Block by Block Weekly Newsletter #35

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Anthony Sassano

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Block by Block

7 min readNov 4, 2018

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🎉 DevCon 4 and the 10 Year Anniversary of the Bitcoin Whitepaper

The official Ethereum developers conference, DevCon, was held in Prague this week with an estimated 3000 people attending the conference and a further 2000 people attending community-sponsored events around Prague. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to the conference but I kept my eyes glued to Twitter and spoke to many people who did attend and the general sentiment is that it was one of, if not the best, crypto conferences they have ever attended. The Ethereum community is as vibrant as ever!

The crypto community also celebrated the 10th anniversary of the original Bitcoin whitepaper this week, which was released to the world on Friday, Oct 31, 2008, at exactly 14:10:00 EDT. Head here for 10 interesting facts about the whitepaper.

News of the Week

🤔 Blockchains LLC Finally Reveal What They’re Building

For those unfamiliar with Blockchains LLC, it made news earlier this year when it purchased 60,000+ acres of the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) in northern Nevada, home to the Tesla Gigafactory.

This week, the companies CEO Jeffrey Berns, announced that the land will be used to build a smart city powered by the Ethereum blockchain. He plans for the city to have all the trappings of a functioning community, including homes and apartments, markets, schools, and even banks.

Berns imagines the city to work on four technologies: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and 3D printing, all integrated with blockchain technology. And he pointed to the company becoming an incubator for pilots in areas such as clean water and energy.

It’s an ambitious project but Jeffrey is funding it entirely out of his own pocket and, best of all, he’s not doing an ICO or introducing an arbitrary token!

🏦 Tether Announces New Banking Relationship

Tether Limited, the company issuing USDT stablecoin, confirmed The Block’s earlier reports that it has established a banking relationship with Deltec Bank & Trust Limited headquartered in The Bahamas.

Tether also uploaded a letter from Deltec Bank dated November 1, 2018, which includes an attestation that on October 31, 2018, Tether’s portfolio cash value was $1,831,322,828. The letter also discloses that it is “provided without any liability” and “is solely based on the information currently in our possession.”

Although this seems like positive news for the controversial cryptocurrency, Lawson Baker wrote a long tweet thread on why the attestation is most likely rubbish.

💰 Coinbase Announces Series E Financing Round

Coinbase announced this week that it will add an additional $300 million of investment at a valuation of over $8 billion to accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets. The Series E equity round is led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Y Combinator Continuity, Wellington Management, Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain and others.

Coinbase plans to use this financing to accelerate their global expansion, offer more crypto assets on the platform, support more crypto-utility apps and focus on bringing institutions into crypto.

☄️ ConsenSys Acquires An Asteroid Mining Company

ConsenSys, a Brooklyn based firm that specialized in all things Ethereum, announced that they have acquired the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources. Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys, promised to offer up more information in the coming months.

In the meantime, Planetary Resources CEO Chris Lewicki (formerly of NASA JPL) and General Counsel Brian Israel will both be joining ConsenSys. Here’s what Lewicki had to say about the matter, “I am proud of our team’s extraordinary accomplishments, grateful to our visionary supporters, and delighted to join ConsenSys in building atop our work to expand humanity’s economic sphere of influence into the Solar System.”

🏛️ Morgan Stanley Report Says Crypto Now An Institutional Asset Class

Institutional investors are increasingly getting involved in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — while the number of retail investors in the space is staying stagnant — according to a new report by Morgan Stanley.

In an update to “Bitcoin Decrypted: A Brief Teach-In and Implications,” the global banking giant’s research division delved into the last six months of bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, and highlighted certain trends it noticed.

Perhaps most notably, the report emphasized its writers’ view of the market’s “rapidly morphing thesis,” which began by defining bitcoin as “digital cash” and noting that investors had full confidence in it, to a solution for issues in the financial system, to a new payment system to ultimately a new institutional investment class.

The report did cite three issues clients had with investing in the cryptocurrency space: regulatory uncertainty, a lack of regulated custodian solutions and a current lack of large financial institutions in the space.

