EthHub Weekly #121

0x matcha live, Omen launched, SKALE mainnet goes live, The Graph raises $5mil and much more!

Jul 06, 2020

Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)

🤓 EthHub Educational Series

Education is at the core of what we do at EthHub across our docs, newsletter and podcast. So to that end, we launched a new initiative this week called the EthHub Educational Series. We’ll be publishing videos on our YouTube channel from time to time that teach you new concepts and walk you through apps.

The eth2 Altona multi-client testnet has been running without a hitch since it launched last week with participation from 4 eth2 clients - Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysm and Teku. PryLabs’ single client Onyx testnet is also still running and going very well.

The EF announced this week that they’re sponsoring 3 prizes at ETHGlobal’s HackFS conference for developers that build eth2+libp2p related projects. Apply here.

One last note - I’ve decided to retire the ‘Community Member Spotlight’ section of the newsletter and may replace it with something else in the future!

Oh and thank you to everyone who contributed to our Gitcoin Grant in the latest matching round - your support means a lot to both of us!

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

🏦 Senate Banking Committee Remains Open to Idea of Digital Dollar

Not every U.S. lawmaker is on board with the idea of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or digital dollar, but no one explicitly rejected it during a hearing of the powerful Senate Banking Committee.

That’s probably the biggest takeaway from Tuesday’s hearing, where the panel heard from former regulator turned CBDC evangelist Chris Giancarlo, Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla and Duke Law professor Nakita Cuttino as expert witnesses.

The lawmakers present asked questions about financial inclusion, including what potential regulations or laws might make digitization easier and more accessible to the unbanked.

“The U.S. needs a digital dollar,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). “The U.S. dollar has to keep earning that place in the global payments system. It has to be better than bitcoin… it has to be better than a digital yuan.”

💰 1.9 Million U.K. Residents Hold Digital Assets

A market research note published Tuesday by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) estimates that 3.86% of the U.K. population owns cryptocurrencies.

"We estimate 3.86% of the general population currently own cryptocurrencies. This amounts to approximately 1.9 million adults with the U.K. population (over 18) taken to be approximately 50 million," the report's authors wrote. Other findings include the assessment that "technical knowledge appears high among most cryptocurrencies owners" and that "75% of consumers who own cryptocurrencies hold under £1,000."

"Of those who purchase cryptoassets, 83% do so through non-UK based exchanges," the FCA's release also highlighted.

Project Updates

Eth 2.0 Dev Update #53 — Altona Testnet Launched

Your bi-weekly update from the PryLabs team discussing the recent Altono multiclient testnet launch, the usual development updates, upcoming work and more.

0x’s Matcha Now Live

Matcha is a simple decentralized crypto exchange that pulls together liquidity from various on-chain liquidity pools (DEXs, AMMs) to fetch the best price for users.

Tornado Fund Announced

Tornado Fund is a DAO to invest in Tornado Cash and help it develop into the first, fully decentralized privacy-preserving technology for Ethereum.

Introducing xToken

xToken is a platform for simple, efficient staking and liquidity strategies. The xToken team are creating smart contracts that wrap complicated staking and liquidity strategies into single set-and-forget ERC20 tokens.

Introducing Omen

Omen is a decentralization prediction market platform launched, maintained, and governed by the DXdao. The DXdao built Omen on an open framework developed by Gnosis for prediction markets.

The Graph Raises $5M

This week, The Graph announced that they closed a $5M funding round from crypto funds including Framework, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, CoinIX, Tally Capital, with continued participation from Multicoin Capital and DTC Capital.