Block by Block Weekly Newsletter #13

Get the newsletter in your inbox each week — click here to subscribe!

Anthony Sassano

Follow

Published in

Block by Block

7 min readMay 27, 2018

--

News of the Week

Coinbase Acquires Paradex and Rebrands GDAX

Coinbase isn’t sitting by idly while decentralized exchanges threaten its business model — they tackled it head-on this week by purchasing the 0x protocol-based Paradex. On top of this, they also announced that their current trading platform GDAX will be renamed to Coinbase Pro.

Paradex will be re-imagined as an “OTC bulletin board” used by Coinbase to offer hundreds of Ethereum-based (ERC20) tokens for trade while users will have total control over their funds.

Coinbase plans to re-launch Paradex for international customers first and then open it up to U.S. customers once they implement “changes for compliance purposes”.

Verge, Bitcoin Gold and MonaCoin Hit With Mining Attacks

The attacks were carried out on these cryptos because of their low hashpower which basically means it’s relatively cheap (compared to larger blockchains) to attack them and reap the rewards. Attackers were able to steal $18.6M worth of BTG through a double spend attack, $1.4M of XVG through hijacking the network to mine blocks in very quick succession and over-writing the MonaCoin blockchain through the use of “selfish (secret) mining” (basically when the secret miner makes their longer chain public, it invalidates any and all of the blocks discovered by other miners during the time the secret chain was hidden).

The verge attack was a bit more complex than a simple 51% attack because of the fact that Verge uses five different mining algorithms which, turns out, were easily game-able. For further explanation on the Verge hack, read this excellent piece.

U.S. Launches Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

Most people are aware of the crazy amount of price manipulation that goes on in the crypto markets. Now, the U.S. justice department, working with the CFTC, are investigating manipulative exchange practices such as spoofing (putting up fake orders) and wash trading (trading with yourself). The investigation is still in its early stages but since there has historically been very little regulatory monitoring of crypto markets, we can expect the justice department to dig up a whole lot of skeletons.

$152 Million Lawsuit Filed Against Augur

Augur, the blockchain-based prediction market, has found itself embroiled in massive $152 million lawsuit this week. Matthew Liston, self-proclaimed former co-founder and CEO of Augur, has taken four Augur associates to court alleging that they committed fraud, breach of contract and trade theft in connection with conflicts that arose out of Liston’s termination. The lawsuit also states that the four associates conducted a hostile takeover that left Matt with nothing.

Click the heading to real the full article (it contains a lot more details).

Six Japanese Public Companies to Launch Crypto Exchanges

The companies include Money Forward, Drecom, Yamane Medical Corporation, Adways, Avex and Daiwa Securities Group. These 6 companies are among more than 100 Japanese companies who are interested in entering the cryptocurrency space in some way.

Coincheck to Delist Privacy Coins

Coincheck, the troubled exchange that suffered a loss of $530 million worth of XEM in a recent hack, will be delisting Monero, Zcash and Dash from its trading platform. The exchange cites difficulty of compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations as the main reason for the delistings.

Regulators Announce Operation Cryptosweep

As many as 70 investigations have been opened in a sweep by regulators from the United States and Canada. They are targeting unregistered securities offerings (ICOs) among other crypto schemes promising “lucrative returns” to investors.

Marshall Islands to Issue Own Cryptocurrency

The new cryptocurrency will be called SOV and has been approved by the countries parliament for use as legal tender. It will be issued to the public through an initial coin offering with a cap of 24 million tokens on the supply.

Project Updates

Truebit Virtual Machine Spec Published

Published to Github by Truebits Sina Habibian, the spec outlines what the Truebit VM is and how it will work.

ZeppelinOS Launched on Mainnet

Click the heading for a full breakdown of what ZeppelinOS is, how it will help people developing on Ethereum and the teams plans for the future.

Cosmos Validator Economics Blog Post

Chjango Unchained from Cosmos breaks down the economic design of the Cosmos Project in an easy to understand language — highly recommend reading the full piece!