Head to The Block for a complete breakdown of the report.

💸 Dapper Labs Secure $15M in Funding

Dapper Labs, the company behind popular blockchain-based game CryptoKitties, announced this week that they have raised $15 million in funding from the likes of Google Ventures, SamsungNEXT and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

With $27 million in new funding so far this year, all signs point to Dapper Labs being on the cusp of a new release.

The team declined to give any details about what’s to come, but they did say something should come in the next weeks — not months. To that end, the company has put up a teaser page on its website, and one of their engineers shared it in the stream of tweets surrounding Devcon.

Project Updates

StarkWare Closes $30M Funding Round

StarkWare recently closed a $30M equity round, led by Paradigm. Other new investors include Intel Capital, Sequoia, Atomico, DCVC, Wing, Consensys, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Collaborative Fund, Scalar Capital and Semantic Ventures.

MetaMask Recap and Mobile Announcement

A recap of MetaMask’s development over the past year and their plans for the future — along with details on the newly announced MetaMask Mobile!

Various Loom Network Updates

Loom Network have announced Custom Game Modes for Zombie Battleground and launched CryptoZombies Season 2.

Hoard Creates First OMG Network App

Hoard created a simple video game with True Ownership, called Plasma Dog. The app was developed with the latest OMG Network integration library and deployed to OmiseGO’s internal testnet

New MakerDAO CDP Portal

The CDP Portal is the new dapp where you can interact with the permissionless smart contracts constituting the Dai Credit System, such as opening and managing your CDPs, similar to that of dai.makerdao.com but with a focus on user experience.

New Ethereum Client Announced

POA Network, Compound, and ConsenSys announce collaboration on Ethereum client written in Elixir.

Uniswap Exchange Launched

Uniswap exchange is a protocol for the automated exchange of ERC20 tokens on Ethereum.

The Stablecoin Index Gets a Revamp

Myles Sniders Stablecoin Index website got a fresh coat of paint with new features including more listed coins, more data and a cleaner interface!

Aion Network Dashboard v2.0 Released

The new dashboard features a new contracts page, tokens page, new graphical analytics and much more.

Parity to Build Zcash Node Software

Parity Technologies, known for developing the Parity Ethereum client and the Polkadot cryptonetwork, announced its plans to build node software for the popular privacy-focused cryptocurrency, Zcash.

Introducing Elph: Highly Scalable Blockchain Infrastructure

Elph is a decentralized network of scalable, highly secure Plasma sidechains (Plasma Chains) that achieve high transaction throughput on top of Ethereum. This week, the team launched Elph on the testnet.

Harbor Teams Up With BitGo

Harbor offers a platform for firms and other entities to issue tokenized securities as a way to raise capital. This week, Harbor announced it was partnering with the crypto custodian BitGo.

Blockchain.com Adds Ethereum Explorer

Blockchain.com has added an Ethereum block explorer to their website which allows users to view top network stats, watch real-time incoming transactions, search for blocks, addresses, or transactions, and more.

Aragon 0.6 Live on Mainnet

Using Aragon 0.6, named Alba, you can now create Aragon organizations on the Ethereum Mainnet!

State of the OMG Ecosystem

The OmiseGO team released a lengthy update detailing all the developments that have happened over the last few months.

BAT Launches on Coinbase Pro

Basic Attention Token (BAT) is the cryptocurrency that powers the Brave browsers in-built blockchain-based digital advertising platform. This week, Coinbase announced that it would be adding BAT to its Pro trading platform.

Project Spotlight

Elph — Highly Scalable Blockchain Infrastructure

Elph is a decentralized network of scalable Plasma sidechains that achieves high transaction throughput on top of Ethereum. Backed by the security of Ethereum via Plasma, all transactions first occur on Elph’s network, are periodically consolidated into batches, and then recorded as a single transaction on Ethereum. This allows for hundreds of thousands of transactions to be recorded in a single block confirmation.

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts

Videos

Misc

Website Updates

New research added to the site

Ethereum Casper V2: Beacon Chain & Sharding Explained Simply

New resources added to the site

Feedback

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.