EthHub Weekly #104
India's supreme court lifts crypto ban, Argent raises $12mil, Zora introduced, dYdX adds fees and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
đ Happy 2nd Birthday to Us!
A small note this week - as this is edition #104 of the newsletter, it means that itâs the newsletterâs 2nd birthday! I humbly started curating this newsletter back in March of 2018 (then called Block by Block) and I never really knew where it would end up. Iâm super happy that Iâm still able to do this and that we have so many subscribers that read it every week! This is a huge personal milestone for me so I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for your support - it keeps us going here at EthHub!
â ď¸Â RIP ProgPoW
Well, where to begin? It was another big week for ProgPoW but as the title states, ProgPoW is pretty much dead at this point. Iâll outline what happened over the last few days below but if you want a more detailed breakdown be sure to catch it on the weekly recap podcast.
We started the week off with a blog post from Hudson Jameson of the Ethereum Foundation giving a comprehensive overview of the entire saga (including history, the arguments for/against and much more). He concluded his post with âIn my opinion, ProgPoW isnât worth it and is dead based on overwhelming evidence of community dissent.â
Next, we had kikx disclose a vulnerability in ProgPoW just a couple of days after Hudsonâs post which resulted in a flurry of conversation across all channels (twitter, reddit, gitter etc). James Hancock also started a new newsletter that will be sharing updates on EIPs and the status of upcoming Ethereum Network upgrades. I highly recommend subscribing!
Finally, we had the much-anticipated All Core Dev call which ended up being the longest in history at almost 3 hours. You can watch it here (ProgPoW talk starts at around 60 minutes in). I wonât summarize the call myself but Trent Van Epps put together his own tweet thread here that gives a great breakdown. We also got Ethereumâs best meme from the call.
Oh and something unrelated to ProgPoW - EthHub is now an official High Priest! You can pledge DAI to us here and the interest earned will be used to donate to Sam Sun (White Hat Hacking), Chris Blec, and DAppNodeâs grants on Gitcoin!
Have a great week everyone!
-Â Anthony
News of the Week
đŽđłÂ Indiaâs Supreme Court Lifts Banking Ban on Crypto Exchanges
The Supreme Court of India has ruled against a decision imposed by the country's central bank nearly two years ago that stifled crypto trading in Asia's third-largest economy.
According to a report from Bloomberg, a three-judge bench of the court ruled on Wednesday in favor of petitions by crypto exchanges and startups that opposed the decision made by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in April 2018 banning domestic financial institutions from providing banking services to crypto exchanges.
The central bank's decision at the time forced crypto exchanges in the country to either close, relocate to other jurisdictions or shift their business model to crypto-to-crypto and over-the-counter trading.
While crypto exchanges immediately filed petitions to the Supreme Court after the central bank's decision in 2018, a clear decision had not been reached until Wednesday after several rounds of hearings. Some exchanges had been forced to close as trade plunged while the case was ongoing.
đ Justin Sun Seizes Control of Steem Blockchain
Justin Sun has seized control of the Steem blockchain â with the apparent help of several prominent crypto exchanges.
On the Steemit Blog (which is newly owned by Sun), a post announced the new regime:
"For the next 4-6 weeks, the Steemit team will be using the voting rights to resume the order of the community while having an open channel for meeting community members and Witnesses."
However users are complaining about app instability on Steemit and some are signaling outright revolt. This is an archived version of the original post because Steemit has been unstable.
In a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system such as Steem, this Orwellian update is only made possible by enough of the networkâs native currency, STEEM, being thrown behind a new set of blockchain validators.
In short, exchanges have staked STEEM they controlled (seemingly from user accounts) to âvoteâ for new leadership.
Project Updates
Lighthouse Update #22
This update mainly goes over the performance gains and optimizations that the Sigma Prime team has made to the Lighthouse client including 70% faster block processing times, 75% reduction in RAM usage and much more!
Whatâs New in Eth2 - 6 Mar 2020
In this update, Ben gives us a great rundown of the state of the eth2 testnets, an EthCC recap, research updates and much more.
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #45 â Prysmatic Labs
Testnet updates, code updates, upcoming work and more from the PryLabs team in their bi-weekly update.
