Sergey Ivancheglo said that the new proposal will keep the name IOTA, since he was its creator. He talked about using “IOBA” to call the current version of the IOTA Foundation.

Sergey Ivancheglo, Co-founder of IOTA and Former Director of the IOTA Foundation, added to the controversy surrounding the IOTA project. He recently announced his plans to create a parallel project and a new cryptocurrency. The developer questioned the organization’s decisions and said that he has the right to use the name IOTA in his new proposal.

Ivancheglo, known as “Come from Beyond” (CFB) in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, explained that he seeks to avoid confusion by identifying the IOTA Foundation version as IOBA, since “binary” starts with b and his own with the original name IOTA. Even though this proposal is theoretically a hard fork, he explained that it is not a classic fork or an initial coin offering (ICO), but a 1:1 exchange rate between both cryptocurrencies.

As an argument to completely separate from the original project, the programmer listed some changes with which he disagrees. Two of them are the support of cryptographic algorithms that would not be immune to quantum computers and the elimination of packets due to having atomic transfers of variable size.

CFB talked about the possible exchanges between the holders of MIOBA, “current MIOTA” according to Ivancheglo, and MIOTA, as a new cryptocurrency of his project. He also mentioned that these changes would be possible after the software that implements the IOTA protocol is ready. He highlighted that the 1:1 exchanges would not take into account the trading price of both cryptocurrencies on the market.

Even though the holders of (m)iobas obtain the same amount of (m)iotas, this is not a classic “fork”. To dispose of inactive addresses, David Sønstebø (65 Ti) and the IOTA Foundation (16 Ti) are controlling some of their iotas. Ivancheglo added that both entities are unwelcome to join the original IOTA as their actions led to the need for the creation of the exchange and gave rise to other problems.

The users expressed their opinion about this situation through their Twitter accounts. Among them is Peter Farla, who said that it was very confusing and would not work. He even asked if there was a roadmap, a website, or a white book to be able to understand it.

Similarly, user @easygoiiing questioned CFB’s plans, asking him about his plans to make his token a success. He commented that IOTA has built a lot in recent years, not only the technology but also adoption. He said that just a name does not make a brand, so he suggested not raising commotion over the name IOTA.

The conflicts between CFB and David Sønstebø, another of IOTA co-founders, have existed since July 2019, when the first decided to withdraw from the project. However, their differences have widened to such an extent that CFB opened last February the possibility for a legal battle to start as he is requiring Sønstebø to pay 25,000,000 MIOTA.

By Alexander Salazar

Auction System in DeFi MakerDAO Altered by Drop in Ether’s Price

The platform liquidated Ether collaterals with zero-dollar bids last March 12^th. Maker is investigating what happened but it ruled out attacks or errors.

The rapid fall of the cryptocurrency market last March 12^th affected the decentralized finance platform MakerDAO, with a 32% drop in the price of Ether (ETH). The cryptocurrency went from USD 144 to USD 95 in a matter of hours, altering its auction system of Ether collaterals, which users acquired with zero-dollar bids.

Users denounced that “free” funds went to the operators of the system based on the DAI token, a crypto asset that operates under the ERC-20 protocol of the Ethereum network. Twitter user @ercwl questioned what had happened, despite not knowing the causes.

Another Twitter user, Eric Wall, reported that some ETH collaterals in @MakerDAO were liquidated for USD 0, without apparent reason. He explained that this Ether can only be bought with DAI and there were no DAI offers. Mr. Wall believes that it could be a liquidity problem or a connectivity/GAS problem with the maintenance software.

Also, Eric Wall clarified that the liquidation of Ether for USD 0 means that someone received it for “free”. He said that miners might have done this by censoring those bids, but these auctions only last 10 minutes. He concludes that it would be a pretty serious censorship attack but there is no evidence.

Udi Wertheimer stated that there were a lot of liquidations of Maker (MKR) on March 12^th, which is normal and expected. What is not normal and expected is, given that this information is correct, that people were able to buy the liquidated collateral for free.

MakerDAO stated on March 12th saying that the steep drop in the price of Ether stressed the Maker protocol, the community, the Maker Foundation, and the entire Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. The organization indicated that these circumstances allowed some users (guardians) to bid close to 0 DAI for lots of 50 ETH collaterals.

During the drop in the price of Ether, a Maker oracle was slow to provide the most current price. Even though it was unintentional, it had the side effect of helping Maker’s vaults to remain overcollateralized. This gave some users enough time to add collaterals to avoid liquidation.

A release indicated that the current state of the Maker protocol is healthy, with no detection of hacking or internal errors. Besides, it did not report any plans to turn off the platform for what happened, but the need to make certain modifications.

The fall in the prices of Ether, and crypto currencies, in general, technically affected the MakerDAO platform. However, the market, in general, has also been in the red this week due to the global expansion of the coronavirus pandemic. In the case of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency fell to USD 4700 per unit last March 12^th.

MakerDAO is a decentralized system that uses its DAI token, with a 1:1 parity with the US dollar. However, it employs a collateralization ratio, which has to be 150% or more, with the cryptocurrency Ether. In other words, the price of each DAI is fixed with a deposit in Ether to a smart contract called CDP (Guaranteed Debt Position). Depending on the collateral amount deposited, a certain amount of DAI is generated.

By Willmen Blanco