EthHub Weekly #61

Ethereal news, Binance hacked, PryLabs Eth2 testnet released, MetaCartel DAO is born, RealT is now live and much more!

May 13, 2019

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

🤯 News Overload!

Well, this past week has been incredibly busy for both Ethereum and the crypto space as a whole. At EthHub, we started the week with our first community call which turned out to be a great success - you can find the key takeaways here.

Next up was Ethereal - a conference hosted by ConsenSys in New York. At the conference it was announced that ConsenSys and Ethereum Foundation (EF) members will be joining the MolochDAO, $30mm has been committed by the EF over the next 12 months for Ethereum development and Devcon5 will be held in Osaka, Japan from October 8-11 this year!

Eric’s heading to NYC this week for EthNY and Token Summit. Be sure to reach out to him on Twitter if you want to meet up - I’ll be dealing with a heavy case of fomo down in Melbourne!

Bonus: the video of the panel I participated in at Edcon is now live.

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

🤣 U.S. Congressman Wants to Ban Crypto

In a Financial Services Committee hearing on Thursday, U.S. Congressman Bradley Sherman (D-CA) called on Congress to propose a bill outlawing cryptocurrencies.

"I look for colleagues to join with me in introducing a bill to outlaw cryptocurrency purchases by Americans...in part because an awful lot of our international power comes from the fact the dollar is the standard unit of international finance and transactions," Sherman said.

"Whether it is to disempower our foreign policy, our tax collection enforcement, or our traditional law enforcement, the purpose of cryptocurrency, the advantage it has over sovereign currency is solely to aid in the disempowerment of the United States and the rule of law," he added.

Ed note: I can’t think of a better advertisement for cryptocurrencies!

😲 Hackers Steal $40.7 Million in Bitcoin from Binance

Hackers stole more than 7,000 bitcoin from crypto exchange Binance, the world’s largest by volume, the startup reported Tuesday.

Binance announced that a “large scale security breach” was discovered earlier on May 7, finding that malicious actors were able to access user API keys, two-factor authentication codes and “potentially other info,” the exchange’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, said in a letter. As a result, they were able to withdraw roughly $41 million in bitcoin from the exchange, according to a transaction published in the security notice.

After the hack, CZ publicly discussed whether the company might seek to encourage bitcoin miners and node operators to “rollback” the bitcoin blockchain, reversing transactions confirmed by the network to return the funds.

Shortly after discussing this option, CZ said in a follow-up tweet that after speaking with various parties, the exchange decided not to pursue the rollback approach.

👍 FinCEN Offers Some Clarity for Crypto

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published a new guidance sheet Thursday, outlining when and how different companies, individuals and platforms in the crypto space may be money transmitters under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and other relevant laws. The document highlighted dapps among other models.

Being designated a money transmitter under FinCEN rules means a firm or person must follow federal AML and know-your-customer (KYC) regulations.

In Thursday’s notice, the U.S. Treasury Department’s AML bureau said that while it “does not establish any new regulatory expectations or requirements,” it does combine several previous documents issued over the past eight years, and details in greater specificity how participants in the space might violate AML regulations.

Dapps, the document noted, are “designed such that they are not controlled by a single person or group of persons,” meaning there is no single entity operating as the dapp’s administrator.

However, if a dapp “accept[s] and transmit[s] value,” it qualifies as a money transmitter under the same regulatory interpretation applied to crypto-dispensing vending machines, FinCEN said.

Read crypto lawyer takes here, here & here and Coin Centers take here.

🤔 Bitfinex’s Private Token Sale Raised $1 Billion in 10 Days

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has raised $1 billion through its native token in a private sale, according to its chief technology officer.

Paolo Ardoino‏ tweeted Monday that Bitfinex has achieved the target in just 10 days, with participation from “giant” firms from both within the cryptocurrency industry and outside.

Some of the investors, which were not named, invested over $100 million each, Ardoino‏ said, adding that others also contributed investments of over $1 million each.

