EthHub Weekly #190
Facebook rebrands to Meta, Optimism introduces EVM equivalence, Across Protocol announced, Phonon introduced and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
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🎉 Conference Season
The last conference I attended was EthDenver in February of 2020 - then the pandemic hit and I’ve been stuck at home in Melbourne for the better part of 2 years. Though over the last few months crypto conferences have had a resurgence and there’s been plenty of event such as Mainnet in NYC and EthLisbon in, you guessed it, Lisbon.
The one conference everyone is itching to go to is Devcon VI in Bogota, Colombia and over the weekend it was announced that it will take place in late 2022 with another related conference being teased for early 2022. While I’ll hopefully be attending both of these conferences, I think the first conference I’ll be attending since EthDenver in 2020 will be… EthDenver in February 2022 - how poetic - and I hope to see as many of you there as possible!
Have a great week everyone!
News of the Week
🤔 Facebook Rebrands to Meta and Announces Focus on the Metaverse
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now, and is still closely linked to one product. “But over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.”
⚖️ Financial Action Task Force Releases Finalized Crypto Guidance with Clarifications on DeFi and NFTs
The Financial Action Task Force has released revised and finalized crypto guidance, containing clarifications on who falls under its recommended requirements.
The global anti-money laundering watchdog first issued its virtual asset guidance in 2019. That draft called for crypto exchanges and money transmitters — which it refers to as virtual asset service providers (VASPs) — to meet standards applied to traditional financial companies. Much of this proposed approach focused on a so-called travel rule, which asked VASPs to collect and transmit originator and beneficiary information on parties participating in a transaction.
Since then, some jurisdictions have begun the process of implementing these standards, and the FATF has continued to review and amend its draft guidance. The body has also conducted reviews of the implementation process in jurisdictions and absorbed industry feedback on its proposed standards.
Project Updates
Introducing EVM Equivalence
In this post, the Optimism team explains why they believe that EVM Equivalence — complete alignment with the Ethereum Virtual Machine specification— will become the next universal standard across the L2 space.
StarkNet Alpha 3 on Testnet
Highlights include an improved testing framework, improved compilation time and syntax for short strings.
Across Protocol Announced
The Across Protocol bridge allows users to take a short-term loan on L1. This loan is trustlessly guaranteed using transaction insurance.
0xPARC Announced
0xPARC is a new organization supporting decentralized application R&D. The aim is to foster a budding community of researchers, developers, thinkers, and builders - a distributed "skunk works" for the Ethereum and decentralized tech ecosystems.
Phonon Introduced
Phonon is a powerful new scaling and privacy primitive for the entire crypto ecosystem. The protocol uses secure hardware to allow users to transact off-chain, endowing any cryptocurrency with all the properties of a cash transaction: fast, free, and privacy-preserving.
Yield Protocol V2 is Live in Beta
New features include multiple new collateral types, more stablecoins to borrow, improved use of gas & transactions and more.
Adobe Introduces Content Credentials
Content Credentials is Adobe’s new way to provide and assess digital content provenance and attribution.
Alchemy Raises $250 Million
The Series C round was led by a16z with participation from Lightspeed and Redpoint and existing investors Coatue, Addition, DFJ, and Pantera.
Immutable and ESL Partner Up
ESL is the world’s leading e-sports company and they have teamed up with Immutable X to build CS:GO NFTs on Ethereum.
DeversiFi Updates
Updates include multi hop swaps, a complete new UI, an improved deposit & withdrawal process and more.
Hyype Guarded Launch Now Live
The guarded launch includes support for popular NFT series such as CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats and many more.
Lyra Launches Ignition
Ignition is a 6-week journey to launch the LYRA token and transform Lyra into DeFi’s volatility engine.
Balancer and CowSwap Team Up
CowSwap is now integrated in Balancer natively and brings together features such as gasless trading, MEV protection, minimized fees and more.
Sismo DAO Introduced
The Sismo DAO members, also called Zikies, are the friends of Sismo. They coordinate through their governance-power-bearing ENS subdomains (eg. ziki1337.sismo.eth), which they claimed for free on sismo.io. Today, the Sismo DAO voting method is 1 subdomain = 1 vote. This, of course, can be changed in the future.
Perpfect Game Introduced
The Perpfect Game, the trading competition for Perp v2 testnet, is a different kind of game. The addresses that can join the game are pre-selected and put into 10 different teams based on the value of the tokens each address holds on 10/22 (Sat.) at 21:00 (UTC+8).
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
The New Meta - The Daily Gwei
The People's Network - The Daily Gwei
Crypto Cities - Vitalik Buterin
Ultra Scalable Ethereum - David Hoffman via Bankless
The State of Ethereum | Q3 2021 - Ben Giove via Bankless
Six Moonshot ZK Applications - Gubsheep
The Web3 Stack: How Web3 Will Offer Superior UX to Web2 - Polynya
A New Mental Model for Defi Treasuries - Hasu via Uncommon Core
Web3 Is In Our Nature I - Thobey Campion via EXO
Podcasts
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
VP of Marketing - EPNS
Senior Solidity Engineer - Maple Finance
Back-End / Relay Node Engineer - Gelato Network
+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!