EthHub Weekly #47

Exchange hacks, lots of dev updates, AraCon and more!

Feb 04, 2019

Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)

💸 Building a Sustainable EthHub

This week we published a piece outlining how we plan to fund EthHub going forward. Since publishing the piece, we’ve received over 100 ETH (~$11,000 USD) worth of donations and we are honestly blown away by the generosity of the community. We plan to start using these donations to post bounties to get more comprehensive content on the EthHub website.

Speaking of the website - we’re going live with a fresh redesign in the next couple of days that we think you’re going to love. We’ve simplified the site so it’s easier to find content and we now have a better search function!

Small newsletter update - I’ve decided to replace the ‘Project Spotlight’ section of the newsletter with a ‘Community Member Spotlight’ section where I will be highlighting the community members that are actually building the projects, products, services and dapps that we have all come to love.

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

🤔 Crypto Exchange QuadrigaCX Missing $145 Mln After Death of Founder

Following the sudden death of its founder Gerry Cotten, cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX is reportedly missing CA$190 million dollars ($145 million) in digital assets, Canadian news daily The Globe and Mail reports on Feb. 1

Citing a creditor protection filing from the Nova Scotia Supreme court, the Globe and Mail states that the firm has been unable to locate or access the funds since Cotten passed on Dec. 9, leading to a liquidity crisis at the exchange. QuadrigaCX filed for creditor protection in compliance with the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) on Feb. 1.

The exchange only has CA$375,000 ($286,000) in cash, while it owes CA$260 million ($198,435,000) to its users.

Since these reports came out, Twitter user CryptoMedication has put together a comprehensive analysis of QuadrigaCX's Bitcoin Holdings and Taylor Monahan of MyCrypto did some digging into their Ethereum wallets.

☠️ Crypto Exchange Liqui Shuts Down Due to Lack of Liquidity

Liqui, a cryptocurrency exchange that has been operating since 2016, announced today that it is shutting down, citing a lack of liquidity as the primary reason. According to Liqui's announcement, the exchange "is no longer able to provide liquidity for the users left" and "do not see any economic point in providing you [users] with our services."

Liqui users will have 30 days to withdraw their assets from the exchange. Liqui's announcement comes after a string of asset delistings, leading some traders to believe the exchange was attempting an exit scam.

👍 Buy Crypto With Credit Cards on Binance

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by adjusted trading volume, has just made it easier for users to buy cryptocurrencies.

The exchange announced Thursday that it has partnered with Israel-based payments processing firm Simplex to enable purchases with Visa and MasterCard credit cards.

At launch, the exchange is supporting credit card purchase for bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), litecoin (LTC) and XRP.

🏦 CBOE Refiles its Bitcoin ETF Proposal

The race is back on to launch the first U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), after Cboe resubmitted its joint proposal with VanEck and SolidX.

Announced Thursday by VanEck digital asset strategy lead Gabor Gurbacs, the Jan. 30 filing would, if approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), allow the Cboe BZX Exchange to list shares of a bitcoin ETF trust. Many proponents of a bitcoin ETF believe that the fund will help bring fresh money into the space, creating a more liquid market.

The new application is about 40 pages longer than the previous one. In a new section on page 10, VanEck claims that the SEC has not provided sufficient insights into what it means when it says a bitcoin ETF would require a “significant regulated market.” VanEck then argues the SEC has previously approved ETFs without the fund issuer outlining how the respective underlying markets for their product met such a designation.

👊 Fidelity Crypto Trading and Custody Platform in Final Testing

Financial services provider Fidelity, which has some $7.2 trillion in client assets under management, said Thursday that its anticipated crypto trading and custody platform is in its “final testing” phase.

The company noted in a blog post late Thursday that it had on-boarded “a select set of eligible clients” already, while it worked on building Fidelity Digital Asset Services (FDAS). Fidelity first announced it would be launching a digital asset service last October.

At present, the company is working with auditors to polish its existing policies and procedures, as well as “to set new benchmarks for this aspect of cryptographic and blockchain-based finance.”

The platform is expected to go live by March of this year.

🤦‍♂️ Cryptopia Exchange Reportedly Suffers Another Security Breach

Blockchain analysis platform Elementus released a new report regarding another hack targeting the troubled crypto exchange Cryptopia. According to the report, a January 28 hack targeted 17,000 more Cryptopia user wallets, managing to take an additional 1,675 Ether (worth about $176,000 at time of press).

Elementus' report states that of the 17,000 freshly siphoned wallets, over 5,000 had already been drained in the original hack 15 days prior. In fact, just two hours after yesterday's attack, many of the hacked wallets had already been "topped up" with more Ether, perhaps from mining pools that were unaware of the latest attack.

Project Updates

MetaMask Monthly

MetaMask recaps what they accomplished in January including: a new developer documentation site, performance improvements and they announced a spring launch window for MetaMask Mobile.

