EthHub Weekly #177
Ethereum turns 6, StarkEx 3.0 live on mainnet, Synthetix exchange live on Optimism, Thales now live and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
🎉 Happy Birthday Ethereum
Ethereum celebrated its 6th birthday on Friday and what an amazing 6 years it has been! From a small office launch to a global network poised to take over the world - it really is an amazing success story. I wrote more about it in The Daily Gwei which you can read here.
Speaking of The Daily Gwei - I co-authored a piece last week with my good friend Nader that gives you a complete overview of EIP-1559 - you can read that here.
Finally, I hosted Daniel from Cryptocurrency Jobs in The Daily Gwei Discord channel for a live AMA where he provided lots of job-related alpha. You can read the full transcript of that AMA here.
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
⚖️ Binance Winds Down Derivatives Offerings in Three European Countries
Crypto exchange Binance announced Friday that it will no longer offer crypto futures and options trading to users in three European countries: Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.
With immediate effect, new users from these countries will no longer be able to open accounts with Binance to trade crypto derivatives. As for existing users, Binance said it will announce a date later, and from that date, users from these countries will have 90 days to close their open positions.
While the initial action is on the three regions, Binance said it has plans to shut its crypto derivatives trading offering across the European region.
🤔 US Officials Investigating Tether Executives for Bank Fraud
U.S. officials are said to be investigating whether executives for the stablecoin operator Tether committed bank fraud, according to a Monday morning report by Bloomberg.
Per the report, the Department of Justice is "scrutinizing whether Tether concealed from banks that transactions were linked to crypto, said three people with direct knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the probe is confidential." The report said the investigation "is focused on conduct that occurred years ago, when Tether was in its more nascent stages."
Bloomberg reported that one of its sources said the DOJ has sent letters informing the recipients that they are targets of an investigation. "The notices signal that a decision on whether to bring a case could be made soon, with senior Justice Department officials ultimately determining whether charges are warranted," the outlet said.
Project Updates
What’s New in Eth2 - 30 July 2021
Ben gives us all the usual eth2 updates we need to know including coverage of the beacon chain, the Altair upgrade, the merge and more.
Rocket Pool Prater Testnet Now Live
This testnet is a release candidate for mainnet. To participate, you can use the website to stake ETH and receive rETH, Rocket Pool’s liquid tokenised staking option.
StarkEx 3.0 Now Live on Mainnet
StarkEx 3.0 brings with it 2 new major features - L1 vaults and SHARed Prover (SHARP) enabling DeFi pooling and dAMM.
Sorare Live on Starkware
Sorare has launched their new scaling solution on Ethereum that leverages Starkware’s zkRollup technology.
zkSwap v2 Launched
ZKSwap V2 will expand its asset ecosystem by enabling users to add and swap any ERC-20 token and shorten the withdrawal time from the ZKSwap layer 2 to a supported layer 1 like Ethereum.
Tenderly Raises $15.3 Million
The Series A round was led by Accel with participation from existing investors and new angel investors, including Nicolas Dessaigne (Co-founder of Algolia), Mirko Novakovic (Co-founder of Instana) and Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel).
Tenderly also integrated with Optimism.
Synthetix Exchange and Kwenta Live on Optimism
The Optimism L2 alpha will offer both the Kwenta and Synthetix communities an opportunity to learn more about synth trading on L2.
Horizon Blockchain Games Raises $4.5 Million
The pre-Series A round, which the firm described as a "SAFE from strategic gaming and blockchain investors" (meaning simple agreement for future equity), drew support from investors such as BITKRAFT Ventures, CMT Digital, The Xchange Company, Khaled Verjee and Zyshan Kaba.
Thales Live on Mainnet
Thales, an on-chain binary options protocol that spun out of the Synthetix ecosystem, is now live on the Ethereum mainnet.
TWAMM Introduced
The Time-Weighted Average Market Maker, or TWAMM (pronounced "tee-wham"), helps traders on Ethereum efficiently execute large orders.
Tidal Finance Launches on Mainnet
Tidal Finance went live with StaFi, Xend Finance, Marlin and EasyFi as initial launch clients for subscription-based weekly adjusted insurance model.
Ondo Finance Announced
Ondo is a new primitive built to accelerate DeFi adoption among mainstream investors by enabling the granular exchange of risk.
The Road to Trustless Ethereum Staking
In this post, Lido explains the thoughts that led to Lido’s current design and how they plan on transitioning Lido to a piece of fully trustless infrastructure.
EthTx Now Open Source
EthTx is an open source decoder of blockchain transactions that is made freely available to the Ethereum Community as a Python library in public PyPi index.
Reality Cards Moves to Polygon
Prediction market app Reality Cards is moving from xDai to the Polygon PoS chain.
Interesting Tweets
Over 2/3rds of blocks on Ethereum had a Flashbots bundle included in them
Fatal flaws in a bot, a sort of on-chain virus, a trojan horse token, and arbitrage gone wrong
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
True Conviction - The Daily Gwei
The Ethereum Way - The Daily Gwei
Against Overuse of the Gini Coefficient - Vitalik Buterin
Beacon Book: Graphics & Narratives - Stateful Works
Why We Need Decentralized Oracles - ChainLinkGod via Bankless
The Mystery of the Missing Message - Optimism Blog
From Digital Oil to a Digital Nation: Narratives for Ethereum in 2021 - Gui Laliberté via Electric Capital
Monopolies with Growth: Ethereum - Vineyard Holdings
The Definitive Guide to the DeFi Pulse Index - Accelerated Capital via Index Coop
How Does Argent Protect the Highest Value NFTs? - Matthew Wright via Argent
Measuring Decentralization in PoS Ethereum - Shyam Sridhar via Robust Incentives Group
How To Securely Manage All Your Existing Hardware and Software Wallet Accounts with a Single GridPlus Lattice1 - Vojtech Plasil via Grid+
Podcasts
Why ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees Thinks Toxic Bitcoin Maximalism Is Bullshit - Unchained
Building A Decentralized Blackrock | Index Coop (SotN 7/27) - Bankless
Ethereum: Can It Go Beyond DeFi? - Epicenter
Videos
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Staff Engineer - Gitcoin
Communications Lead - UMA
Shadowy Super Coder - Superfluid
Institutional Sales Development Representative - Maple Finance
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!