EthHub Weekly #152
CME ETH futures live, Goldfinch announced, Balance v2 introduced, MCDEX v3 announced and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
⛽ High Seas, High Fees
Over the last few months the network fees on Ethereum have obviously been quite expensive and it doesn’t look like they’ll be going down anytime soon (especially not during a bull market). Though there is hope as plenty of layer 2 solutions are rolling out with some already live with plenty of activity (which I wrote about here). I know it’s painful now, but I think that it’s going to get a lot better for end-users over the next year or so - after all, we are currently experiencing the Ethereum scaling war effort.
Our friends over at Cryptocurrency Jobs put together a short recap thread on their journey and growth thus far - check that out here.
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
💰 CME ETH Futures Product Goes Live
CME Group launched its long-awaited ether (ETH) futures product today.
CME's ETH futures were announced in mid-December to much fanfare. Per contract details published on the CME website, the futures are cash-settled and based on the CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate. Each monthly contract represents 50 ETH -- an amount worth roughly $78,000 at press time -- with a minimum block trade size of five contracts.
The CME Group website lists a range of liquidity providers for its ETH futures, some of whom also provide liquidity for the exchange's bitcoin futures and options products. The firms providing liquidity for ETH futures include BlockFi, Galaxy, Genesis, CoinShares and NYDIG.
🤯 Crypto Exchanges Drew in More Than 300 Million Website Visitors in January
The number of visitors to crypto exchange websites surged in January, according to data collected by The Block.
Some 344 million visitors flocked to crypto exchanges, per SimilarWeb data, surpassing December's total of 196 million. The data signifies the highest point since January 2018, when exchange sites drew in roughly 531 million.
Additional data shows that Binance continued its streak, having drawn in approximately 28.8% of the total number of visitors. Binance was followed by Coinbase (25.11%) and Kraken (6.19%).
That January was such a big month for website visits is unsurprising, given the movements in the digital asset market. January saw the price of bitcoin eclipse $40,000 for the first time.
Project Updates
MetaMask Monthly: January, 2021
This month, the team made important improvements to their UI on desktop and mobile to provide a more transparent and seamless user experience, poured more resources into simplifying Swaps for new users, incorporated community feedback into their feature roadmap and more.
Yearn Finance Suffers Exploit
DeFi platform Yearn.Finance said Thursday that one of its pools of funds had been exploited, resulting in the loss of $2.8 million. The platform has vowed to make affected users partially or fully whole.
Domination Finance Announced
A team that has been working in pseudo stealth alongside UMA for the last 3 months launched their inaugural products last week: BTCDOM and ALTDOM. Tradable now, these derivatives give traders access to these indexes. The team, Domination Finance, will be launching a suite of related products over 2021.
Goldfinch Announced
Goldfinch is a DeFi lending protocol that aims to address emerging markets. It raised $1 million from a group of industry stakeholders that includes Kindred Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Dragonfly Capital co-founder Alex Pack.
Balancer V2 Introduced
Balancer V2 brings with it a host of new features including improved gas efficiency, a protocol vault for all Balancer pool assets, customizable AMM logic and much more.
Frame v0.4 Released
A host of new features in this release including the ability to cancel & speed up transactions, adjustable nonces, auto-hide settings and much more.
Mask Network Partners With Loopring
Mask Network will build a strategic partnership with Loopring Protocol. They’ll have deep cooperation in L2 scaling, zkRollup and other decentralized technologies. On the application layer, Mask Network and Loopring will work together on developing more second layer “Red Packet” functions.
0x Labs Raises $15 Million Series A
0x Labs, the startup behind the decentralized exchange protocol and a provider of DEX infrastructure, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round.
The round was led by Pantera Capital with participation from Jump Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com Ventures, Nima Capital, IOSG, the DeFi Alliance.
Synthetix Bellatrix Release Now Live
A bunch of improvements with this release including new crypto synths, shorting rewards and more.
MCDEX V3 Announced
V3 will come with a brand new AMM, a revolutionary market structure, and an exceptional trading experience.
Shell Protocol Liquidity Mining Recap
This post recaps the last month of progress in Shell Protocol and charts out their future course.
Decentral Games Goes Live with Vector
The first user of Vector, Decentral Games, is live with instant transfers of DAI and MANA from Ethereum to Matic and back.
Rarible Raises $1.75 Million
The raise had participation from 1kx, CoinFund, ParaFi and Coinbase.
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Podcasts
Crypto-Dollars, Regulation, and DeFi | Jeremy Allaire - Bankless
Ethereum Push Notification Service: The Decentralized Notification Protocol - Epicenter
DeFi and the SEC - Coin Center
Videos
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Growth Lead - xToken Labs
Smart Contract Developer - mStable
Blockchain Integration Manager - Chainlink
Meme Lord/Lady & Community Manager - Reflexer Labs
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!