😎 EthHub Weekly is Now on Substack
Hey everyone! Just letting you know that the EthHub Weekly Newsletter is now being delivered through Substack. This is a really popular email delivery service that many in the crypto ecosystem use. The newsletter also looks a little different but don’t be scared — the content remains exactly the same!
This will also be the last week that the EthHub Weekly is posted to our Medium page as Substack provides a nice archive for people to browse through.
Please whitelist the ethhub@substack.com email address to ensure the newsletter doesn’t get filtered into your spam/junk folders.
- Anthony
News of the Week
🤖 Cryptopia Goes Offline Citing Hack
New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia has gone offline citing a major hack. The exchange announced the news on Twitter this week, stating that it “suffered a security breach which resulted in significant losses.”
No information has yet been provided on the value of the losses, the tokens and currencies affected or any measures to refund users.
Meanwhile, tweets from Whale Alert on Saturday indicated that 19,391 ether (ETH) tokens worth nearly $2.44 million and around 48 million centrality (CENNZ) tokens worth about $1.18 million were transferred from Cryptopia to unknown wallets on Jan. 13. It is not currently clear if those funds were moved by the hacker or by the exchange.
🤯 Crypto Gaming Startup Exits Stealth Mode
Crypto gaming investment firm Planet Digital Partners officially launched this week, seeking $38 million in funding through a Security Token Offering, or STO. They’re akin to stocks managed using blockchain, but offering investors much more of a known quantity than Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), which don’t come with any legal claim on a company or its revenues.
Buyers of the Planet Digital STO, by contrast, will get a significant share of revenue generated by the company. And at least some of those games will use blockchain tech, which founder and CEO Steve Grossman says his team has been examining for more than a year.
Planet Digital’s Board of Directors will include Kelly Sumner, founding partner and former CEO of Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive, and former CEO of RedOctane, which published the smash hit Guitar Hero. Chris Deering, former president of Sony PlayStation’s European division, is attached as an advisor.
👊 Ethereum Co-Founder Joe Lubin Joins Board of ErisX
Crypto trading startup ErisX is expanding its board of directors as it prepares to launch spot and derivatives markets for digital assets, including bitcoin and eventually ether.
The company announced Thursday that Joseph Lubin, founder of the Ethereum development studio ConsenSys, and Cris Conde, a technology entrepreneur, had joined the board. They will serve alongside DRW CEO Don Wilson, Valor Equity Partners managing partner Antonio Gracias and ErisX CEO Thomas Chippas.
BitMEX, one of the most active trading platforms for bitcoin, is being squeezed out of North American crypto markets, a recent report says.
The exchange platform, which facilitates trading for futures contracts tied to bitcoin, has been closing accounts out of the Unites States and Canada’s Quebec region, according to a report by South China Morning Post. “BitMEX’s move to bar Quebec traders comes after the province’s financial regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), sent a letter to the exchange in early 2018 asking it to close all accounts linked to Quebecois, saying the exchange was not authorised to provide trading services,” the report said. BitMEX is the largest marketplace for bitcoin, according to data provided by CoinMarketCap.
Binance’s cryptocurrency exchange platform has expanded into the European market with its entry into the Island of Jersey, a self-governing dependency of Great Britain. Binance Jersey will allow trading of popular cryptocurrencies bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) against the euro (EUR) and the British pound (GBP).
The exchange will launch with four trading pairs, including BTC/GBP, ETH/GBP, BTC/EUR and ETH/EUR.
👏 Bakkt Makes Its First Acquisition
Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler announced Monday that the New York Stock Exchange–backed startup was acquiring “certain assets” belonging to Rosenthal Collins Group (RCG), an independent futures commission merchant.
The acquisition will help Bakkt improve its risk management and treasury operations and that the deal will also help improve Bakkt’s anti-money laundering/know-your-customer operations.
The transaction is expected to be finalized next month.
