Weekly Roundup: Iceland’s Corn Preference, Polygon’s zkEVM Restoration, and Other Highlights

Iceland PM wants harvests, not hash rate

Iceland reportedly wants to plant more corn and chase out Bitcoin (BTC) miners as the northern European nation renews its focus on food security and energy stability. Cheap hydroelectric power has seen Bitcoin miners swarm to Iceland, making it both the world’s largest energy and Bitcoin hash rate producer per capita.

“Bitcoin is an issue worldwide,” Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir told the Financial Times in a March 23 report. “Data centers in Iceland use a significant share of our green energy.” Jakobsdóttir wants to reallocate renewable electricity from crypto miners to power other industries and housing for the country’s 375,000 citizens. Icelandic Bitcoin miners reportedly use more energy than households, causing electricity shortages.

A new proposal would see a boost to wind energy for industry use to accelerate carbon neutrality plans, but “Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, which use a lot of our energy, are not part of that mission,” Jakobsdóttir said.

Meanwhile, Jakobsdóttir said Iceland is starting to grow corn as the country was “very much reliant on imported corn.” Farming in Iceland is “not exactly great” as glaciers cover “a large part of the country,” she said, but trade disruptions and farmer protests sparked a push to reduce reliance on imports.

Hack VC’s new $100M to fund crypto startups: Bloomberg

With the crypto market again on the rise, venture capital firms are again coming back around to crypto after their hiatus last year — and Hack VC is one of them. The venture firm is reportedly raising $100 million for a fund aimed at seeding crypto startups, Bloomberg reported on March 23, citing people familiar with the plan.

• Just last month, Hack VC raised $150 million for a similar crypto and artificial intelligence-focused fund.
• Hack also raised a $200 million early-stage crypto startup-focused seed fund in February 2022.

The crypto market has been on a run so far this year, with Bitcoin twice nailing new all-time highs in March, which has seen VC funding perk up. Blockchain game publisher Immutable launched a $100 million fund for blockchain games last week, and last month VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) put $100 million toward Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer.

“Rainbow staking” could combat Ethereum centralization — Buterin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has floated a conceptual Ether (ETH) staking framework dubbed “rainbow staking,” which aims to address the blockchain’s centralized staking ecosystem. In a March 21 speech at ETHTaipei, Buterin acknowledged that liquid staking and “staking in general” had become centralization risks to Ethereum.

• He said there weren’t enough solo stakers — those who deposit 32 ETH worth over $111,500 to be a validator — because it’s expensive and technically difficult.
• The solution, to Buterin, is rainbow staking, with the idea being “you explicitly split up into two kinds of staking, and you call it heavy staking and light staking,” he said.

Rainbow staking aims to reduce reliance and provide a competitor to liquid staking protocols, but Buterin conceded that more research on the concept is needed before it goes live on the blockchain.

Polygon’s zkEVM back after 10 hours downtime

Polygon’s beta zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) is back online after a ten-hour outage on March 23 due to an issue with its blockchain sequencer. The zkEVM came back after the outage on March 23 at nearly 9:00 pm UTC, at block number 10989776. In a March 25 X post, Polygon said its Ethereum layer 2 scaling zkEVM had resumed operations after it pulled it into an “emergency state” so its team could apply a fix.

It said a detailed post-mortem of the issue is coming “early next week.” Earlier, Polygon said its zkEVM was down due to “an issue with its sequencer,” which organizes, batches and makes sure transactions are in order for sending to Ethereum. The outage only impacted its zkEVM and not its toolkits like Polygon PoS or its Chain Development Kit (CDK). Blockchains deployed using its CDK were also unaffected.

Other news

• Terra co-founder Do Kwon was released from prison in Montenegro as the country’s Supreme Court decides on what to do with extradition requests from the United States and South Korea.
• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission again extended its time to decide on Grayscale’s ETH futures exchange-traded fund (ETF).