“They know we are trustworthy,” and have a “good understanding” of the company, the CTO said in other tweets.

Project Updates

Prysmatic Labs Releases Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 Testnet

You can now head to https://prylabs.net to get started with the Sapphire Testnet from PryLabs. Click through to the blog post to learn more about what’s included (and not included) as part of this first release.

You can also read a blog post from the EGS team covering their experience using the PryLabs testnet here.

MetaCartel is Born

After being rejected from the MolochDAO, Peter Pan and the MetaCartel have decided to fork the code and create their own grant based DAO that will fund application layer products to coordinate the sharing of product insights and user data.

RealT is Now Live

RealT is a platform for tokenizing real estate on Ethereum. It uses a single-purpose LLC to own individual properties and then tokenizes ownership in these LLC’s across unique sets of tokens.

MolochDAO Updates

Various updates from Moloch this week including the announcement of new members (ConsenSys, EF employees) and latetot + an anonymous + a recap of other developments over the last few weeks.

FOAM Announces Grants Program

Projects building on the FOAM API can apply for grants between 50,000 and 500,000 worth of FOAM tokens per project.

Microsoft Releases Azure Blockchain Kit

Microsoft released the first Preview release of the new Azure Blockchain Development Kit for Ethereum, as an extension to Visual Studio Code.

New Status Developer Portal

The new developer portal contains all you need to contribute to the repos, earn crypto on Gitcoin, build your own dapp with the javascript API and Embark Project, learn about extensions and much more.

New ZEIP for 0x

ZEIP-34 enables more granular trading, better price discovery and increased market liquidity for NFTs by using property based orders.

Ren Updates

Ren announced a new fee model for the ecosystem and that they will be integrating Dai into that model.

Nuo Integrates Matic

Nuo to become one of the first lending platforms to implement faster Plasma Exits on Matic sidechains.

DeFi Tracker Released

The team from Dexwallet released a tool that allows you to track all of your DeFi activity by simply entering your Ethereum address.

Introducing Cent Messenger & Instant ETH Transfers

You can now directly message any other user (or any group of users) in an intuitive chat-based UI on Cent as well as send ETH instantly using the app!

0x Development Update #18

Daniel Pyrathon, recent hire on the growth team at 0x, runs through Aprils updates from the team including governance and research, growth, general ecosystem updates and much more.

Introducing CIRI: Crypto Interest Rate Index

The Messari team introduces their own take on a “Crypto LIBOR” to track crypto interest rates across various finance apps.

Announcing Unisocks

You can now buy and sell Uniswap branded socks using Uniswap and every SOCKS token bought increases the cost of the next while every SOCKS token sold decreases the price.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the work of Arjun Bhuptani!

Arjun is the founder of Connext Network - an Ethereum scaling solution using state channels. The team recently released their first product - the DaiCard - which allows instant, trust-minimized off-chain payments in Dai all from your browser.

Connext’s technology is also used to power Ethereum apps such as SpankChain and Ujo Music - all live on mainnet today.

Arjun is also a founding member of the MolochDAO.

If you’d like to learn more about Connext and Arjun, have a listen to our podcast with him here.

On-Chain Activity

Almost $100m in total DAI on-chain volume over a 24hr period
Maker losing dominance to other lending platforms due to high stability fee
The decentralized synthetic asset platform, Synthetix, has been seeing very healthy growth since March
Ethereum uncle rate vs gas regression
New financial metrics on LoanScan

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts

Podcasts

Digix: The Golden Path Forward with Shaun Djie - Into the Ether
Groundbreaking Asset Management Models with Set Protocol - Wyre Talks
ConsenSys’ Joe Lubin: Ethereum’s Competition Isn’t Even Close - Chain Reaction Podcast

Videos

Misc

Looking for Work?

Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week

Sales Development Representative - Staked
Technical Community Developer - 3Box
Design Intern - Messari
Marketing Intern - Donut
+100’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!

Donations: 0xA19FCDaD77C1F0fd184689aca88BabCF68010347