Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)
😔 A Bump in the Road
The Ethereum network was put to the test again over this past week with the unfortunate inadvertent hard fork that was triggered on the network due to participants like Infura running an older version of the Geth client software. Now, it wasn’t Infura’s fault this happened (nor was it really anyone’s “fault”) but it did surface a few critical aspects of Ethereum core development that needed to be reviewed and improved upon.
Anyway, you can read my full recap here, the post mortem from the Geth team here, Jinglan’s thread about how the Optimism team were actually the ones responsible for triggering the hard fork, and lightclients thread on the technical details.
Have a great week everyone!
– Anthony
News of the Week
⚖️ Binance Begins to Block U.S. Users
Crypto exchange Binance has begun blocking U.S. users from accessing its exchange platform, The Block has learned.
The move comes more than a year after Binance first announced in July 2019 that it would stop serving U.S. residents from September of that year.
Until now, the exchange was still effectively allowing U.S. users to access its platform. As The Block reported recently, a U.S. resident just had to click “I’m not [American]” to set up an account on Binance.com. It remains possible to create an account in this fashion.
Binance is now sending emails to U.S. residents based on their IP addresses in what appears to be a significant step toward enforcing its previously announced blockade of such users.
💸 PayPal Crypto Now Available for U.S. Residents
PayPal said Thursday that it is opening up its nascent cryptocurrency services to all eligible U.S. users.
“We are pleased to announce that all eligible PayPal accountholders in the U.S. can now buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly with PayPal,” the firm said in a statement.
The move follows disclosures of high demand from PayPal’s leadership. On an earnings call earlier this month, PayPal CEO Daniel Schulman remarked that “our base is very eager for us to offer these capabilities” and that the firm’s waiting list was bigger than expected.
“Due to initial demand from our customers, we’ve also increased our weekly cryptocurrency purchase limit from $10K/week to $20K/week,” the spokesperson said.
Project Updates
What’s New in Eth2 – 13 November 2020
A very healthy update from Ben this week going over the usual phase 0 updates, testnet updates, staking & taxation, and much more!
Ethereum Cat Herders Update #33
Eth2 genesis on Dec 01, deposit contract live, 1559 multi-client PoW testnet, Eth1.0 YOLO & Berlin update, Peep an EIP-2718, Account Abstraction community call, and more.
The State of 1559 – Update 003
The Ethereum foundation has made a grant to ConsenSys and the 1559 multisig, exploration on forking testnets, updates on tooling, updates on escalator tip simulations and new content about EIP-1559.
Eth2 quick update no. 20
Staking community grants announced, new eth2 testnets Toledo & Pyrmont announced and a reminder about the eth2 deposit contract.
Beacon Fuzz – Update #09
2 consensus-related bugs identified in Prysm, 1 minor discrepancy identified on Teku and a devops update.
Upcoming Prysm V1 Release for ETH2 Mainnet
Before November 24th, PryLabs will publish a mainnet-ready, v1 release of their code that anyone can run, including tagged binaries via their easy prysm.sh script, docker builds, and also allowing you to build from source.
Lighthouse Update #32
A detailed update from the Sigma Prime team going over their mainnet development schedule for eth2 phase 0, a recap on how the genesis date will work, Lighthouse mainnet features and more.
Nimbus Update: November 10
Updates on the Nimbus client going over security, performance and ease-of-use.
Alexandria Dev Update #1
Alexandria is a new protocol under development for the Ethereum ecosystem. The goal is to provide a new peer-to-peer network that exposes the chain history for the Ethereum blockchain.
An Update on Umbra’s Funding and Future
Umbra is a protocol for stealth addresses on Ethereum. In this update, the team goes over their funding needs, the grants they’ve pursued, the challenges faced, the current progress and the plan going forward.
Balancer Raises Additional Money
Balancer Labs announced that Pantera Capital and Alameda Research have made an investment in Balancer, through the direct purchase of BAL tokens from the Balancer Labs treasury.
Yearn.finance x Hegic: Options
In this post, Andre Cronje details how Hegic options products can be integrated into Yearn.finance’s products.
A new fund from the founders of Hegic and Yearn.finance was also created called ‘Molly & Andre’ – details here.
Blocknative Raises $5 Million
The latest round of financing was led by Blockchain Capital and includes participation from new investors IDEO CoLab Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Industry Ventures as well as existing investor Foundry Group.
Synthetix Updates
sOIL and iOIL now live on the Synthetix platform, the Bornite product release went live, the Regulus release went live, the Mimosa release went live and the Spartan Council was announced.
yAcademy Formally Proposed
Academy is a security wing tasked with auditing Yearn’s contracts, attracting and retaining top talent, and eventually generating revenue by expanding its auditing services to the ecosystem at large.
Aave V2 Now Available on Public Testnet
You can now test Aave V2 without spending real assets on the testnet client here – read the full post for instructions on how to get started.
Introducing Govbase
Govbase is a database of projects and tools in online governance. It is intended for developers and researchers.
mStable Protocol’s 3 Month Roadmap Update
Core protocol improvements proposed include mStable’s new AMM, mBTC, MTA tokenomics & an ~80% reduction in gas costs platform-wide.
Cryptowatch Adds Uniswap Markets
You can now use the Cryptowatch desktop app to monitor Uniswap markets on the dashboard.
LiquidStake Launched
LiquidStake will allow ETH stakers to take out USDC stablecoin loan against their staked assets while earning staking rewards from the eth2 network.
Axie Infinity October Development Update
AXS launched, new highs for monthly growth across all metrics, scaling updates and more.
Zerion Updates
Zerion now calculates profit & loss for all tokens, LP shares and vaults including network fees and daily returns.
UNION Raises $3.9 Million
UNION, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol building risk management tools, has raised $3.9 million in fresh funding.
The round was backed by Alameda Research, Solidity Ventures, 3Commas, and Black Edge Capital, among others. With fresh capital in hand, UNION looks to launch its protocol in the coming months.
dHEDGE Open Call for Managers
The dHEDGE DAO currently plans to invest up to 500,000 sUSD in pools managed on dHEDGE. This week, the team put out an open call for managers to apply to the DAO for an investment. Each pool can receive between 10,000 and 100,000 sUSD in investment from the DAO.
Celer State Guardian Network Launches on Mainnet
Phase One of the Celer State Guardian Network (SGN) mainnet is now up and running. SGN is the last piece of Celer Network’s coherent layer-2 scaling platform.
Metric DEX Update
Metric DEX shipped a new version which allows you to trade any 2 tokens wallet-to-wallet using a 0x relayer network.
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
Podcasts
Podcasts
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Interview with a Spartan – Uncommon Core
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Circles – Creating Universal Basic Income Economies for Everyone – Epicenter
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LiquidStake – Andrew Keys & James Slazas | Meet the Nation – Bankless
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Cooper Turley, Strategy Lead at Audius on Building a Decentralized Soundcloud using Token incentives – Cryptotesters
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Interview with DeFi Dad – The Crypto News Podcast
Misc
Meme of the Week
Looking for Work?
Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:
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Community Manager – UMA
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Inbound Marketing Lead – Colony
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Product Manager, Chainlink Core – Chainlink
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+1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!
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