EthHub Weekly #107
Uniswap v2 announced, Gitcoin Grants Matching Round 5 now live, MakerDAO transfers MKR token control over to governance and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
💰 Supporting EthHub
Gitcoin Grants Matching Round 5 has been live for a few days now and it’s great to see so many in the community supporting all of the projects that they love. So far, over 2,500 unique contributions worth over $28,000 have been made! You can learn more here.
Gitcoin Grants continues to be the best way to support us here at EthHub in our continued work on this newsletter, the 2 podcasts we put out almost every week, the EthHub docs website, and our monthly livestream that we do with top minds in the Ethereum community.
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- Anthony
News of the Week
⚖️ HODLpac Enlists Winklevoss Twins, Brian Armstrong in Bid to Influence Crypto Policy in Washington
A new political action committee (PAC) is hoping to push crypto-friendly public policy by providing financial support to Congressional candidates.
Founded by former Cato Institute staffer Tyler Whirty, HODLpac seeks to advocate for blockchain legislation by directing funds to different congressional candidates – but with a decentralized twist.
Donors may ultimately use Ethereum-based tokens to vote for which candidates should get their support, though initially voting will not tap any crypto tokens. The PAC will rely on We the Peeps, a fundraising platform built by Peeps Democracy, Whirty said.
According to Federal Election Commission filings, the PAC’s founding donors include a who’s who of crypto notables.
The documents list Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Emilie Choi, Donald R. Wilson Jr of DRW, Polychain’s Olaf Carlson-Wee, Nathan McCauley of Anchorage and the Blockchain Association’s Kristin Smith.
🤔 China One Step Closer to Issuing Its Digital Currency
The People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the country’s central bank, is said to have moved one step closer to issuing its national digital currency.
A Global Times report on Tuesday, citing “industry insiders,” said the PBoC appears to have completed the development of digital currency's basic function in collaboration with private companies.
The central bank is now reportedly drafting relevant laws to circulate the digital yuan.
An anonymous industry insider told the Global Times that Alipay’s recent patents revolve around the basic function of digital currency, including circulation, payment and issuance.
Alipay is the financial arm of Chinese tech giant Alibaba and is said to have publicized five patents related to China's digital currency earlier this year.
"Judging from the patents, the first step of technological development has been basically completed," the insider was quoted as saying in the report.
Project Updates
MetaCartel Virtual Hackathon Goes Live This Week
Dragon Quest, MetaCartels first virtual hackathon, goes live on April 1st and will run until the end of April. Partners include Aragon, DappHero, 3box and there is over $7,000 in prizes and bounties! Visit the Github page for more details.
Eth2 Phase 0 Spec Audit Complete
Least Authority has released their full report for their eth2 phase 0 spec security audit. You can read it here (keep in mind that its quite technical).
Uniswap V2 Announced
Uniswap V2 will be bringing a suite of new features to the Uniswap protocol including token to token trading pairs, flash swaps, price oracles and much more.
MKR Token Contract Control Transferred to Governance
This week, the Maker Foundation announced that the transfer of MKR token control from it to the Maker governance community is now complete. The MKR token contract is now 100% in control of MKR holders!
Aztec Protocol Update
Aztec is now actively working on ZK-ZK Rollup, or in shorthand, ZK² — so-called because it comprises SNARKs at two or more layers:
‘Lower Level’ ZK-SNARKs each representing a private transaction
‘Upper Level’ ZK-SNARK, which is the Rollup SNARK, succinctly proving the correctness of the Lower Level SNARKs
Additionally, Aztec will soon allow you to send private payments at 100 tps on mainnet, with both balance privacy and user privacy baked in.
UMA Announces “Priceless” Synthetic Tokens
UMA’s new DeFi contract design allows for synthetic tokens that have no on-chain price feed, are multi-sponsored to pool risk and are completely synthetic ERC20 tokens.
CoinMetrics Announces Series A
The $6 million funding round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from FMR, LLC, Castle Island Ventures, Communitas Capital, Collaborative Fund, Avon Ventures, Raptor Group, Coinbase Ventures, and Digital Currency Group.
Introducing Ceramic Protocol
Ceramic is a new permissionless protocol for creating and accessing unstoppable documents that serve as the foundation for a connected, interoperable web without silos.
Coinbase Wallet Integrates DeFi Apps
You can now lend out your crypto and earn interest on Compound and dYdX by using the Coinbase Wallet mobile app.
GridPlus Mini Update: March 24, 2020
Justin Leroux gives us a brief update on GridPlus including details on the teams continued work on hardware & firmware for the Lattice1, their work on GridPlus Energy and more.
Announcing Embeddable NFTs
OpenSea have created a way for you to now embed an NFT directly in your blog, Medium post, or website!
DEX.AG Updated
User balances page, transaction history page and lots of general UX/UI upgrades were added to dex.ag last week.
Nimbus: March Update
Lots of technical updates from Nimbus this month including work on interoperability, audits, libp2p and more.
Wyre Launches International Support
20+ new countries (including Australia, Denmark, Norway) have been added to Wyre’s Apply Pay/Debit Card widget.
Fuel Labs Releases Yul+
Yul+ is a new low-level intermediate language for the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Balancer Labs Raises $3M
The seed round was led by Accomplice and Placeholder with participation of CoinFund and Inflection.
Community Member Spotlight
This week we’re highlighting the great work of Mike Demarais!
Mike is the Co-Founder of Rainbow Wallet - an in-development mobile crypto wallet for Ethereum (currently available on iOS).
Mike is also a self-declared “part-time hypeman” for Uniswap and has been a big supporter of the project since day 1.
Keep up the great work Mike!
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Podcasts
Into the Ether Livestream: Coronavirus impact on markets, Eth2 progress, money printing and DeFi - Into the Ether
Eth Is Money with David Hoffman - Epicenter
Ether: The Triple Point Asset - Bankless
The MakerDAO Situation & The Ethereum Foundation with Alex Van De Sande - The Block Experience
Videos
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Solidity Engineer - Synthetix
Golang Developer - Matic Network
Ethereum Smart Contracts Engineer - MakerDAO
Chief of Staff to the Chief Product Officer - Coinbase
+100’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!
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