Ethereum biweekly vol.47: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, development tools and research articles

Published in

Paradigm

32 min readJul 7, 2020

23rd June — 7th July. EIP-1559 on fire, Altona multiclient testnet launched, 0x releases Matcha, Gnosis prediction markets are live, Skale Network is live, Augur v2 will launch on July 28th, and much more!

Greetings, Ethereans! It is time for our biweekly summary of all things from the Ethereum ecosystem!
The biggest event from these two weeks was the launch of Altona multiclient testnet about a week ago on Monday, June 29th, with Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysmatic and Teku clients stable. Read biweekly update from the Prysmatic Labs team discussing the launch, the usual development updates, upcoming work and more. Moreover, Afri put together a report detailing how three Eth2 clients handled working together on the Witti multi-client testnet. Take a minute to check it out!
These weeks, we had All Core Dev and EIP-1559 Implementers calls. Hardly surprising, EIP-1559, one of the most highly anticipated upgrades for the Ethereum network which has been talked about for quite a while, was on fire these days.
It was a pretty significant two weeks for the ecosystem too. A lot has happened! Matcha, a simple decentralized crypto exchange that pulls together liquidity from various on-chain liquidity pools (DEXs, AMMs) to fetch the best price for users, is now live. Omen, a decentralization prediction market platform launched, maintained, and governed by the DXdao. The DXdao built Omen on an open framework developed by Gnosis for prediction markets. Augur v2 will be launched on the Ethereum mainnet on July 28th, 2020 and current REP holders will need to manually migrate their v1 REP tokens to v2. After over 2 and a half years of work, the SKALE network, smart contracts and an initial set of nodes are up and running. It’s now easier to host on IPFS the latest Uniswap frontend. MakerDAO is exploring Peg Stabilization Modules, ie stablecoin to stablecoin trading. Synthetix launches binary options You can now visit xmoon.exchange to bridge ETH to DAI to xDAI to xMOONs to Reddit MOONs and back. Compound changes its COMP token distribution model. Tornado Fund, a DAO to invest in Tornado Cash and help it develop into the first, fully decentralized privacy-preserving technology for Ethereum, announced. Nexus Mutual launched pooled staking. Katalyst and KyberDAO will go live on today, on July 7th. The Golem team announced the Community Incentives Program (CIP). The Melon terminal has just been born. MetaMask Version 8 announced. Staking is now live on Matic Network. Loom Network published a 2020–2021 roadmap. And much more!
Have a great week everyone! More to follow!

Development

“The technical side of Ethereum’s efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise”
- Vitalik Buterin

GitHub metrics:

Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):

Protocol updates

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #90 [2020–06–26]

Tim Beiko’s notes: lots of discussion of needing more client diversity rather than more features, as well as sharing the testing load and simplification of the protocol.

Nethermind v1.8.60 memory usage during sync reduced 70%

Ethereum without block limits.

Eth2.0 Call #42 [2020/6/25]

Notes from Ben and William Schwab.

Danny Ryan’s quick update — deposit contract rewritten in Solidity by Axic, formally verified by Runtime Verification.

Early benchmarking of Eth2 clients — Lighthouse with the early lead.

Altona multiclient testnet launched almost a week ago with Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysmatic and Teku clients stable. One more testnet after Altona until launch.

Step by step guide to run an Altona validator on Raspberry Pi4B 8 GB.

Eth 2.0 Dev Update #53 — Altona Testnet Launched: Biweekly update from the PryLabs team discussing the recent Altono multiclient testnet launch, the usual development updates, upcoming work and more.

Weak subjectivity in Eth2.

Eth2 Witti Testnet Metrics Report Released: Afri put together a report detailing how 3 eth2 clients (Prysm, Lighthouse and Teku) handled working together on the Witti multi-client testnet.

What’s New in Eth2–27 June 2020: Phase 0 updates, recaps on the current active and pending testnets, research updates and more in this weeks eth2 update.