0x Development Update #15

Jacob Evans from the 0x project recaps all the work the team did in January including: releasing four new developer tools, working on scalability with StarkWare, attending the Eth1.x gathering at Stanford and giving a shout out to various community projects.

Graph Explorer Released

The Graph launched their Hosted Service and Graph Explorer this week. Graph Explorer makes it easy for developers to discover all the data being indexed on The Graph and easily pull it into their dApps. Launch partners include: Dharma, Compound, Uniswap, ENS, Origin, Decentraland, and Livepeer.

New KyberSwap Released

KyberSwap will launch as a standalone token swap service that includes a brand new interface, easily and quickly see available exchange rates for tokens and the site is now optimized for mobile. The team also announced that a KyberSwap Mobile App is coming soon.

MakerDAO’s January Recap

The maker team introduces us to the Maker Ecosystem Growth Group. The primary areas of focus for this group are: system development for multi-collateral Dai, rebuilding the Oasis DEX and providing more detailed research about the day-to-day Dai markets to keep MKR holders informed.

Nuo.Network Goes Live on Mainnet

Nuo is a decentralized lending platform that acts as a debt marketplace, allows lenders to earn interest on their crypto assets and is non-custodial and open source. This week, the platform launched with WBTC support. Be sure to check them out.

Parity Security Alert

On February 3rd, Parity received several reports that an attacker can send a specially-crafted RPC request to a public Parity Ethereum node (any version pre 2.2.9-stable and pre 2.3.2-beta) and that node will crash.

Please update your Parity node by downloading the fix from here.

Ledger Mobile App Released

Ledger announced this week that the Ledger Live mobile phone application is now available. This allows Ledger Nano S and Ledger Blue users to view their balances by scanning a LiveQR code presented on the Ledger Live desktop version. Currently featured in consultation mode, the app enables you to check the value of your crypto assets anywhere you go.

Prysmatic Labs Biweekly Update #21

A biweekly update from the Prylabs team covering their time at both Aracon and Goerlicon as well as research and development updates on their Ethereum 2.0 client.

AraCon Recap

Ethereum-based project Aragon hosted their conference AraCon this week and Lane Rettig put together a recap thread of the most interesting bits from the conference.

WBTC Goes Live on Ethereum

The long-awaited launch of WBTC finally happened this week and the system currently stores around 72 BTC. WBTC is an ERC20 token fully backed by real BTC and stored by regulated custodians. You can find more information here.

What's New in Eth2 - 1 February 2019

Ben Edgingtons weekly update on all the developments happening with Ethereum 2.0. The biggest news? Danny Ryan published v0.1 of the Eth2 Serenity spec!

Introducing DEX.AG

Built by Timur Badretdinov, DEX.AG is a decentralized exchange aggregator that is incorporated with the Settle.finance platform.

Aragon Desktop App Gets a Refresh

The Aragon desktop app has been relaunched with a suite of new features, performance improvements and an overall better user experience.

Go Ultra-long on ETH via “Looping CDP” with InstaDApp

With a click of a button you can now 3x leverage your MakerDAO CDP using the awesome InstaDApp tool.

FOAM Developer Update #5

Updates include a stable release of the FOAM map app, more documentation, UI changes and a few back-end changes.

Radar Relay Becomes ‘Radar’

Radar is now the parent brand for products such as Radar Relay and an upcoming yet-to-be-announced product.

AirSwap Releases DexIndex

DexIndex is an open source tool that searches Ethereum decentralized exchanges to find the best token prices.

Introducing Plasma Group

Plasma Group is a full service plasma toolbox for deploying, transacting on, building with, and developing on plasma chains.

Counterfactual Development Update #2

Various updates on all the work that the Counterfactual team has been doing with state channels over the last 2 weeks.

BoxSwap Releases Wallet for NFTs

The wallet was launched into public beta this week and enables NFT Traders to manage their assets seamlessly.

zkERC20: Confidential Token Standard

This EIP (created by AZTEC) defines the standard interface and behaviours of a confidential token contract, where ownership values and the values of transfers are encrypted.

Community Member Spotlight

For the inaugural ‘Community Member Spotlight’ I wanted to highlight the work that both Somway Jain and Samyak Jain have been doing over the last few months. The pair are responsible for building out a ‘Decentralized Bank’ on top of the MakerDAO protocol - called InstaDApp. The platform allows you to perform many different types of interactions with MakerDAO CDPs - such as setting CDP alerts or paying down someone else’s debt - all through a clean user interface.

They’ve also created a MakerDAO explorer called MakerScan and a decentralized token swap platform called Easwap.

Don’t forget to follow both of them on Twitter!

On-Chain Activity

The US House Election market correctly resolved to Democrats after 6 dispute rounds.
Averages for funded (non-zero) CDPs.
WBTC is now live with 72 BTC (~$250,000 USD) in custody.
Over 2 million ETH now locked in MakerDAO CDPs.
Average Ethereum block time is now 17.5 seconds (normally 15 seconds) due to the difficulty bomb kicking in.

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts