EthHub Weekly #158
Aave AMM market released, Aztec 2.0 launched, OpenSea raises $23mil, Dune v2 now live and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
⚒️ The Merge
Mikhail Kalinin posted a proposal to the Ethereum Github repository last week which proposes to speed up the merger of eth1 <> eth2 - prioritizing it for after the London hard fork (scheduled for July). This means that the merger could be done as early as Q1 next year (I doubt it’d happen Q4 this year). Though the merger is definitely something that pretty much everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem wants (except maybe most miners) and I believe we will see a concerted effort to get it done asap.
2 media appearances from me this week - I joined DeFi Dad on Yield TV to talk all things layer 2 (watch here) and I’ve started a new weekly series with David Hoffman from Bankless where we discuss all things Ethereum (watch the first episode here).
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
🤔 Crypto Exchange Kraken Could Go Public Next Year
Kraken could go public next year via a direct listing, a spokesperson of the cryptocurrency exchange told The Block.
Direct listing means Kraken won't choose the traditional IPO or the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) routes. The spokesperson said Kraken is "too big" for the SPAC route.
Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino tweeted Tuesday that Kraken could go public in 2022 either via a SPAC or an IPO.
Kraken's plans of going public were first revealed earlier this year when its CEO Jesse Powell said he'd make the exchange go public at a valuation of above $10 billion. Kraken is reportedly in talks to raise funds in a move that could see its valuation reach that level.
🤯 Morgan Stanley to Offer Wealth Management Clients Access to Bitcoin Funds
Morgan Stanley alerted its wealth management advisors Wednesday that the Wall Street giant will begin offering access to at least one bitcoin-related fund to accredited wealth management clients.
It's the latest sign of bitcoin adoption on Wall Street and a big development for the cryptocurrency in the wealth management channel. Morgan Stanley's wealth management unit boasts 16,000 advisors, managing some $4 triillion in client assets.
According to a source at the bank, the firm could offer clients access to funds operated by NYDIG or Galaxy Digital.
On Wednesday, Morgan Stanley published a note through its wealth management unit that outlined the case for cryptocurrency as an emerging investable asset class. That piece notably suggested that would-be investors should look to publicly traded products rather than obtain direct exposure via coin ownership.
Project Updates
Ethereum Cat Herders Update #40
Berlin upgrade is announced, Ropsten testnet forked, Goerli will be forked March 17th. EIP-1559 & EIP-3238 approved for the London upgrade, Eth2 — Altair upgrade, Prater testnet, 1559 community call, events, and more.
Aave AMM Market Released
Users can now deposit LP tokens from both Uniswap v2 (DAI/USDC, USDC/WETH and more) and Balancer (WBTC/WETH, BAL/WETH).
Aztec 2.0 Launched
Aztec 2.0 includes a private rollup service, their block explorer is now live, and the alpha release of the Noir private smart contract language for Aztec 3.0.
MetaMask v9.2.0 Released
This version adds support for multiple Ledger & Trezor hardware wallet accounts, adds a warning when sending a token to its own contract address and more.
Introducing SafeSnap
Combining the Gnosis Safe with decentralized governance platform Snapshot, SafeSnap enables decentralized execution of crypto governance proposals, through on-chain execution of off-chain votes.
Gods Unchained Immutable X Linking Goes Live
You can now be among the first to have assets minted in Immutable X so you're set up and ready to trade when the marketplace launches.
Introducing the Flexible Leverage Index
FLI is a structured product in ERC20 format that enables traders to automate a target leveraged exposure in a completely decentralized manner.
Dune V2 Now Live
Dune v2 includes automatic and reliable query refreshing, a unified, much faster and prettier Dune experience and other improvements.
Fuse from Rari Capital Now Live
Fuse is an open interest rate protocol that supports any asset and it is now live on the Ethereum mainnet.
Connext Raises $2.2 Million
The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from 1kx and Huobi Capital. With fresh capital at hand, Connext looks to seed the early network liquidity and expand its team to launch the full network.
OpenSea Raises $23 Million
The raise was led by a16z with participation from funds Blockchain Capital, 1Confirmation and more with additional participation from angels Naval Ravikant, Tim Ferris, Mark Cuban and more.
Vega Raises $5 Million
Vega Protocol, which is building a decentralized network for trading derivatives, has raised $5 million in a new funding round from Coinbase Ventures, ParaFi Capital and more.
Overlay Raises $2.215 Million
The round had participation from Polychain Capital, 1kx, MetaCartel, The LAO, ParaFi Capital and others.
Fractional Introduced
Fractional is a decentralized protocol where NFT owners can mint tokenized fractional ownership of their NFTs. These tokens then function as normal ERC20 tokens which have governance over the NFT that they own.
Zapper is Now Multichain
Zapper will support all sorts of chains from layer 2’s to sidechains to other layer 1’s starting with Polygon and adding others over time.
Syndicate Raises $1 Million
The round was led by IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from Electric Capital, Delphi Ventures, CoinFund, Robot Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, DeFi Alliance, Nascent, and 18 founders and angels.
1inch v3 Introduced
V3 includes a bunch of improvements such as lower transaction fees, more liquidity and other features.
Rollups Wallet Introduced
Rollups Wallet is a layer 2 wallet app that you can download for iOS that is build on zkSync which enables instant token transfers and 100x cheaper gas fees.
Pendle Introduced
Pendle is an on-chain yield asset aggregator that enables the separation and trading of future yield.
Colony's 2021 Product Roadmap
In this post, Colony details their entire 2021 roadmap which is full of a number of awesome features.
BarnBridge SMART Yield Now Live
SMART Yield allows users to tranche out the yield from the debt pools of other projects, such as Aave, Compound, Cream, or Yearn Finance to normalize the risk curve by creating derivatives for risk mitigation.
UNI Grants Program Q1 Grantees Announced
Recipients of the grants include Gitcoin, ETHGlobal NFT hacks, APY vision and others.
Compound Grants Program Now Live
You can now apply to the grants program to receive funding for various projects.
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Podcasts
Ultra Sound Money | Justin Drake - Bankless
MetaKovan on Why He Spent $69 Million on a Jpeg - Unconfirmed
Rarible: The NFT Transformation - Epicenter
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Full Stack Engineer - LinkPool
Senior Backend Engineer - Ideamarket
DeFi Developer - Three Arrows Capital
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!