Bison Trails Announces Support for Eth2: Bison Trails will be offering a suite of products to interact with the Beacon Chain and enable network participants to easily add validators and scale their infrastructure automatically.

Development tools

Gelato automation protocol is live on mainnet, an IFTTT-like way to automate Eth contract execution

Hack on eth2+libp2p at HackFS

Debugging your transaction with Tenderly

A simple ABI decoder

Build Ethereum apps on Python with EthVigil SDK

Vyper v0.2 — breaking changes release

State machines in Solidity

Class features provided by Solidity

1inch writeup of Balancer deflationary’s token issue which BalancerLabs chose to cover for affected users

Sourcify FAQ decentralized opensource verification with NatSpec

OpenZeppelin Contracts v3.1

Need free access to an archive node?

Flash mintable asset backed tokens

Debugging verified external contracts with Truffle

Fast event log searches on your own node with Flume

Solidity library to use Uniswapv2 oracle with storage proofs

Comparing queue routines in C and Solidity

Shadowing Solidity storage variables in memory

Ethereum’s merkle trees javascript tutorial

How to build a decentralized auction

Samczsun finds Atomic Loans vulnerabilities, loans essentially disabled until v2

Exploring Solidity’s model checker

Governance and new standards proposals

EIP-1559 Implementers’ Call #3

EIP-1559 Call #3 Takeaways: Notes from the 3rd implementers call for the popular EIP-1559 Ethereum upgrade are now available.

Barnabé Monnot’s 1559 and escalator analysis.

Hasu and Georgios Konstantopoulos analyze EIP2593’s escalator algo to change the fee market, in conjunction with EIP1559. EIP2593 author Dan Finlay’s response:

EIP2751: Disable SELFDESTRUCT opcode

ERC2746: Rules Engine Standard

ERC2767: Contract Ownership Governance

Democracy Earth is now a DAO explorer, starting with Moloch v1 and proof of personhood score

TornadoCash forming a Moloch DAO with OpenLaw

KyberDAO goes live today, on July 7

Jameson: who is a core dev?

Golem’s governance via preset preferences proposal

Follow the EIPs repo.

Ecosystem updates

Ethereum Cat Herders Update #24: 1559 Fee market change, Altona Eth2 multiclient testnet, performance and diversity goals for Ethereum, and more in this update.

Book of Swarm is published on Swarm, free and open-source

HOPR incentivized mixnet has incentivized testnets

Stablecoins v2: a framework for analyzing risk of DeFi’s foundations

Unilogin: pay transaction fees with tokens or app pays for users

Transaction fees on Ethereum in first half of 2020 (44m) exceed 2019 (34m):

Quadratic matching with MACI (anti-collusion) explainer

5 Contrarian Takes with DegenSpartan

A Guide to Yield Farming on Ethereum

DeFi “yield farming” — a new trend in Crypto by Citadel

Aquaponic Yield Farming

A Lesson in Pumpamentals

The State of Meta Transactions

Argent: Solving Dapps’ Dirty Secret

Tokenized Ownership is the Best Coordination Tool Since Equity

How to Think About Savings Rate in Crypto

Meditations on Gitcoin Grants and CLR matching

Projects updates

0x:

Say Hello to Matcha! The 0x team finally released Matcha into the world, a simple decentralized crypto exchange designed for everyone! After nearly 3 years of building the 0x protocol and enabling others to build great DeFi products, the team had a ton of new ideas for how they could make it easier for more people to access exciting new markets.

They believe that tokenization combined with global peer-to-peer markets will help to eliminate the geographic lottery and unlock latent human potential. That is why they set out to rethink the exchange experience and build the foundation to onboard the next wave of crypto traders.

What makes Matcha different?

First, you’ll notice that the homepage features token shortcuts and a search field. On other exchanges, navigating to markets requires clicking into two different dropdown menus to find the assets you’re looking for. With Matcha search, you can quickly type out whatever token or pair you’re looking for and immediately jump into that market to begin trading.

