Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
🌑 The Moon Mission Fund
Long-time Ethereum community member DCinvestor published an interesting idea to Twitter and then expanded on it on Reddit last week. He asked the community who would be interested in donating to an “eth2 Moon Mission Fund” using Gitcoin. The purpose of this fund would be to take donations in any token, immediately convert it to ETH, and then unlock all the ETH in 3 to 5 years to be distributed to all the teams that have built eth2 clients (based on their % share of the network). DC goes into more detail on Reddit here and explains his rationale behind this idea.
Personally, I think it’s a great idea but I have some reservations. Firstly and probably the most obvious – who should manage these funds? Would we utilize a DAO or leave it up to a centralized body like the EF or ConsenSys? DC suggests that we could probably use the Gitcoin team as custodians (they are certainly not a bad choice) but I’m unsure of how much of the community would trust any centralized entity to hold onto a possibly large amount of ETH. Anyway, Eric and I will expand on this more on our weekly podcast recap episode – be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss it!
Have a great week everyone!
– Anthony
News of the Week
🤯 Reddit Rolls Out ‘Community Points’ on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior
Reddit is expanding a trial program designed to let users reward each other for their contributions, using the Ethereum blockchain (currently on the Rinkeby testnet). The first two communities to utilize these features are r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR.
The rewards (points) can be spent on premium features and used as a measure of reputation in the community, the social media platform said. Users are rewarded based on their contribution to their favorite channels, with the community ultimately deciding how many points each user receives. Users can hoard their points or spend them on unique features such as badges, custom emojis and GIFs in comments.
In addition, users will be able to leave a tip for comments they like or posts they see as valuable. Users will also be able to transfer community points directly to another Reddit member’s Vault as well as any Ethereum wallet address.
In order to start contributing, users need to sign up to the “Vault,” Reddit’s local blockchain wallet, accessed via scanning a QR code through the official Reddit app.
💰 ErisX Announces Launch of First US Ether Futures Contracts
Crypto derivatives platform ErisX is launching Ether futures contracts, it announced Monday in a blog post.
The new contracts, the first futures contracts for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap in the U.S., will begin trading effective immediately, ErisX announced. The move comes a few days after ErisX announced it had received a virtual currency license from the New York Department of Financial Services, and would begin offering trading services in what is the nation’s most stringent regulatory regime.
“Starting today individual and institutional investors can access physically delivered futures contracts based on ETH-USD with monthly and quarterly expirations. The ErisX futures exchange trades alongside the ErisX spot market on a unified and innovative platform enabling price transparency and collateral efficiencies,” the blog post said.
Physically-settled futures contracts deliver actual tokens upon expiry, rather than the fiat equivalent.
💳 Visa Patent Filing Would Allow Central Banks to Mint Digital Fiat Currencies Using Ethereum
Visa looks to be laying the groundwork for a future in which fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar could be easily turned into a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The California-based payments giant, which processes upwards of 100 million transactions every day on average, has filed a patent application for a process for turning physical fiat currency into a newly digitized version.
The filing, which was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in November and made public on Thursday, says the system would be able to mint digital fiat currency and keep a tally of all issuances on the blockchain (and it specifically mentions Ethereum). Managed by a “central entity computer,” the system would also remove physical cash from circulation.
By the sounds of it, newly created digital fiat would be the exact equivalent, like for like, with physical cash. The denomination and serial number would even be carried over into the new system. The patent also says some sort of “trusted certificate” would be required to mint the digital cash, presumably to keep issuance a tightly controlled process.
Project Updates
Introducing Argent V1
Argent V1 is now live and offers one tap access to decentralized finance (DeFi). Argent now has integrations with TokenSets, PoolTogether, Aave, Uniswap V2 liquidity pools, Compound, Maker and Kyber. Get the app here.
Lighthouse Development Update #25
The Sigma Prime team has been hard at work on their Lighthouse client implmenting many upgrades and doing focused work on the Schlesi multiclient testnet. Read all about it and more in this months update from the team.
What’s New in Eth2 – 15 May 2020
In this weeks update, Ben attempts to answer the question “when eth2?” with some fact-based research and reporting. He also provides updates on the usual topics (client progress, testing, research and more).
DAppNode Releases New Dashboard
This dashboard allows users to monitor their eth2 validators and displays information around earnings, attestations & aggregations, and even provides alerts!
Nimbus Joins Schlesi Testnet
Status’ Nimbus client has joined the Schlesi eth2 multi-client testnet alongside Prysm, Lighthouse and Teku. The testnet also had its first fork over the weekend due to a consensus issue.