0x, Dharma and imToken Join WalletConnect

WalletConnect is a standard for establishing a link between web-based dapps and mobile wallets. This week, Richard Burton from Balance.io announced that 0x, Dharma and mobile wallet imToken have joined the WalletConnect initiative.

TruStory Raises $3M in Seed Found

TruStory is a platform for users to discover and validate claims that people make online, whether in a blog post, whitepaper, website, or social media post. Founder Preethi Kasireddy announced that the project had raised $3M in seed funding from leading venture firms such as Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital and a bunch of angel investors.

Loom Network Announces ZombieChain

ZombieChain is an EOS-like DPoS sidechain that is intended to help Ethereum dApps scale (while still maintaining the security of the main Ethereum blockchain). Developers will be able to run their dApps on ZombieChain for a fixed monthly fee.

Project Pangea Re-brands to Meridio

Meridio bills itself as ‘the new standard for shared ownership of physical assets’. The project aims to allow people to invest in shares of individual properties on the blockchain.

Dharma Protocol Beta Live on Ethereum Mainnet

Dharma is a generic, permissionless protocol for issuing, underwriting, and administering debt instruments as cryptographic tokens.

With the mainnet launch of Dharma, users are able to borrow and lend in over 50 different ERC20 tokens, build a relayer or underwriter, build their own customized debt agreements and build credit derivatives or crowdfund debt agreements. For more detail, click the heading to read the announcement post!

Aragon Developer Portal Released

Head on over to https://hack.aragon.org/ and browse all the tools and documentation that the team has put together to make it easier than ever to build on Aragon.

Chinese Mobile Game Platform Integrates with Loom Network

Cocos, one of the biggest and most widely used game engines in Asia, has announced plans to integrate with Loom Network dAppChains to enable the deployment of scalable blockchain games.

Ethfinex Performance Report — Month 3

Highlights include active user growth of 56.8% and a total trading volume of $3.3 billion USD (up 44%).

Project Spotlight

Amberdata — Blockchain Analytics and Monitoring

Amberdata allows live monitoring of blockchains (currently Ethereum) and produces rich metrics and analytics along with dashboards and reporting features.

Shrimpy — Easy Crypto Portfolio Management

Shrimpy makes diversifying a cryptocurrency portfolio easy for everyone. Simply select the percentage of each coin you would like to hold and Shrimpy will automatically buy and sell your currencies to maintain those balances.

NoteChain — Write Notes on the Blockchain

NoteChain allows you to write and read notes utilizing the Ethereum blockchain.

Crypto Drama & Controversy

Ethereum-blockchain Size Debate

StopAndDecrypt published a blog post during the week that argues Ethereums blockchain size (which StopAndDecrypt claims has exceeded 1TB) is an issue for Ethereum. This post stirred up the hive in the community and led to many discussions on reddit and twitter (too many to link to).

Thankfully, Gustav Simonsson followed up on this piece by publishing a rebuttal that breaks down what StopAndDecrypt got wrong in his analysis. The rebuttal takes many points from the wider discussions that happened in the community during the week and formalizes them.

It’s worth reading both posts and coming to your own conclusion!

It’s also worth noting that StopAndDecrypt is mostly a Bitcoin fan (just look at his twitter for proof) and is definitely biased in this case. Gustav is a former Ethereum Core Dev and is currently working on an Ethereum-based project (so he may be biased too — as he explains in his post).

Crypto Conference Gets Ugly

At a conference in Taiwan, Craig Wright (the man who proclaimed himself as Satoshi) and Jack Liao got into a bit of a spat. Watch the video to see the full meltdown.

South Carolina Sanctions Shipchain

Shipchain, the blockchain logistics company, was hit with a cease-and-desist order this week which claims the company violated the state’s securities statues. You can read the official statement from Shipchain here.

Awesome Tweets

Random Bits

Personal Updates

Website Updates

New research added to the site:

New resources added to the site:

Feedback

You made it! Thanks for reading. I’d love to get your feedback so please send an email to info@blockbyblock.io and I’ll be sure to get back to you! :)

Disclaimer: None of the information outlined in this piece should be taken as investment advice. Please click here for more information.