EthHub Weekly #162

zkPorter announced, Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper released, Gitcoin raises $11.3 Million and more!

Apr 20, 2021

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

[SPONSORED] To celebrate breaking $10M monthly trading volume metric.exchange is holding a trading competition to reward our early users for their customs! Prizes totaling over $50,000 equivalent in the METRIC token and DAI will be distributed to users transacting the highest volumes between the dates of 19th to 29th April 2021.

Metric.exchange is a community-owned DEX aggregator brought to you by BUILD Finance. It offers users the best prices on any Ethereum asset trades and the most up to date feature set including 0x V4 integration, KeeperDAO ‘Hiding Game’ transactions and L2 integrations. Place market swap orders or gasless on-chain limit orders and enjoy a low-slippage and low-fee trading environment and hold METRIC tokens to receive a pro-rata share of all platform revenue.

🎢 Buy the Dip?

We’re at that stage of the cycle where the bull market has been raging for over a year now that people are just becoming so used to these “dips” we see every so often. Of course, many will proclaim that they are “buying the dip” and it’s likely the markets just continue on higher but there is also the other (more daunting) side of things where the markets may not recover quickly or trend sideways. Personally I’m not bearish at all and we’ve seen worse dips over the last few months but I think it’s always a good idea to reflect and ground yourself a little bit from time to time - it certainly helps me stay sane in this crazy industry!

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

🤔 After Failed Token Sale and $1B Bond Offering, Telegram is Reportedly Eyeing an IPO

Encrypted messaging app Telegram is reportedly looking to go public.

Citing unnamed sources involved in the process, Russian news outlet Vedomosti broke the news on April 11. The timing is notable, given that at the end of March, Telegram's founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced via his Telegram channel that the firm had sold $1 billion in bonds.

Resistant to the sale of user data and ad space, Telegram has long suffered from a lack of clear revenue flow. Durov, along with his brother Nikolai, first made their fortunes with Russian social media site VKontakte.

The Durov brothers used that money to make Telegram, which is designed to be resistant to the Russian government's extensive firewalling and media censorship. This did not ingratiate the pair to the authorities. They ultimately left Russia but have kept up work on Telegram. Money, however, became a persistent issue.

Famously, Telegram ran afoul of the US Securities and Exchange Commission over its $1.7 billion initial coin offering for its GRAM tokens. Regarding the recent bond issuance, Durov said "the end goal for Telegram is to become a financially sustainable project that can serve humanity for decades (or centuries) to come."

💱 Coinbase Goes Live on the Nasdaq

Coinbase shares closed at $328.28 in their Nasdaq debut on Wednesday, giving the cryptocurrency exchange an initial market cap of $85.8 billion on a fully diluted basis.

The shares opened at $381 and quickly shot up as high as $429.54, before dropping back below the debut price and reaching a low of around $310. The price was still well above the reference price of $250 set Tuesday night, though no shares changed hands at that price.

Skirting the traditional IPO process, Coinbase listed its stock directly, allowing employees and existing shareholders to sell shares immediately at a market-based price. In pursuing a direct listing, Coinbase followed tech companies like Spotify, Slack, Palantir and Roblox, which helped standardize the process.

Project Updates

Gitcoin Raises $11.3 Million

The round was led by Paradigm, with additional investments from IDEO, 1kx, Electric Capital, Naval, Balaji, The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures, and many others.

Introducing Simulation Platform

The Simulation Platform from Blocknative computes and summarizes the likely results of every marketable pending transaction against the current state of the chain – in real-time, at scale, and with low latency.

zkPorter Announced

zkPorter is “an engine for mass crypto adoption” which is coming with EVM-enabled zkSync 2.0 this August. It promises up to 20,000+ TPS at layer 2.

Coinbase ETH2 Staking Now Live

Coinbase has started allowing customers off the waitlist to earn up to 6% APR on their ETH.

Introducing the Maple LBP

Maple will be distributing its governance token MPL through a Balancer Labs Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool on April 28, 2021.

DeFi Saver Introduces Recipe Creator

The Recipe Creator allows users to combine any number of actions from different DeFi protocols, as well as flash loans and swaps into a single transaction.

Chainlink 2.0 Whitepaper Released

This whitepaper outlines how Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Networks can go on to create a decentralized metalayer that enhance smart contracts with highly scalable, confidential, and secure forms of off-chain computation, in addition to the external data that Chainlink already provides today.