Eventually, there will be hundreds of assets with thousands of different pair combinations you can trade. So, the team wanted to make it as fast as possible for traders to find and navigate to whatever markets they’re looking for with fewer interactions, no matter where they are on Matcha.

Under the hood, Matcha splits trades across 0x Mesh, Kyber, Uniswap, Curve, Oasis, and their own proprietary liquidity sources to find the best prices for traders. As the team adds additional liquidity sources, Matcha will continue to improve to ensure traders are receiving the best prices the market can offer, which reduces time and effort spent price hunting.

On most exchanges, tokens aren’t given nearly enough prominence or the love they deserve. They are merely a list item hidden inside a dropdown menu. Traders are required to learn about and discover these assets on their own time. The 0x team believes a good exchange should make it easier for people to learn about the things they’re investing in. That’s why they’ve invested in building out asset pages which will serve as a destination for people to discover and learn about new tokens. They look forward to improving these alongside the various token projects and communities over time.

Most exchanges and DeFi products require you to be an expert going in. The team heard time and time again from people who use DEX’s regularly, that they can still sometimes be scary. Whether it’s losing money due to extreme slippage or fat fingering a trade. They want to make sure that you always feel smart and in control when you’re using Matcha.

The team wants everyone to feel comfortable and confident trading on Matcha. This is why they will continue to invest in education, new user onboarding and abstracting away the complexities of the blockchain wherever possible.

How to Trade on Matcha DEX Aggregator:

Aave:

June Update: $100M Milestone, Bug Bounty Boost, and Epic Events: June was an incredible month, and the team has celebrated the $100M market size milestone 5 months after launching on mainnet, record growth for the DeFi space.

Technical & Development Updates:

With the tremendous growth in Aave Protocol over the past 6 months, it is of the utmost importance for the protocol to remain as secure as possible. The team is extremely confident in the security of Aave Protocol, but they want to be sure the protocol meets the highest security standards. Therefore, the Aave team decided to up the reward for any critical bugs found to $250,000! This is the highest bounty ever for a DeFi protocol. Read more about the Bug Bounty update here and check out all the bounty criteria here.

Events & Community:

Aave was thrilled to be featured in SEA DeFi Week, which highlighted a different DeFi technology each day. Check out Stani’s intro to Aave here.

They were also at Mainnet by Messari, and at BlockDown2020 where Stani was on the panel “DeFi: What does the future hold?” with some of the industry’s top leaders.

The team is proud of all the hackers who hacked on Aave at the Gitcoin and HackMoney hackathons! Check out their blog posts for the rundown on the coolest hacks.

Aave co-hosted a Dev Meetup with Chainlink which dove into some of the winning HackMoney hacks. Find the full video here. The 3rd Community Call also highlighted some recent hackathon winners from the HackMoney, Metacartel Dragon Quest, and the NYBW Gitcoin hackathons — check out the video to learn all about YieldHero, MagicBet, DeFi777, and HodlFactory.

Moreover, the team had their first DeFi Debate on synthetic assets featuring the OG founders of Synthetix and UMA! The debate was moderated by Aave’s own Marc Zeller, and you do not want to miss out on this in-depth discussion!

June 8th was the anniversary of the first ever smart contract based loan on Ethereum with ETHLend! They’ve come a long way since then with a much sleeker UI/UX and more friendly user experience. Witness DeFi history here.

Don’t Miss Out On:

The new Aavewatch
Head of Support Pablo Candela’s talk on the Uniswap Market, Governance, and Tokenomics (its in Spanish!)
This AMA with CEO Stani Kulechov on the DApp List twitter
This DeFi event by Furucombo featuring Lilith Li, the newest member of the Aave team (in Chinese!)
This issue of Our Network
This Bankless AMA with Stani (you need to be a Bankless subscriber to read it!)
YieldHero makes it possible to redirect your Aave yield to support the Crypto for Black Lives gitcoin grant! Try it out here.

