EthHub Weekly #116

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

[SPONSORED] Matic Network, the leading Ethereum Layer 2 platform, is transitioning to the public mainnet!

Matic Network is a scaling solution that aims to provide a generalized Layer 2 platform which offers various approaches to Ethereum developers to scale their DApps for large-scale usage. For the initial phase, Matic has launched its hybrid PoS + Plasma sidechains on top of Ethereum which is already gaining huge traction – making Matic one of the fastest growing DApp platforms in the space.

Matic has already welcomed more than 40+ DApps onto their platform, including VR metaverse projects such as Decentraland and Somnium space, leading games like Blocklords, BattleRacers, and Light Trail Rush, as well as decentralized social networks such as Sapien and much more.

Matic has also been a prolific contributor to Ethereum education globally. Matic has conducted more than 100 hackathons to date, not only in India but worldwide, as well as contributing to EthGlobal hackathon EthIndia. With a scalable Layer 2 like Matic on Ethereum, applications have everything on Ethereum to build products ready for mass adoption.

💻 Eth2 and Hackathons, Oh My!

The next stage of multi-client eth2 testnets are upon us with the launch of Witti! Afri Schoe livestreamed the event on Twitch and you can keep track of the new Witti testnet here. The point of this testnet is to run with the changes that were introduced to fix what happened on the Shlesi testnet (it forked due to a consensus bug).

ETHGlobals HackMoney hackathon finished up this week with over 350 hackers participating and 116 DeFi-related projects being built. I was a judge for a bunch of these projects and I was blown away by the creativity (as per usual)! You can view all the projects here. Devfolio also announced a new Ethereum India Fellowship program which aims to help developers go from web2 to web3.

I caught up with Alex Saunders from Nuggets News for our monthly Ethereum ecosystem recap – you can watch that here. I also joined DappPocket on a podcast to talk about Ethereum and TokenSets.

Have a great week everyone!

– Anthony

News of the Week

💰 Coinbase Acquires Tagomi

Coinbase is acquiring Tagomi, a prime brokerage platform specializing in digital asset trading.

Announced Wednesday, the two companies said the deal is expected to be finalized later this year, without disclosing the financial terms.

“We are going to be integrating the Tagomi platform into our product suite and it will form the foundation for the future of our institutional trading business,” said Shan Aggarwal, head of corporate development at Coinbase.

In terms of how the integration will pan out, Aggarwal added: “Tagomi will continue to operate for the near future. We’re still thinking through long-term options.”

The purchase of Tagomi by Coinbase has been in the pipeline since last year when the deal was prematurely reported to have closed. A source familiar with recent developments said it was an “all-stock deal” and “significantly less” than the $150 million reported last year. 

📝 Digital Dollar Project Releases First Whitepaper

The Digital Dollar Project is proposing a framework for the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The group published its first white paper Friday, detailing the need for a tokenized version of the U.S. dollar and some potential avenues for building this system. A digital dollar could help the U.S. maintain the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency while serving a broader array of individuals and entities than the current financial system, the paper says.

The group is helmed by former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Chris Giancarlo, Gattaca Horizons CEO and former CFTC Chief Innovation Officer Daniel Gorfine, Accenture Senior Managing Director David Treat and Pure Storage CEO Charles Giancarlo, with contributions from a number of Accenture analysts and directors. The Digital Dollar Foundation, which is working with Accenture on the project, was launched earlier this year.

“What we’re hoping to be is a catalyst for a discussion here in the United States about what role the U.S. will play in this ongoing and accelerating global debate over the future of money in a new digital age,” Chris Giancarlo, now senior counsel at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, said.

Project Updates

StarkWare Reddit Onboarding Demo

Using StarkEx, the StarkWare team trustlessly onboarded to Ethereum Mainnet 1.3M accounts with initial balances, effectively demonstrating how an entire subreddit the size of r/FortNiteBR (with its Brick tokens) could be brought onto Mainnet. The amortized price per transfer: 600 gas.

The team created no network congestion in the process. They did it over a ~12 hour period while using 2.5% of the network. We paid gas prices that were on average 30% below the average block gas price during this time.

mStable Now Live on Mainnet

mStable is a protocol that unites stablecoins, lending and swapping into one robust and easy to use standard. The first mStable features (Mint, Save and Swap) are live today on their website.

What’s New in Eth2 – 30 May 2020

Ben update us on where we’re at with phase 0, provides a post-mortem on the recent testnets (Topaz and Schlesi), explains whats next (Witti), and provides the usual resources and research updates.

Prysm Eth2 Client Feedback

The PryLabs team are collecting feedback from anyone who has used their Prysm software to connect to the various eth2 testnets. You can fill out that form here.

