EthHub Weekly #80
ProgPoW drama, North Korea developing its own crypto, Dolomite DEX live on mainnet, The DeFi Score introduced and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
đ ProgPoW Drama⌠again!
As Iâm sure most of you have seen this week, the ProgPoW discussions have been heating up once again primarily on Twitter and Reddit. I wonât go into too much detail here (as Eric and I will discuss this on the weekly recap podcast) but I will leave you with some resources to get you up to speed. This Trello board being put together by Scott Lewis, Trent Van Epps, and Andrew is a great resource for keeping up on all of the talking points & arguments while this Kialo dashboard organizes all of the arguments into a Pros and Cons view. Have fun!
On a lighter note, our good friend and core EthHub contributor Chaz Schmidt put together an awesome guide on how to get started earning passive income with Compound Finance - you can check it out here.
Have a great week everyone!
-Â Anthony
News of the Week
đ¤Â North Korea Plans Cryptocurrency to Sidestep Sanctions
North Korea is working on building its own cryptocurrency to get around the tough international sanctions.
Development is apparently still in its early stages and follows a similar project from Venezuela, which launched its oil-backed petro token last year â also to avoid U.S.-led sanctions.
In a Wednesday report from Vice, Alejandro Cao de Benos â the official managing North Koreaâs cryptocurrency conferences and a special delegate for the nationâs Committee for Cultural Relations â said that the as-yet-unnamed token is expected to be âmore like bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.â
Like the petro, the new crypto may be pegged to an asset within North Korea. âNow we are in the phase of studying the goods that will give value to it,â Cao de Benos said, adding that there are âno plansâ to peg a cryptocurrency to the North Korean won.
âď¸Â DOJ Brings Extortion Charges Against Steven Nerayoff
U.S. law enforcement has charged Steven Nerayoff, a former paid advisor to Overstockâs tZero, with extortion.
Nerayoff, an attorney and founder of blockchain consulting firm Alchemist, was arrested Wednesday morning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and was scheduled to face charges before a federal court in Brooklyn in the afternoon. The FBI also arrested Michael Hlady, an Alchemist associate.
Nerayoff and Hlady face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of the alleged scheme, described as âan old-fashioned shakedownâ by the United States Attorney Officeâs for the Eastern District of New York (part of the Department of Justice) and âan age-old extortion scheme ⌠with a modern-day twistâ by the FBI.
Nerayoffâs attorney, Avi Moskowitz, said that âa civil dispute has been improperly distorted into a criminal matter. Mr. Neryaoff looks forward to the truth coming out and clearing his name.â
According to the governmentâs complaint, Nerayoffâs firm was tapped to advise an undisclosed, Seattle-based startup â dubbed âCompany 1â in court documents â in July 2017. Nerayoff began demanding larger than contractually agreed-upon ETH payouts for his help with the companyâs initial coin offering (ICO) that coming fall, the complaint says.
đŠÂ SEC Charges Token Sale Platform ICOBox With Securities Violations
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged that ICOBox and founder Nikolay Evdokimov violated securities laws with its 2017 token sale and subsequent activity facilitating other initial coin offerings (ICOs).
According to a press release Wednesday, Evdokimov raised $14.6 million by selling âICOSâ tokens to more than 2,000 individuals, promising customers that the tokens would increase in value once it began trading. Moreover, token holders were told they could purchase other tokens on the ICOBox platform at a discount using their ICOS tokens.
âAccording to the complaint, the ICOS tokens are virtually worthless,â the release says.
The complaint itself specifies that, âICOBox and Evdokimov told investors that the offering proceeds would be used to cover the cost of providing ICOBoxâs planned services to digital asset startups that could not afford them.â
Project Updates
Dolomite Goes Live on Monday September 23rd
Note: Depending on when you read this newsletter, Dolomite may not be be live on mainnet yet.
Dolomite is a decentralized exchange built on top of the Loopring protocol. Itâs the culmination of 1.5 years of development and includes many innovative features including: the first DEX to natively integrate Wyre for seamless fiat conversions, is U.S. based and serves U.S. customers, cash in and out using your bank for a tiny 0.75% fee and much, much more!
