details and breakdown. - We award Kaks with 400 KMD for publishing a tutorial video about making subatomic swaps.
- DreamTim started a fundraising effort to bring I2P to Komodo, and we will send 600 KMD to his fundraising campaign.
- Mylo was award 400 KMD for developing a website to browse the AtomicDEX order books. It is becoming a full market-making product targeted for web communities.
- We award CHMEX with 400 KMD maintaining a live voting result page on dexstats.info
- We award MadMax with 400 KMD maintaining a live voting result page on komodod.com
- We award Regnar with 400 KMD for working on a new dashboard that highlights many things about the KMD ecosystem
- We award Tyke with 400 KMD for his efforts to write a history book about Komodo.
Read The Full Announcement 
In mid-April, Komodo made it into second place on DAO Maker's list of the top 7 most trending altcoins. The Komodo team thanks you for your support and activity across all social channels! 
Source In early April, the Komodo team announced the launch of a Micro Bounty Campaign. With this campaign, the Komodo Team wants to increase the awareness of the Komodo Platform, its products, vision, and features in a playful way. Read more about the Micro bounty campaign here.
Komodo Mentions in the Media 
This week, Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelman was interviewed by Decrypt about why blockchain interoperability is essential for Decentralized Finance (DeFi). "For Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann, the single blockchain architecture model is inefficient and outdated. His company's blockchain interoperability technology started with a vision for a decentralized exchange that connects all the blockchains," he told Decrypt. "Komodo takes the data [from] the Ethereum interface and translates whatever is not being understood by the native Bitcoin protocol," Stadelmann said, "so these two different blockchains can interact with each other." Read the full article on Decrypt. 
Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelman sat down for a superb interview with Yonah Hochhauser from BLOCKTV. Kadan describes Komodo's technology, explains the differences between centralized and decentralized exchanges, and explains why AtomicDEX is the industry leader today. Watch the full interview here. 
CoinTelegraph published an article on April 14 that discussed KMD's price movement against the US dollar over the previous 28 days. They also briefly explain the technology and use cases of Komodo. In addition to that, they mention how Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) praised Komodo as far back as 2018. In a Forbes article from August of that year, CZ suggested customizable blockchains like Komodo may be poised to outlast the previous generation's crop of general-use chains. Read the article on Cointelegraph here. 
Komodo is continuing its efforts to educate people about blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies with the Blockchain Fundamentals content series. Topics include the basics of blockchain, like consensus mechanisms and digital signatures, to guides on margin trading and atomic swaps. Check out all of the Blockchain Fundamentals articles here. | 
