October - the Month of Crypto Hackers

Good day, people! Here's the Friday and the Bitdegree Insider newsletter coming to your hands. Before jumping into the weekend mood, let's look at what web3 landscape has for us and like yesterday, we have a question for you!

What kind of educational content are you interested in?

Today's talking points:

• ⚡ October-Hacktober
• ⚡ How The Blockchain Works
• ⚡ Selected Meme of The Day!

OCTOBER - HACKTOBER?! CRYPTO HACKS BROKE ALL RECORDS!

In the first 12 days of this month, the crypto industry experienced 11 different hacker attacks worth $718 million. Somebody was busy…

Hacking is good and bad. Sounds shocking? Let me explain.

• Bad: because the hacks greatly impact investor and user confidence in the DeFi sector. Each new hack somehow takes us away from the future of WEB 3.0.
• Good: every hack makes the industry stronger and stronger.

As the saying goes, there are no ups and downs. Teams are beginning to focus on auditing and security. Infrastructure is being developed with reward systems for discovered drawbacks. Users are becoming more attentive and careful. So… only a win-win situation here, I guess? 

Hackers, you can rest a little bit, though.

HOME ALONE, OR THE BLOCKCHAIN WORKS

You probably saw this movie at least once. Remember how Kevin successfully protected his house from thieves? That's because the boy knew his home... 

So, if we want to protect our funds stored on the blockchain, we must know how blockchain works because it's our home. And hackers are Harry and Marv. Just smarter.

So, blockchain is made of 0-3 layers. Let's start from the bottom.

L0 (Layer 0) — The Foundation of The House

Before building a house, you need to make a foundation, and conduct plumbing, sewerage and electricity.

Layer 0 in the blockchain industry are protocols that link multiple blockchains. 

For example, Polkadot and Cosmos, where it is possible to build blockchains interconnected by a single network. Blockchains built on Layer 0 can interact with each other and transfer various data, including tokens.

L1 (Layer 1) — First Floor of The House

Layer 1 is about the standard blockchains that we all know: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

Often they work independently of each other and have their standards and the logic of work.

L2 (Layer 2) — Second Floor of The House

Layer 2 - optimizes the Layer 1 blockchain, offloading some of its tasks and reducing the cost of transactions. All thanks to scaling mechanisms. 

For example, the Bitcoin blockchain has a Layer 2 network called the Lightning Network (LN) that allows you to send BTC instantly and almost for free (that's what people use in Salvadore). Ethereum also has L2 blockchains, the most famous of which are Arbitrum and Optimism - they can be used to use Ethereum applications with minimal fees.

L3 (Layer 3) — The Interior of The House

To live comfortably in a house, you need various furniture, devices, appliances, and more.

Layer 3 is a variety of applications that work on blockchains. That application layer allows you to interact conveniently with the blockchain. For example, to use cryptocurrency exchanges, games, protocols, and so on.

Selected Meme of The Day

Bite-Sized News

• Uniswap Labs Raises $165M In Series B Funding Led By Polychain Capital
• Tether Eliminates Commercial Papers From Its Reserves
• Crypto Exchange Binance Burns $548M Worth of BNB Token
• CoinShares Launches AI Twitter Bot to Calculate Current NFT Prices