Bitfly Releases Eth2 Staking Calculator
Set custom economic, staking pool and network parameters along with a bunch of other parameters to get a rough idea of what kind of return you can expect from staking in eth2.
TXRX Research Updates
Highlights include the release of Onotole – a transpiler for eth2 pyspec, Schlesi network metrics and a write-up of the scope of the eth1 <> eth2 merger.
Justin Drake Proposes Eth2 Price Feeds
Justin made waves this week by making a suggestion that a simple price feed service should be added to the eth2 beacon chain. The service would allow building fully decentralised oracles that produce a price for every tracked asset at every epoch boundary, i.e. with a granularity of 6.4 minutes. Lots of good discussion in the thread itself including a response from Vitalik (who is opposed to the idea).
Eth2 Deposit Launchpad Announced
This new launchpad aims to be the easiest and safest interface that Ethereans use in order to became a validator in eth2.
OpenEthereum’s First Update
OpenEthereum v3 has been released and includes important updates including better node discovery and decreased database size. Read this thread for the full tl;dr.
Chainlink Announces VRF
Chainlink VRF utilizes verifiable random functions to generate randomness that is verifiable on-chain and is live now! Developers can get started here.
PoolTogether have already announced that they’ll be integrating Chainlink’s VRF into their protocol.
RabbitHole Announced
On RabbitHole, users can acquire XP, level up, and earn rewards for interacting with well-known blockchain protocols. RabbitHole breaks down each decentralized application into gamified tasks so users can understand the main functions of the application while simultaneously bootstrapping the network.
Tornado Cash Trusted Ceremony Now Complete
With a record 1114 contributions this was by far the largest Trusted Setup Ceremony to date. By comparison, all other trusted setup ceremonies had less than 200 participants.
$TAPE Launched on Zora
Grammy-winning DJ RAC released a personal token on the newly launched Ethereum-based marketplace called Zora. The $TAPE token represents a cassette tape featuring RAC’s new album and is sold on a bonding curve.
tBTC Live on Mainnet (for 2 days)
tBTC went live on the Ethereum mainnet this week but then over the weekend a bug was discovered which forced the team to pause deposits. A full post-mortem on what happened is coming soon.
Opium Exchange Now Live
Opium Exchange lets you list your own decentralized derivatives. The platform currently has gas-price options for DeFi live along with a some other contracts with up to 100x leverage.
DeBank Releases DeFi List
The DeFi List panel helps users explore different products/apps within the DeFi space using the DeBank portfolio tracker.
Loopring Updates
Loopring has deployed a new approach to generating layer-2 account keys on their website which requires no passwords, no account keys are ever the same, and it’s decoupled from the Loopring protocol itself.
dYdX Launches BTC-USDC Perpetual Market
Users can now trade BTC-USDC with up to 10x leverage by using dYdX’s decentralized exchange.
MetaCartel Ventures Makes First Investment
The DAO has decided to back to the decentralized stablecoin project MetaCoin as its first investment.
Radar Relay Relaunched
Relay now offers smart DEX routing, giving users access to liquidity from multiple sources. In addition to 0x orders, bridge orders afford access to better prices by tapping into liquidity on Curve, Kyber, Uniswap, 0x, and Oasis, with more on the way.
RIP Sai
The old MakerDAO system (Sai) was officially shut down this week which means no new Sai can be minted (only redeemed).
Introducing DyDAI
DyDAI is a token that allows users to earn interest from dYdX margin deposits.
Frontier Integrates iEarn
Using Frontier Wallet, you can now earn the highest yield in DeFi by taking advantage of iEarn.
Community Member Spotlight
This week we’re highlighting the great work of Ben DiFrancesco!
Ben is an active Ethereum community member and is the Founder, CEO & Lead Engineer at ScopeLift – a software engineering consulting focused on crypto. Ben is also the co-organizer of Philly Blockchain.
Additionally, Ben curates the Build Blockchain newsletter which covers some of the most interesting things that happened in Ethereum and the wider crypto space each week. We recommend that you go subscribe right now!
Keep up the great work Ben!
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Videos
Podcasts
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RAC: Can Ethereum Help Reshape the Music Industry? – Into the Ether
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Coordinating ETH 2 with Danny Ryan – POV Crypto
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ErisX Launches Ether Futures (with Joe Lubin) – John Lothian News Podcast
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
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Paralegal – Ledger
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Head of Product – Monolith
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Financial Journalist Internship – The Block
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Technical Blockchain Product Manager (VP) – J.P. Morgan
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+100’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!
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Donations (ethhub.eth)