EthHub Weekly #180
Visa buys a CryptoPunk, Coinbase to buy $500mil worth of crypto, Optimism community launch, Fractional raises $7.9 million, RARE token introduced and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
🤯 Visa and Punks
The biggest news of the last week was that Visa announced that they had purchased a CryptoPunk because they consider it to be an “historic commerce artifact”. Obviously this is game-changing news and I wrote a little bit about why here but you should all definitely listen in to the EthHub podcast tomorrow to hear Eric and I give our thoughts - after all, Eric is a punk maxi!
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
💰 Coinbase Ready to Purchase $500 Million Worth of Crypto
Brokerage firm Coinbase has the green light from its board to purchase more than $500 million worth of crypto on its balance sheet, according to a tweet from its chief executive officer Brian Armstrong.
The firm, which is known for helping publicly traded companies make large bitcoin purchases, will also be investing 10% of all future profits in crypto.
"I expect this percentage to keep growing over time as this crypto economy matures," Armstrong said.
A blog penned by Coinbase's chief financial officer Alesia Haas indicated that the purchase would include Ethereum as well as other assets tied to the decentralized financial world.
⚖️ Binance Enforces Mandatory KYC On All Users Amid Mounting Regulatory Pressure
Binance has said it's now requiring all users to complete Intermediate Verification amid mounting compliance pressure from worldwide regulators.
The world's largest exchange said in an announcement on Friday that effective immediately, all new users now must complete Intermediate Verification to access Binance's services, including cryptocurrency deposits, trades and withdrawals.
Binance said the move comes as it reviews its products and services on an ongoing basis to "determine changes and improvements in light of evolving global compliance standards."
Per Binance's Identity Verification process, an Intermediate Verification includes the submissions of government-issued ID as well as facial verification.
Project Updates
Ethereum Cat Herders Mid-Year Report
This report covers all the work that the Cat Herders completed through Q2 and Q3 of 2021.
Lodestar Releases Light Client Prototype
In this post, Lodestar details what their light client prototype is and what it means for Ethereum.
Optimism Community Launch
Any project that meets the launch criteria can apply to be whitelisted on the Optimism mainnet and will be approved within 2 weeks.
The Graph also added support for Optimism.
Warp Introduced
Warp will allow developers to take their battle-tested, audited Ethereum smart contracts, transpile them to Cairo, and deploy them on StarkNet seamlessly.
Rainbow Adds Additional Network Support
The Rainbow mobile wallet app now supports Optimism, Arbitrum and the Polygon PoS chain.
CryptoPunk Images and Attributes Now On-Chain
You can visit this contract on Etherscan and query directly for the Cryptopunk images as either a raw set of pixels or an SVG. You can also query for a Cryptopunk's attributes.
Tally Wallet Introduced
Tally is a community owned and operated Web3 wallet, building off the road the early MetaMask team paved for the Ethereum community.
Ledger Adds Lido Support
Users can now stake their ETH directly from their Ledger by using the Lido liquid staking service.
Reintroducing Glass
Glass is on a mission to reform internet video from the infrastructure to the experience of living as a creator. In this post, the team details the path that they’re taking to achieve this mission.
Introducing Impersonator
Impersonator allows you to log in to DApps by impersonating any Ethereum address via WalletConnect.
Blocknative Adds Polygon Support
Polygon support is available via the Blocknative API, SDK, Mempool Explorer, Notify, and Onboard.
Polygon Ecosystem DAO Announced
With this DAO the Polygon team welcomes all active community members and DeFi projects to pitch in ideas to chalk out this idea to bring DeFi to the next million users.
Fractional Raises $7.9 Million
The seed round was led by Paradigm with participation from Robot Ventures, Delphi Digital, Variant Fund, Divergence Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Mechanism Capital, among other major ecosystem contributors.
Introducing the Balancer Grants DAO
Balancer Grants DAO will function as an independent community-owned grants program for the Balancer ecosystem. The first cycle will last 3 months and has a budget of 20,000 BAL (~$500K at today’s valuation) to distribute to Balancer Grantees.
Wallet Avatar Customization Added to Zapper
From your Zapper dashboard, hover over your avatar icon to prompt an edit button to appear. Click & select an NFT you own as your new wallet avatar.
Mirror WRITE Airdrop
An airdrop of 302 WRITE tokens has been distributed amongst Mirror’s most active members.
OpenZeppelin Governor Introduced
OpenZeppelin Governor is a governance system which is now available for use in OpenZeppelin’s open source smart contract library and in Defender.
BarnBridge Announces SMART Alpha
SMART Alpha creates single-asset pools for any non-rebasing ERC-20 with a Chainlink price feed. SMART Alpha has a target release between Labor Day and mid-September.
RARE Token Introduced
The RARE token will be used for curation within the SuperRare ecosystem across their Spaces, DAO and other products.
Power Perpetual Detailed
Power perpetuals provide global options-like exposure without the need for either strikes or expiries, giving them the potential to consolidate much of options market liquidity into a single instrument.
ZK Open Legal Working Group Introduced
11 projects have teamed up to create legal clarity around the use of ZKPs to unleash their full potential for privacy and scaling applications.
Introducing the Lyra Launch Council
The Lyra Launch Council is a community elected group that will oversee the launch of the protocol and token.
Boba Network Announced
Boba Network is a layer 2 optimistic rollup that reduces gas fees, improves transaction throughput, and extends the capabilities of smart contracts.
Ondo Finance Raises $4 Million
Pantera Capital led the round with CoinFund, Protoscale Capital, The LAO and Digital Currency Group also participating.
Euler New Website and Rebrand
Euler’s website got a refresh and they now have a new logo.
Interesting Tweets
An overview of the floor prices for recently launched NFT projects
A look at NFTs from a physical art gallery owner’s point of view
A series of question that all rollup providers should be able to answer
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
ETH's Scarcity Engines - The Daily Gwei
Metaverse Millionaires - The Daily Gwei
Sign-in with Ethereum - Brantly Millegan via Bankless
Who Owns Your Metaverse? - Mark Beylin
Opinion on Memes - CL via eGirl Capital
Alternatives to Selling at Below-Market-Clearing Prices for Achieving Fairness - Vitalik Buterin
Two Rights Might Make A Wrong - Samczsun via Paradigm
A Beginner's Guide to Layer 2 Networks - Rainbow
Mitigating Miner Extractable Value (MEV) with Gnosis Safe - Tobias Schubotz via Gnosis
Off-chain Protocols: Sidechains and Rollups - Infura Blog
Podcasts
Aztec Protocol: Bringing Scalable Privacy to DeFi - Epicenter
On-Chain Analytics Show ETH Accumulation Is Greater Than That of BTC - Unchained
Conversations with the Coop: Kain Warwick from Synthetix - Index Coop
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Senior Product Manager - Gnosis
Technical Marketing Lead - Status
Senior Frontend Engineer - DeFi Pulse
Sr. Software Engineer (Arbitrum) - Offchain Labs
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!