Project Updates
Ethereum Constantinople Upgrade Delayed
The Ethereum Core Developers and the Ethereum Security Community were made aware of Constantinople-related issues identified by ChainSecurity on January 15, 2019.
Out of an abundance of caution, key stakeholders around the Ethereum community determined that the best course of action was to delay the planned Constantinople fork that would have occurred at block 7,080,000 on January 16, 2019.
A new hard fork date of February 27th at block number 7,280,000 has since been announced.
A big week for the 0x Project with 4(!) separate updates:
- Development Update #14
- 0x Roadmap (part 1): ZEIPs
- New Ethereum Dev Tools from 0x
- The 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program’s History & Future
What’s New in Eth2–18 January 2019
Ben Edgingtons weekly update on all the developments happening with Ethereum 2.0.
Parity Fether connects to Ethereum in a decentralised manner, fetching data from Ethereum nodes rather than forcing users to trust a centralised node or service.
Ren — The Evolution of a Protocol
Taiyang Zhang from Republic Protocol introduces the broader vision for Ren which is a complete privacy stack built for the digital era of finance, providing a modular architecture designed to suit the privacy needs of any financial application, be it centralized or decentralized.
ChainSafe Systems’ bi-weekly update on the development of their JavaScript/TypeScript ETH2.0 client, Lodestar.
BoxSwap Enters 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program
BoxSwap is a simple way to trade digital assets peer-to-peer, designed primarily to remove counter-party risk. This week, the BoxSwap project entered the 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program.
New Initiative to Simplify Crypto-Compliance
The Brooklyn Project and TruSet, with support from AirSwap, Gnosis, and Kyber, have launched a two-week initiative ending on January 24th to evaluate making crypto-compliance easier and better.
On January 31, 2019 the MakerDAO team are going to take down the OasisDEX and Oasis.Direct front ends to completely rebuild the solutions based on a new strategic direction.
0x Tracker Gets a Fresh New Look
The whole site has been given a makeover with special attention given to the homepage, news & updates, and mobile views.
Lighthouse Eth2.0 Client Updates
Paul Hauner from Sigma Prime details all of the teams updates for Lighthouse in this 10-part tweet thread.
Status Desktop Released in Alpha
Status’ desktop client is available for download by clicking here. It is alpha software so it may contain vulnerabilities.
Project Spotlight
Haven is a new app that enables you to shop, chat, and send cryptocurrencies privately.
Unlike mainstream apps, privacy is at the core of everything Haven offers. When you use Haven, your data truly belongs to you. It’s encrypted and stored directly on your mobile device.
On-Chain Activity
- Two large CDPs withdrew their first $DAI since December 9th and 10th (CDP 1275 and CDP 4987).
- USDCs total circulating supply hit $372mil on the 13/01 (over 60% increase in just 1 month).
- Veil launched onto mainnet this week and has a fancy explorer of Augurs open interest over time.
- Rich from MakerDAO can tell when xDai Burner Wallet developer Austin Griffith is drinking or working based on his on-chain activity.
- DDEX officially forked off of the 0x Protocol on December 19th and since then the amount of filled orders on the 0x Protocol has fallen off a cliff.
Interesting Tweets
Ecosystem Bits
Blog Posts
- Exploring Ethereum 2.0 Design Goals
- The Case for Ethereum Scalability
- A Guide to Augur Market Economics
- The State of Blockchain Regulation, Policy, and Compliance in 2019
- The Moloch DAO: Collapsing The Firm
- Lender of First Resort (recommended read)
- Why 2019 Will Be The Year Of The DAO
- The Year in Ethereum (recommended read)
- Decentralized Oracles: A Comprehensive Overview
- Mapping Out Sybil Resistance Mechanisms
- What to Expect When ETH’s Expecting (highly recommended read)
- Long Augur
- Fundamentals of Proof of Work
- Unpacking Bitcoin’s Assurances
Podcasts
- Settle: The Platform for Open Finance with Scott Lewis — Into the Ether
