EthHub Weekly #89
Lots of Eth2 updates, God's Unchained card trading now live, EF call for grant applications and much more!
Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
🔥 Ethereum 2.0 Week
This week felt like there was more Ethereum 2.0 news than usual. We had a massive post from Will Villanueva about the progress of Phase 2 (and we had him on our podcast), Ben Edgington brought the goods with a fresh What’s New in Eth2, Danny Ryan gave us our 4th eth2 quick update, PryLabs posted their first testnet update, and Bitfly built a Beacon Chain explorer for the Prysm testnet.
Seems like Ethereum 2.0 is so close that you can smell it at this point, right? :)
Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony
News of the Week
😬 China Cracks Down on Crypto Exchanges
Shanghai headquarters of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the country’s central bank, has officially announced that it will crack down on cryptocurrency exchanges in the city.
According to an official announcement Friday, the regulator said it will “adopt monitoring measures such as interviews, inspections, and bans on the monitored entities involved in virtual currency activities to resolve related risks in a timely manner.”
Cryptocurrency speculation is rising amidst recent promotion of blockchain technology in China, said the central bank, adding that investors should not mix blockchain technology with cryptocurrencies.
“There are multiple risks in virtual currency issuance financing and trading, including false asset risk, business failure risk, investment speculation risk, etc. Investors should enhance their risk prevention awareness and beware of being fooled. Being cheated,” said the regulator.
💸 Fed Reserve Evaluating Digital Dollar
In a Nov. 19 letter responding to questions from lawmakers Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) and Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) in late September, Powell said the Fed has noted the efforts of other nations to explore a CBDC option, and that it continues to "carefully analyze the costs and benefits of pursuing such an initiative in the U.S."
In their letter to Powell, Hill and Foster had expressed concerns over the potential risks to the dollar if another nation or private company creates a widely used cryptocurrency, and asked whether the central bank is look pursuing such an option.
While the U.S. central bank is looking at whether a fully digital dollar would offer benefits to the U.S., Powell said the Fed is not actively developing one. Further, a digital national currency may not offer advantages to the U.S. that it may do to other nations.
⚖️ Jury Convicts Crypto Ponzi Scheme OneCoin’s Lawyer on Fraud Charges
OneCoin has been called a “pyramid scheme” and “multi-level marketing” ploy by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who have aggressively pressed charges against the international operation they say generated in excess of €3.5 billion ($3.7 billion) in sales revenue. The verdict adds another name to the growing list of convicted OneCoin officials.
Scott was convicted of washing a sizable portion of that haul. He was found guilty Thursday with laundering $400 million starting in 2016. He now faces potentially up to 50 years in prison, as well as disbarment.
The money flowed through an elaborate network of fraudulent private equity investment funds and between international tax havens, from the British Virgin Islands to Ireland, to the Cayman Islands, that obfuscated their source, according to the press release.
In the process, Scott skimmed off $50 million for himself.
Project Updates
Ethereum Istanbul Upgrade Announcement
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 9,069,000, which is predicted to occur on Saturday, December 7, 2019. Please upgrade your node before Sunday, December 1, 2019 to account for the variable block times.
Ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 Progress
Will Villanueva from Quilt (one of the Ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 teams), gives us a very detailed update on the progress of phase 2 including updates on executions environments, ewasm, cross shard transactions and much more! Highly recommend giving this one a read and listening to our recent podcast with Will here.
Ethereum 2.0 Testnet Update #1
The Prysmatic Labs team gives us our first Eth2 testnet update with details on network stats, a new beacon chain explorer and more.
Eth2 quick update no. 4
Highlights from this update include details on a grant that was given to Sigma Prime for eth2 differential fuzzing, the forming of the Light Client Task Force and some notes on the uni-directional bridge between eth1 and eth2.
What’s New in Eth2 - 22 November 2019
Updates on the Phase 0 spec and testnets, phase 1 sharding implementation, phase 2 execution environments, notes from various Eth2 and Eth1.x calls and much more.
Ecosystem Support Program Call for applications
The Ethereum Foundation published their official call for grant applicants last week. The Foundation is looking for people and teams that want to work on light clients for eth2, bridges between Ethereum and other blockchains, translators and much more.
God’s Unchained Marketplace Preview
Trading went live last week for God’s Unchained cards and in this update the team gives us a preview of their own native marketplace where you can buy, sell and trade every card in the game.
ETH/BTC EMA Ratio Trading Set Launched on TokenSets
The ETH/BTC EMA Ratio Trading implements a crossover strategy on the ETH/BTC 26 day exponential moving average. At a high level, if the ETH/BTC ratio falls below support, ETHBTCEMACO rebalances 100% ETH into BTC expecting BTC will continue outperforming ETH. Conversely, if the ETH/BTC ratio rises above resistance, the Set rebalances into ETH expecting ETH will continue to break out against BTC.
Introducing chai
chai is an ERC20 token representing a claim on deposits in the Dai Savings Rate (DSR). It can be freely converted to and from dai: the amount of dai claimed by one chai is always increasing, at the Dai Savings Rate.
Introducing StakeDAO
StakeDAO is a revenue-sharing DAO for Stake Capitals DeFi services which enables DAO token holders to continuously receive staking rewards.
Messari Adds DeFi Metrics
You can now track loans issued on major DeFi platforms including Compound, dYdX and MakerDAO by using Messari’s new tool.
OpenSea Raises $2.1mil
This new round of funding was led by Animoca Brands, gumi Cryptos, Standford Startx, and David Pazdan from MetaMask. Existing investors such as 1Confirmation and Blockchain Capital also joined the round.
/r/EthFinance Introduces a Weekly Developers and Announcements Thread
Starting every week on Wednesdays, developers, companies, and individual coders can share their product on Reddit in a dedicated thread on the /r/EthFinance subreddit.
InstaDApp Launches SAI > DAI Migration Tool
InstaDApps migration tool makes it super easy for anyone to migrate their CDPs from old the old Maker system (SCD) to new the new Maker (MCD). One major feature of this tool is the fractional migration of big CDPs. For example, you might have a $100K CDP, but there is only $20K in SAI pool, you can choose to partially migrate 1/5 of your CDP over to a MCD Vault.
FOAM Location Update
CEO of FOAM, Ryan John King, provides a large update on what the team has been working on around building, designing and testing the architecture of new FOAM radio hardware and software.
Nifty Gateway Acquired by Gemini
Nifty Gateway, the online marketplace for crypto-collectibles (NFTs), announced that they have been acquired by Gemini.
Rocket Pool 2.0 Beta Recap
The Rocket Pool 2.0 Beta has finally wrapped up, clocking in at just shy of two months of uptime. The network was running either close to or at capacity the whole time.
Community Member Spotlight
This week we’re highlighting the great work of Will Villanueva!
Will is currently working on Ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 as part of the Quilt team (of which he is a founding member). He also co-founded Bounties Network.
If you want to keep up to date with Phase 2 of Eth2, then Will is a must follow.
Keep up the great work Will!
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later (recommended read)
Podcasts
Will Villanueva: Ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 Deep Dive - Into the Ether
Vitalik Buterin - The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine - The Portal
Launching Dai, With Mariano Conti - POV Crypto
John Adler on Optimistic Rollups - Hashing It Out
How MakerDAO Now Features a Risk-Free Rate - Unconfirmed
Misc
Meme of the Week
Elon’s Cybertruck wrapped in Ethereum logos? Yes please!
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
Senior Solidity Developer - Maple
Solidity Engineer - Stability Labs
Product Designer - Compound
Business Analyst - ConsenSys
+100’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!
Protect Your Crypto
Buy a hardware wallet:
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