EthHub Weekly #168
Arbitrum One mainnet beta live, Token Terminal v2 launched, Set Protocol raises $14 million, Gitcoin introduces governance token and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
[Sponsored] DeFi users, you no longer need to pay expensive and unpredictable interest rates on your ETH-backed loans. Liquity is an immutable, governance-free borrowing protocol that allows you to borrow interest-free against ETH as collateral. Loans are paid out in LUSD — a USD pegged stablecoin, and need to maintain a minimum collateral ratio as low as 110%.
Outside of borrowing, users can deposit LUSD to the Stability Pool to earn LQTY rewards and participate in collateral liquidation events — purchasing ETH at a discount when liquidations occur. Lastly, users can stake LQTY to earn protocol revenue, which recently crossed >$12M since Liquity’s launch in April. To learn more, head over to liquity.org to get started and get the most out of your borrowing needs today!
🧘 Calm Before the Storm
The last week in the crypto ecosystem was quite calm with the markets trending mostly sideways and no crazy developments - gas prices even got to under 20 gwei for the first time in a long time! Though I believe that all of this is just the calm before the storm (in a good way) - I don’t really see these lulls in both the market and in development lasting longer than a couple of months at best - there’s just too much going on in this ecosystem regardless of price action!
I joined the ‘Rockstars of Ethereum’ podcast last week to talk all things Ethereum including how I originally got into the space and some of my background from the early 2010’s - you can check it out here.
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
🤔 Ray Dalio Confirms BTC Holdings, Says ‘Bitcoin’s Greatest Risk is its Success’
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Bridgewater, identified himself as a holder of bitcoin in a conversation at Consensus 2021 on Monday morning.
Speaking to Coindesk's Michael Casey, Dalio claimed that we are witnessing a shift away from the dollar as the global reserve currency, a competition in which bitcoin and other digital assets play a major role. "Probably the greatest power that a government has is over its currency and to control where money and credit go," he said.
Referring to the succession of recent global currencies and the Federal Reserve's massive quantitative easing over the last year, Dalio said "It's a great power to be able to print the world's currency but it happens just like the British pound happened or like the Dutch guilder happened."
🤔 China’s Inner Mongolia Set to Impose Eight Measures on Crypto Mining Ban
The government of China's Inner Mongolia region has proposed eight new measures to phase out crypto mining activities.
The Inner Mongolia Development and Reformation Commission (DRC) issued a proposal on Tuesday that outlined eight areas that could be deemed as illegal that relate to crypto mining activities. It is the first, more concrete proposal to emerge four days after a Chinese State Council committee raised the subject of a bitcoin trading and mining crackdown during a recent meeting.
The proposal is now set to go through a public consultation process that will last until June 1 before it takes effect. The proposed measures target not only crypto mining facilities in the region that mostly use fossil fuels but also power stations that supply energy to such operations. Internet cafes that may have been using idle computers to mine cryptocurrencies are also included.
Project Updates
Finalized No. 26
In this eth2 update from Danny Ryan he runs through progress on Altair, Rayonism and the merge.
Introducing Arbitrum One
Arbitrum One mainnet beta has now launched for developers with over 250 teams having registered for deployment already. The network will most likely be opened to the public in the next few weeks.
Arbitrum also announced that they have teamed up with Etherscan to build out a block explorer (expected in late July) and they have also teamed up with Alchemy.
Token Terminal v2 Now Live
This update brings with it a bunch of new features to the Token Terminal dashboard including key metrics charts, revenue share charts, composition charts and more.
Uniswap Likely to Expand to Arbitrum
Uniswap will most likely expand v3 of their offerings to the Arbitrum layer 2 solution thanks to a governance proposal that was put forward by the community.
Set Raises $14M Series A
Set Labs has raised a $14M Series A round led by 1kx and Hashed with participation from Mechanism Capital, Defiance, Spartan, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Craft, Threshold Ventures, and long-term Set community members.
Gitcoin Introduces Governance Token
Gitcoin introduced the GTC token and their DAO that will govern Gitcoin — two crucial components allowing Gitcoin to decentralize and build an equitable protocol for funding open source development.
Polygon Datasets Now Available on Google BigQuery
Hosted by Google Cloud as a financial services public dataset, the Polygon blockchain dataset has been listed in the Google Cloud Marketplace, and can be found here.
Introducing JPG
JPG connects collectors, curators and artists through an on-chain registry of NFTs. Anyone can submit their NFTs to the JPG registry, making them available for inclusion in exhibitions by participating curators.
Kwenta Details L2 Launch Plan
Kwenta will be launching on Optimistic Ethereum’s layer 2 in the coming weeks in 3 distinct phases which they detail in this update.
A Multichain Strategy and Roadmap for Maker
In this post, Maker details their multichain and layer 2 strategy along with how they think about each solution.
Balancer Labs Raises $24.25 Million
This fresh round of capital comes from investors Blockchain Capital, Fintech Collective, LongHash Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Continue Capital, Kain Warwick and Jordan Momtazi.
mistX Launched
mistX is the worlds first FlashDEX that makes Flashbots technology available to everyone - enabling front-running protection and more.
Circle Raises $440 Million
Circle, the company behind the fast-growing dollar-pegged coin USDC, has raised $440 million in fresh capital.
Polygon SDK Released
The Polygon SDK aims to support building two major types of solutions: stand-alone chains and secured chains. The initial release supports stand-alone chains with layer 2’s to be introduced in a future release.
GameStop Building NFT Platform on Ethereum
GameStop has quietly unveiled a new web portal for a non-fungible token (NFT) platform. The exact scope of the project is unclear, though prominently featured on the page is a link to an Ethereum address, indicating that GameStop's team will use Ethereum as a technology base.
Turbo-Geth Changes Name to Erigon
Turbo-Geth is getting to the point where it needs to be looked at as a completely different product, and not simply a derivative of Geth, which is why the name was changed to Erigon.
RBN Governance Token Announced
The RBN token aims to achieve the following goals: stewarding the development of the protocol, align incentives between Ribbon stakeholders, and unite all current and future Ribbon products under a single umbrella.
Hermez Network Roadmap Update
In this post, Hermez details their roadmap and how their protocol will be rolled out in 5 distinct phases.
BackRunMe Launched
BackRunMe allows users to capture their own MEV instead of it all going to miners/searchers.
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
We're Still Early - The Daily Gwei
Fleeting Liquidity - The Daily Gwei
Virtual Channels: Creating a State Channel Network - State Channels
Booby Trapping the Ethereum Blockchain - Samcznsun for Paradigm
The Compelling Case for NFT Gaming - Yuffie for Nansen
Blockchain Voting is Overrated Among Uninformed People but Underrated Among Informed People - Vitalik Buterin
Creating your own ERC20 token in more than 2 hours - Mariano Conti
Podcasts
Liquity & LUSD | Founder Robert Lauko - Bankless
Gitcoin DAO & $GTC token, with Kevin Owocki - Bankless
Ethereum Foundation: An Eth2 Progress Update - Epicenter
Is CowSwap the most innovative DEX? | With Hasu and Felix Leupold - Uncommon Core
Videos
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Finance Director - Least Authority
Solidity Developer - Harvest Finance
Algorithmic Trader (DeFi) - Wintermute
Business Development Associate - Perpetual Protocol
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!