The Solana network has suffered its fifth outage so far this year after the network stopped processing blocks for more than four hours. Applications built on top of Solana stopped working until the network was restarted.

Popular Mexican-style fast-food restaurant chain Chipotle will now accept cryptocurrency payments through digital payments firm Flexa, which supports around 9 currencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Prosecutors in New York’s Southern District have charged and arrested Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager at non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea in the first NFT insider trading case.

Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Solana Suffers Fifth Outage This Year
• Chipotle Starts Accepting Crypto Payments in U.S. Stores
• Former OpenSea Employee Charged in First NFT Insider Trading Case
• What is Optimism (OP)?

Solana Suffers Fifth Outage This Year

The Solana network has suffered its fifth outage so far this year after the network stopped processing blocks for more than four hours. Applications built on top of Solana stopped working until the network was restarted.

In cryptography, a nonce refers to a random number used for a specific purpose. On Solana, durable nonces are designed for token holders with complex offline signing setups that can’t always prepare their transactions fast enough for the network.

A failure in how Solana handles durable nonces led to the outage, as instead of treating these as single transactions, network validators double-counted them as a single transaction at two different block heights, which broke the network’s consensus.

These durable nonce transactions will remain disabled until developers identify and patch the exact problem. Offline custodians who used these transactions may be affected. At the time of writing, some exchanges report problems with their Solana deposits and withdrawal, including Binance and Coinbase.

Chipotle Starts Accepting Crypto Payments in U.S. Stores

Popular Mexican-style fast-food restaurant chain Chipotle will now accept cryptocurrency payments through digital payments firm Flexa, which supports around 98 currencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Chipotle customers can use the app to pay for food items in any of the nearly 3,000 restaurants spread throughout the United States. To pay with Flexa, customers will need to download Gemini or the SPEDN app.

The move sees Chipotle join a long list of restaurants accepting cryptocurrency payments. Subway was one of the first to do so, starting as early as 2013.

In Venezuela, Pizza Hut started accepting crypto in 2020, while Starbucks allowed reward members to turn cryptocurrencies into cash balances on the Starbucks app using a third-party app.

Former OpenSea Employee Charged in First NFT Insider Trading Case

Prosecutors in New York’s Southern District have charged and arrested Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager at non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea.

The project manager faces one count of wire fraud and one of money laundering in connection with a scheme to commit insider trading using NFTs “using confidential information about what NFTs were going to be featured on OpenSea’s homepage for his personal financial gain.”

According to a Department of Justice press release, each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Per the indictment, Chastain was tasked with selecting NFTs to be featured on OpenSea’s homepage. These selections were kept confidential until they went live, as such a listing often led to a jump in the prices of those NFTs and of those made by the same creator.

The indictment details that from roughly June to September of 2021, Chastain would secretly buy an NFT just before it was featured on the front page of its website. Once they hit the homepage, he would sell them “at profits of two- to five-times his initial purchase price.”

According to the DJ, the project manager then covered his tracks through anonymous accounts on OpenSea. The NFT marketplace has since implemented new policies to bar similar practices.

What is Optimism (OP)?

Optimism (OP) is a layer-two smart contract network that aims to enable low-cost, near-instantaneous Ethereum transactions. Optimism speeds up Ethereum transactions and cuts their costs by settling them on another blockchain.

It uses a technique called optimism rollups, whereby multiple transactions are batched into one and settled on the Optimism layer, with data fed back to the main Ethereum network. Its rollups “optimistically” assume all transactions in them are valid.

Optimism was introduced in June 2019 and its testnet was released in October 2019. In January 2021, an alpha mainnet of Optimism was launched, but it took until October 2021 for Optimism to launch a network compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

What is OP used for?

The OP token shifts the network’s structure by fueling the Optimism Collective, a governance system for funding composed of the Token House and the Citizens’ House. The Token House allows OP holders to vote on projects associated with Optimism, while the Citizens’ House facilitates and governs funding for projects aimed at promoting public goods.

Rumors Optimism was launching a governance token started circulating on April 20, 2022 when an OP token page was spotted on Coinbase.

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