EigenLayer's Sreeram Kannan: King of the Professor Coins

For a crypto founder who's attracted so much controversy, Sreeram Kannan is surprisingly sanguine. In a wide-ranging interview after his selection as one of CoinDesk's “Most Influential” figures in crypto for 2024, the EigenLayer founder was generous with his time, chatting more than an hour beyond our scheduled slot.

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Marc Hochstein, CoinDesk's deputy editor-in-chief for features, opinion and standards.

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Solana was the most popular blockchain among new developers this year, according to a report released last week by Electric Capital. In July, this community became the first since 2016 to bring on board more devs than Ethereum. Solana attracted 7,625 new developers in 2024, the most of any chain and a little over 1,000 more than Ethereum. The results underscore the challenge Ethereum faces as rival smart contract platform Solana's low fees and fast transactions attract investment and talent.

Solana's network activity lit up as the Pudgy Penguins NFT project debuted its native token, PENGU, on the programmable blockchain. Solana registered a total transaction tally of 66.9 million Tuesday, the highest daily volume since its inception in 2020, according to data source Artemis. To highlight how busy it was, Solana's transaction count eclipsed the total of all other major chains combined.

Kraken's layer-2 rollup network, built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, has gone live. The network, called Ink, is Kraken's answer to Base, the highly successful blockchain launched by rival exchange Coinbase. Like Base, Ink is based on the OP Stack, a customizable framework that lets developers build their own rollups using Optimism’s technology. The team had originally planned for Ink to go live in early 2025, so the launch of its main network is ahead of a schedule.

Avalanche, a layer-1 blockchain launched in 2020 that's now the tenth-largest by total value locked (TVL), activated its highly anticipated Avalanche9000 upgrade Monday, marking the ecosystem's biggest technical changes to date. The network has been prepping for these changes for months, with new features that will cut the costs for sending transactions, operating validators and building applications on the network. Leaders at Avalanche previously said that part of the goal with the upgrade is to attract developers to Avalanche and encourage them to create customized blockchains using its technology, known as subnets, or “L1s."

Crypto degens have a new – and, if all goes according to plan, faster, cheaper and safer – way to trade Runes, the Bitcoin ecosystem's answer to memecoins. An automated-market maker (AMM) for the Runes protocol went live on Wednesday on Stacks, following the unveiling of the layer-2 network's native BTC-backed asset sBTC on Tuesday. It's the first AMM for such tokens on Stacks. The teams behind decentralized exchange (DEX) Bitflow Finance and Bitcoin bridge Pontis developed the AMM. Runes launched in April and spurred a flurry of activity, paying 78.6 BTC ($8.18 million) in fees in the first 90 minutes. However, less than a month later, this excitement waned considerably, with fees dropping more than 50%. Bitflow's aim is for its AMM to help Runes scale and address some of the shortcomings holding it back.

ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, has picked Linea's technology to build its upcoming layer-2 network, Namechain. Linea is a zero-knowledge rollup that came out in July 2023 and was built by Ethereum infrastructure giant Consensys. It is the seventh-largest rollup network, according to L2Beat, with $1 billion locked in its ecosystem. Rollups are a special type of blockchain where one can transact faster and at a lower cost. There are two kinds of rollups: optimistic and zero-knowledge. Optimistic rollups use optimistic proofs, which have a seven-day window to dispute transactions before they are finalized. Zero-knowledge rollups, by contrast, finalize proofs within minutes. ENS has been described as "the phone book for Web3," but a more precise analogy is the web's domain name service (DNS). The domain name "CoinDesk.com" is easier to remember and type than a numerical IP address. Similarly, ENS handles like parishilton.eth, which the namesake heiress acquired in 2021, are more relatable than the strings of letters and numbers that make up Ethereum wallet addresses. For this service, "we need fast finality,” said Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS. That's because “you want to be able to update your ENS name and have the chain reflect it in the smallest interval possible. And to do that and have