TXRX Team Update

Updates on the eth1 <> eth2 merge, the eth2 network monitor, the results of a cross-shard transaction simulation and more.

ETHOnline Announced

ETHOnline is a new online-only hackathon from ETHGlobal that will take place from October 2nd to October 30th. Sign up here.

Devcon6 Announced

The next Devcon will be taking place in Bogotá, Colombia in 2021! Unfortunately, there won’t be a Devcon in 2020 (due to obvious reasons) but there are plans for more Ethereum Foundation run online events – stay tuned.

Loopring Monthly Update

Lots of updates from the team this week including a recap of the Loopring Protocol 3.5 release, Loopring’s DEX settled over 1M trades and has a new key management system with the Loopring Wallet being audited and entering beta soon.

Balancer Liquidity Mining Begins

This week, Balancer Labs will start considering liquidity held on Balancer protocol for the distribution of governance tokens. For details on the specifics please refer to their previous post.

OMG Network V1 Public Mainnet Beta Now Live

This new public beta is a fully trustless, low cost, high throughput way to transfer value at the same level of security as Ethereum. The OMG Network uses the More Viable Plasma (MoreVP) specification to increase the processing capacity of Ethereum.

Introducing DeFi777

DeFi777 simplifies existing DeFi systems by turning common DeFi actions into simple token transfers. The goal is to be able to take advantage of these protocols from any crypto wallet, without requiring Dapp browsers like Metamask.

Fortmatic Raises $4mil and Rebrands

Formatic has raised $4mil in a seed round led by Placeholder with participation from Lightspeed Ventures, SV Angel, Social Capital and more. Fortmatic also rebranded to ‘Magic’ to better reflect the service that they offer.

Introducing Pool Pipes

Pool Pipes are a feature released by the ZapperFi team that aims to help reduce liquidity fragmentation throughout DeFi.

Rocket Pool 2.5 Announced

Major features include the introduction of tokenized staking deposits, continous staking, extra deposit safety and updated RPL tokenomics.

Expanding Compound Governance

Robert from Compound goes over how their new governance system will work. The gist of it is that all users and applications built on Compound will continuously, and automatically receive COMP tokens to shape the future of the protocol.

Introducing Umbra

Umra is a privacy preserving stealth payments implementation built on Ethereum (and created at HackMoney 2020). You can learn how it works by watching this video.

Foundation Announced

Foundation is a new platform that claims the power of the stock exchange and reinvents it for independent artists, designers, and brands. It’s similar to other projects like Zora.

RenVM Mainnet Released

RenVM Mainnet is now live. This launch means anyone can now use real Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash or Zcash on Ethereum by using the RenBridge to swap it for tokenized versions on Ethereum.

The Uniswap Market is Live on Aave

Users can now use Uniswap LP shares as collateral with Aave’s lending protocol.

Aztec Launches PLONK Cafe

PLONK Cafe is a forum for technical discussion and collaboration on TurboPLONK, Plookup, and other cutting-edge Universal SNARK technologies.

Alderaan Mainnet Released

This week, the Raiden Network Alderaan release went live on the Ethereum mainnet. The Alderaan release is the first full suite version of Raiden and it introduces a bunch of exciting new features including monitoring services, pathfinding services and mediation fees, compared to the Red Eyes release.

Matic Network Updates

Matic holders will be able to stake from many mobile wallets (Coinbase Wallet, Frontier, imToken etc), Ispolink has joined the Matic ecosystem, and Matic announced their support for ETHIndia’s Online hackathon Chain Runner.

Nexus Mutual Changes

In this update, Hugh Karp from Nexus Mutual discusses possible protocol changes that the team is thinking about such as pooled staking, simplified pricing, partial claims and more.

Centrifuge Goes Live

The team launched two products this week – Tinlake, their securitization app which lets investors and borrowers finance their own asset pools and Centrifuge Chain, their Proof-of-Stake blockchain.

EnjinCraft Plugin for Minecraft Introduced

EnjinCraft brings the power of blockchain to Minecraft, making it easy to tokenize Minecraft items and integrate them with your server.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the great work of Jinglan Wang!

Jinglan is a long-time Ethereum community member currently working with the Optimism (formerly Plasma Group) team. She previously worked at Handshake, Nasdaq and was apart of the MIT Bitcoin Club. She also served as the Executive Director of the Blockchain Education Network for a time.

Keep up the great work Jinglan!

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts

Podcasts

Misc

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OMG Network Releases Ethereum Layer 2 Scaling with USDT Support

While the cities burn below – (Market Monday)