ETH 2.0 UX Survey
Sigma Prime is building a staking interface for their Lighthouse eth2 client and would like community input - do that here.
ETHGlobal Survey
The ETHGlobal team have built a survey to help better understand the developer community. You can win various prizes for helping to fill it out - do that here.
Introducing Zora
Zora is a marketplace to buy, sell and trade limited-edition goods. All of these goods are launched as tokens which enables these goods to be dynamically priced, fractionally traded and launched before the item even exists.
Devcon: What is Ahead
A healthy update from the Ethereum Foundation (EF) regarding this years Devcon 6 including the announcement that the location will be announced shortly.
Anthonyâs note: Announcement of an announcement? Did Justin Sun buy the EF?
Argent Raises $12mil
Ethereum mobile wallet Argent has raised $12 million in a round led by Paradigm with participation from Compoundâs founder Robert Leshner , Index Ventures, Creandum, and firstminute.
Kyber Ecosystem Report #12
A massive ecosystem report from Kyber this month going over everything that happened during the month of February for the team. Highlights include huge network growth (and KNC price growth), new DeFi integrations, Kyber in the media and much more!
LINK/ETH RSI Ratio Trading Set Released
The LINK/ETH RSI Ratio Trading Set implements a crossover strategy on the LINK/ETH simple RSI. At a high level, if the LINK to ETH ratio falls below support, LINKETHRSI rebalances 100% LINK into ETH with the expectation that ETH will continue outperforming LINK. Conversely, if the ratio rises above resistance, the Set rebalances into LINK expecting that LINK will continue to break out against ETH.
Kollateral Live on Mainnet
Kollateral aggregates liquidity from the largest flash lending pools like dYdX and Aave.
Introducing PieDAO
The Pie DAO is a decentralized organization dedicated to bringing market accessibility and economic empowerment by providing a governance layer to tokenized portfolio allocations available to anyone on the Ethereum network.
The dYdX Business Model
dYdX is building a business model around their exchange and are introducing trading fees starting Mar 10, 2020.
Zerion Adds Support for More DeFi Protocols
8 additional protocols are now supported including Synthetix, Curve, PoolTogether, Aave, 0x, iEarnFinance and InstaDApp.
InstaDApp Announces DeFi Accounts
DeFi Accounts are a platform that provides users and developers with a single point of integration to access all the DeFi protocols.
Semaphore Released
Semaphore is a generic privacy layer for Ethereum applications based on zk-SNARks. This open-source library allows any user to signal their endorsement of an arbitrary string, revealing only that they have been previously approved to do so, and not their specific identity.
Horizon Blockchain Games Raises $5mil
The round was led by Initialized Capital with participation from ConsenSys, CMT Digital and Regah Ventures.
Introducing the Ren Alliance
The Ren Alliance is a consortium of DeFi companies and/or projects that are helping secure, develop, and utilize RenVM.
Community Member Spotlight
This week weâre highlighting the great work of Loi Luu!
Loi is a Co-Founder of Kyber Network - the on-chain liquidity protocol that has experienced explosive growth lately. You can check out his previous work here.
Loi also holds a PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore and was selected in the Forbes 30 under 30 list for Asia, and Top 10 Innovators under 35 for Asia Pacific by MIT Technology Reviews.
Keep up the great work Loi!
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Podcasts
John Adler: How Fuel Labs is Planning to Help Scale Ethereum - Into the Ether
DeFi Reality check with Taylor Monahan - POV Crypto
Tokenization of real estate & The impact of ETH 2.0 with David Hoffman - The Block Experience
Why MakerDAO's Head of Smart Contracts Dogfoods DAI - Ethereal Podcast
How to Scale Ethereum dApps with SKALE's Christine Perry - Ethereal Podcast
ETH Denver Fireside Chat With 2 of the Most Crypto-Friendly Governors in the Nation - Unchained
Videos
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Research Analyst - Messari
Ethereum Engineer - Immutable
Senior Front-End Engineer - Rarebits
Product Manager - Horizon Blockchain Games
+100âs more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!
Support EthHub:
Donations (ethhub.eth)