EthHub Weekly #164
MetaMask crosses 5 million MAUs, Alpha Grants program announced, Gnosis Protocol v2 announced and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
🚀 I Love You 3000
It continues to be all time high season for ETH with it crossing $3,000 for the first time ever over the weekend. Now, while the price action is indeed exciting, there was another more exciting development last week - a 79 page report on the investment case for ETH published by SquishChaos on Twitter. I read the whole thing and I can tell you that it is well worth your time to dive into - it somehow made me even more bullish on ETH (I know, hard to believe)!
Speaking of bullish things, I sat down with David Hoffman and DCInvestor to talk about all things Ethereum, ETH and the flippening - you can watch that here.
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
🤔 Visa CEO Says Payments Giant is Moving Into Crypto in a “Very Big Way”
Visa CEO Al Kelly discussed the payments giant's crypto ambitions during an earnings call on Tuesday, describing the firm as "extremely well-positioned" to do so.
As previously reported, Visa is undertaking a multi-pronged strategy as it relates to its services related to bitcoin, stablecoins and, on a longer time-horizon, central bank digital currencies or CBDCs. It's an area he has elaborated on in the past, including a podcast appearance this spring during which he positioned such plans in the context of Visa being at the intersection of new payment technologies.
During the Tuesday earnings call, Kelly again drew a distinction between the different elements of the broader plan, citing the spending and purchase of cryptocurrencies, crypto-related APIs for financial institutions, settlements via stablecoins and CBDCs.
"So our focus is on five different opportunities that we see in this space and I would say that this is space that we are leaning into in a very big way and I think are extremely well-positioned," Kelly said during the call.
💰 a16z is Raising as Much as $1 Billion for a New Crypto Fund
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is setting up a new fund to invest as much as $1 billion in crypto and crypto start-ups, according to a report from the Financial Times.
A16z is looking to raise between $800 million and $1 billion for the fund, which will be its third and largest crypto-focused fund. Recently, the firm has invested in zero-knowledge private applications platform Aleo.
The firm found early success by investing in Coinbase and Ripple through its traditional funds. It later created a dedicated crypto fund in 2018, and by 2019 it had amassed a portfolio of crypto firms that would become some of the highest-valued companies in the space, in addition to other early bets on tech firms like Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Airbnb. A16z established a second crypto fund last year.
If a16z raises the $1 billion, this would make it one of the highest-funded investment pools dedicated to crypto. Paradigm previously raised $1 billion for crypto investments.
Project Updates
Ecosystem Readiness Project Announced
The goal of this project is to get Ethereum developer tooling ready for the London network upgrade.
MetaMask Crosses 5 Million Monthly Active Users
In the past 6 months, MetaMask has grown 5x, and is now used by more than 5 million users every month.
OKEx Announces Arbitrum Support
The exchange will allow deposits and withdrawals to Arbitrum’s layer 2 solution on Ethereum.
mStable Live on Polygon
Users can now access the mStable protocol’s risk-minimized DeFi savings account on the Polygon network.
Aave April Update
Record growth, liquidity incentives, governance power distribution and more updates in this April monthly recap from Aave.
Alpha Grants Program Announced
Alpha Grants Program is a program in which Alpha Finance core development team will give grants to Alpha Builders, well-organized development teams and individuals with a proven track record of building in DeFi who want to contribute to building the Alpha ecosystem.
Sudoswap Launched
Sudoswap is a peer to peer asset swapping platform that’s powered by 0x - it allows users to swap any asset to any asset.
Meebits Introduced
Meebits is LarvaLabs’ new NFT project that allows users to mint 3D characters.
Element Protocol Security Roadmap Update
In this update, Element shares their official audit reports, officially open sourced the Element Protocol codebase, and introduce their bug bounty.
Introducing zkDAI
zk.money from Aztec now supports private, scalable DAI transactions and to celebrate the launch, users can shield and send zkDAI for free for the next 7 days (up to a total of 1000 DAI txns).
Covalent Network Announced
The Covalent Network will resemble a virtual, global co-operative for blockchain data and will be governed by the Covalent Query Token (CQT) which will allow holders to propose, vote on, and make changes to the parameters of the network.
Hashflow Announced
Hashflow is a decentralized exchange that lets users trade trustlessly with crypto’s top market makers. It allows for better prices, no slippage, and rock-bottom gas fees.
Gnosis Protocol v2 Announced
Gnosis Protocol V2 leverages batch auctions to provide MEV protection, plus integration with liquidity sources across DEXs to offer traders the best prices.
Polygon Announces DeFi Fund
The $150 million fund which will be focused on making DeFi more accessible and cost-effective to bring the next million users to DeFi.
PoolTogether Launches on Polygon
The first Aave powered no loss prize pool is live on Polygon with $100,000 of MATIC rewards in the first 35 days.
Balancer and Gnosis Team Up
The Balancer-Gnosis-Protocol (BGP) alliance combines the best of both protocols, with Balancer V2’s flexible liquidity pools enabled by a single-vault architecture and asset managers, in combination with Gnosis Protocol v2’s price-finding mechanism and MEV protection. Today, users can trade on the proof-of-concept CowSwap dApp.
The Graph Mainnet Migration Update
The first 10 subgraphs migrated from The Graph’s hosted service to mainnet this wek including Gnosis, mStable, UMA and more.
Celer and StarkWare Partner Up
Users can seamlessly use both OP rollup and ZK rollup for diversified DeFi use cases. Coming this summer.
New Apps Added to Gnosis Safe
Aave, ENS, dHedge and Liquity were added this week with a lot more dApps coming soon.
First HEZ Airdrop Announced
The first-ever airdrop of HEZ tokens will be distributed to Gitcoin Round 9 MetaMask donors on Tuesday, the 4th of May.
1inch Launches Wallet App
The app, 1inch Wallet, is meant to provide customers with a mobile-friendly way to perform token swaps, trades, and other transactions.
Maple Redesign Announced
The new logo and visual identity reflect the values and long term strategy of the Maple protocol.
B.Protocol Governance Launched
The B.Protocol community proposed to launch the BPRO token and give it control over the protocol (currently the protocol is under the control of the user Score, and thus users have to hand it over with an onchain vote).
ParaSwap 4 Now Live
With this update ParaSwap is now 10% cheaper than Uniswap (gas-wise), a new gas token has been introduced, a new algorithm has been launched and more.
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Podcasts
Ethereum Bull Case with Cobie - Uncommon Core
Modeling Ultra Sound Money | Justin Drake - Bankless
Flashbots: The Good, Bad and the Ugly of MEV - Epicenter
How MetaMask Grew Its Monthly Active Users By 5X in the Last 6 Months - Unconfirmed
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Head of Design - RabbitHole
Integrations Developer - Aave
Senior Solidity Engineer - xToken Labs
Senior Smart Contracts Engineer - Superfluid
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!