EthHub Weekly #166
Core dev apprenticeship program announced, Balancer v2 now live, Arbitrum dev mainnet date announced, BairesDAO announced and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
🐕 Dog Money
Vitalik made waves in the cryptocurrency world this week when he decided to sell off the “dog tokens” that he was airdropped and donate the proceeds to charity (I wrote more about that here). It seems that Vitalik selling his tokens killed the mania that was surrounding them and also worked to drop gas fees down to more sane levels (<100 gwei).
On a more positive note, the ETHGlobal Scaling Ethereum hackathon finalists were announced and you can view them here. I had the honor of judging a cohort of projects from this hackathon and was blown away by the creativity and inventiveness of the projects - I love Ethereum builders!
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
⚖️ Binance Faces Investigation by IRS and Department of Justice
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance is reportedly facing an investigation by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as well as the Department of Justice, according to a report by Bloomberg.
According to the report, officials from the DOJ and the IRS have "sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business," citing unnamed sources. Bloomberg's report noted that "[t]he federal agencies haven’t accused Binance of wrongdoing."
Bloomberg reported in mid-March that Binance was facing an inquiry from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over whether the exchange allowed U.S. residents to trade on its platform.
🤔 Tether Reveals Breakdown of its Reserves for First Time Since 2014 Launch
Stablecoin issuer Tether, for the first time since its launch in 2014, has revealed a breakdown of its reserves.
The breakdown, shared with The Block on Thursday, is dated as of March 31, 2021. It shows that Tether held nearly 76% of its reserves in cash and cash equivalents and other short-term deposits and commercial paper.
Commercial paper, in fact, formed the majority of its cash and cash equivalents category, with a 65% share. Fiduciary deposits formed 24% of the category, reverse repo notes 3.60%, treasury bills about 3%, and actual cash only 3.87%.
When asked why actual cash formed only a tiny part of the total reserves, Tether's general counsel Stuart Hoegner told The Block that it is "misleading to focus exclusively on cash" within the cash and cash equivalents category. "Readers should not confuse items not in 'actual cash' with a lack of liquidity," he said.
Project Updates
Core Dev Apprenticeship Program Announced
The program is a pilot project to get more people involved and engaged with Ethereum core protocol work. Applications are open now until May 31st and the apprenticeship will take place from mid-June to mid-September.
Arbitrum Developer Mainnet Announced
The Arbitrum optimistc rollup mainnet will be opened to developers on May 28th, 2021. The team has also added Sequencer support to their layer 2 solution.
Gitcoin Announces Plans to Decentralize
The Gitcoin team believes that a decentralized Gitcoin is flexible, antifragile, collaborative, and global, far more capable of empowering the next generation of builders to create the coordination tools that will strengthen our species.
Maple Protocol Deployed to Mainnet
Maple's decentralized corporate debt marketplace will grant crypto-native companies access to on-chain growth capital.
BTC2x-FLI Announced
BTC2x-FLI is a structured product in ERC20 format that enables traders to automate a target leveraged exposure in a completely decentralized manner. The 2x-FLI style of tokens target a long 2x exposure to their underlying cryptoasset.
Alpha Finance Launches Oracle Aggregator
A data oracle is a platform that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs that power smart contracts. With Alpha Oracle Aggregator, Alpha Finance Lab will enhance scalability, flexibility, and security for the suite of Alpha products in a number of ways.
Zapper Raises $15 Million Series A
Zapper, the decentralized finance (DeFi) dashboard, has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Framework Ventures. The round was joined by Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures as well as Mark Cuban.
BairesDAO Announced
BairesDAO is a group of individuals from Argentina who have banded together to invest in founders who are building products within DeFi.
Handle Finance Closes Strategic Round
Participants in this round include QCP capital, OKEX Ventures, Genblock Capital and many others.
Loopring Creator Grants Announced
There are $5,000 in grants up for grabs every quarter to be given out to budding content creators that produce educational content such as tutorials or guides.
Alpha Homora V2 Live on Ethereum
Get access to leveraged yield farming with Alpha Homora and partners including Cream Finance, Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve and Balancer.
Balancer V2 Now Live
Balancer v2 comes with a host of new features including a new interface, new BAL liquidity mining program, dynamic fee pools and more.
UMA’s Optimistic Oracle Now Live
The oracle can be used to resolve markets and bring all types of data on-chain. It is not limited to use only for UMA financial contracts, but can be “plugged into” by any DeFi protocol.
Slingshot Open Beta Live on Polygon
You can now use Slingshot on Polygon’s PoS chain for faster trading at near zero gas fees.
Infura and Truffle Now Support Polygon
ConsenSys' leading developer tools, Infura and Truffle, now support Polygon with boilerplate application tooling, API access, and customer service for applications using the Polygon PoS chain.
Zora Introduces Auction House
Auction House is an open and permissionless protocol on Ethereum that allows any creator, community, platform or DAO to create and run their own curated NFT auction houses.
Synthetix Staking Integrates Optimistic Ethereum
The Synthetix Staking dApp is now compatible with Optimistic Ethereum (OΞ) on L2, meaning that OΞ stakers can now benefit from the improved user experience and expanded features offered on Staking over L2 Mintr.
NiiFi Raises $3 Million
DARMA is leading a $3 million seed round in NiiFi, a decentralized exchange (DEX) being built on Nahmii – a layer two system for boosting Ethereum’s transaction capacity.
Sky Mavis Completes Series A
$7.5 million was raised from a bunch of investors to scale Axie Infinity and NFT gaming.
Alchemix Integrates with Chainlink
Alchemix has integrated Chainlink price feeds for ALCX, alBTC, alUSD and alETH.
Woofy Token Announced
Woofy allows you to be exposed to a lighthearted dog coin and the DeFi darling blue chip (YFI) at the same time.
Interesting Tweets
A few thoughts on the possibility of deflation in Ethereum post-EIP 1559
Debunking common myths about proof-of-stake from non-cryptocurrency people
Ethereum may lead to the greatest wealth transfer in history
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Podcasts
Legitimacy | Vitalik Buterin - Bankless
EIP-1559 – Tackling the Gas Fee Problem on Ethereum - Epicenter
Curve Finance – The Stablecoin Exchange Protocol - Epicenter
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Marketing Lead - Set
Senior DevOps Engineer - LinkPool
Full Stack Engineer (Web3 Focus) - Polymarket
Community and Social Media Manager - The Giving Block
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!