Ed note: I had a chance to play around with Dolomite before it went live on mainnet and I must say Iâm really impressed with what the team have put together here - I highly recommend checking it out and please @ us (@sassal0x or @econoar) with your thoughts!
Whatâs New in Eth2 - 20 September 2019
An exciting Whatâs New in Eth2 from Ben this week covering all of the highlights from the interop lock-in, recent implementers call, work on BLS standardization and a brief research update.
Danny Ryan also posted his own Eth2 interop review on the Ethereum blog here.
Development Update #0 - Ethereum.org
The first development update for the Ethereum.org website was released this week that covers the latest updates to the website including a hiring update (Sam Richards joins as a full-time web developer), building the translation program and team, and whatâs next for the site.
The Ethereum.org website also now has two new sections - one for Java developers and one for enterprise resources.
Introducing Balancer
Balancer is a non-custodial portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor. Balancer turns the concept of an index fund on its head: instead of paying fees to portfolio managers to rebalance your portfolio, you collect fees from traders, who rebalance your portfolio by following arbitrage opportunities.
Rocket Pool 2 - Beta v1 Guide
The Rocket Pool team have put together a guide that will walk you through how to set your computer up to interact with the beta when it launches on the 24th of September at 00:00 UTC, see the state of the Rocket Pool network, make a deposit into it, track the state of the deposit and interact with it, and finally, withdraw your earned rETH back into your account.
Introducing the DeFi Score
ConsenSys Codefi announced the DeFi Score this week which is a methodology to promote transparency and understanding around the technical and financial risks impacting DeFi lending markets.
Introducing MyDefi
MyDefi.org is a global Dashboard to help you visualize your DeFi activity easily. It currently supports Compound, MakerDAO and TokenSets with future plans to support Augur, Synthetix and dYdX.
DeFi Strategies Announced and Released
DeFi Strategies is an app that helps you explore investment strategies in Open Finance through a trading simulator.
Introducing the ETH 26 Day EMA Crossover Set
This week the Set team introduced the second Exponential Moving Average Set on TokenSets â the ETH 26 Day EMA Crossover Set (ETH26EMACO). This Set automatically rebalances based on a crossover between the price of ETH and the 26 Day Exponential Moving Average (26 EMA) technical indicator.
BitPay Adds Support for Ethereum
BitPay will soon start supporting the Ethereum blockchain which means you will be able to use ETH with the platform. BitPay have also announced that they will shortly support ERC-20 tokens, namely, stablecoins.
Harbor Tokenizes Real Estate Funds Worth $100 Million on Ethereum
Harbor has pivoted from helping companies issue security tokens to helping them tokenize existing securities. Announced Monday, the startup has created tokens on the Ethereum blockchain representing the shares of four real estate funds worth $100 million.
AZTEC Protocol Announces Latest Round of Funding
AZTEC has raised money from A_Capital, Coinbase and other leading institional investors to build out their developer tooling for AZTEC and add universal SNARKs to our offering.
Atstake Announced and Released
Atstake allows you to create two-person agreements where one or both of you stake ETH or ERC20 tokens which are later distributed in any way between you based on any criteria.
Community Member Spotlight
This week weâre highlighting the great work of David Hoffman!
David is a very active member in the Ethereum community. He is currently the Chief of Operations at RealT - an Ethereum-based tokenized real estate platform, and a co-host of the POV Crypto Podcast.
David also writes all about Ethereum (and the apps built on top) on his blog over on Medium.
Keep up the great work David!
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Ether is the Best Model for Money the World has Ever Seen (highly recommended read)
ETH the Reserve Asset (highly recommended read)
How we built the largest payment channel network on Ethereum
Podcasts
Synthetix: Bringing Currency, Commodity and Stock Exposure to Ethereum - Into the Ether
How Tether's Surge on Ethereum Is Affecting Bitcoin - Unconfirmed
Videos
Misc
Meme of the Week
This Buterin & Lubin âJust Keep Chuggingâ remix is a must listen - Alexander killing the meme game once again!
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Creative Copywriter - Brave
Operations Associate - AZTEC
Investor Support Associate - CoinList
Senior Marketing Manager (Global) - Chainlink
+100âs more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!
Protect Your Crypto
Buy a hardware wallet:
Donations:Â 0xA19FCDaD77C1F0fd184689aca88BabCF68010347