Aave has launched a Gnosis Safe app! Safe users can now deposit, earn, and borrow in the Aave Market, directly from their Safe:

Aragon:

ANT has joined the Messari Disclosures Registry: Aragon and Messari join forces in a step forward for ANT transparency.

New Aragon Connect developer docs are here:

Augur:

Augur v2 Launch & REP Migration: Augur v2 will launch on July 28, 2020.

Augur v2 introduces a new REP token called “REPv2”. Current REP holders will need to manually migrate their REPv1 to the new REPv2 token to participate in the Augur v2 reporting system.

Augur v2 reintroduces the concept of “Use It or Lose It”, meaning all REPv1 and REPv2 holders will need to participate in a network wide market fork, if one ever occurs. If you do not participate within the 60-day forking period, your REPv1 or REPv2 will be forever unable to participate in any of the forked and future universes of Augur. More information on “Use It or Lose It” forking can be found in the migration guide and Augur whitepaper.

No immediate action needs to be taken, however REPv1 holders will need to eventually migrate their REPv1 to REP v2 after Augur v2’s deployment. A migration tool will be provided within the Augur UI, and a full tutorial on doing so will be published.

Note: Forking is the crux of Augur’s security model. This is intended to be an extremely rare event, with no market in Augur v1 ever nearing the forking thresholds. Currently, triggering a fork would cost approximatley ~$9,100,000 USD (~550k REP @ $16.50), rendering the “losing” side of the forks REPv2 presumbably worthless.

Exchanges, dApps, DEXs, wallets, block explorers, service providers, and any other entities interacting with REP can find more information on how to handle the migration here.

Please read the Augur v2 Deployment & REP Migration FAQ for further details. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please get in touch via email or Discord, and follow @AugurProject for public communications.

Bancor:

Calculating Dynamic Reserve Weights in Bancor V2: A key part of Bancor V2 liquidity pools is the use of dynamic reserve weights.

Liquidity pools hold reserves (balances) of ERC20 tokens. The “weights” of a pool refer to the percentage exposure of each token in the pool.

Most liquidity pools today are deployed with fixed weights. In a pool that consists of two tokens and fixed 50/50 weights, each reserve maintains 50% of the pool’s total value. Liquidity pools can be deployed with even (50%/50%) or uneven (80%/20%) weights.

Bancor V2 introduces a new type of liquidity pool where weights update dynamically based on market conditions. If a token’s price rises on external markets, the token’s weight in the pool also rises, and vice versa.

These automated weight adjustments incentivize arbitrageurs to re-balance reserves and bring prices offered by the pool into alignment with external market prices. This allows for the pool to closely track external market prices while maintaining the value of staked balances in the pool.

The remainder of this post describes the process by which dynamic weights are calculated in Bancor V2. The team will soon releases open-source code for dynamic weighting as well as technical documentation.

Watch the full AMA with the Bancor & Chainlink teams:

MakerDAO has released a proposal to add Bancor Network Token (BNT) as one of the collateral assets that would generate the DAI stablecoin on its protocol.

Brave:

New data shows publisher revenue impact of cutting 3rd party trackers.

THEMIS: Towards a Decentralized Ad Platform with Reporting Integrity (Part 1). The Brave research team presented THEMIS, a novel privacy-by-design ad platform that requires zero trust from both users and advertisers. This decentralized protocol further improves upon the current BAT-based ad ecosystem.

Coinbase:

Coinbase Custody selected by 21Shares for Bitcoin ETP.

Compound (COMP) is now available on Coinbase Earn and Coinbase.

Compound:

Latest Governance Proposals, New Product Launches:

Governance Updates:

Four proposals have passed through Compound’s governance system since the public COMP distribution went live on June 15th. Most of the proposals are a reaction to the user behavior surrounding the initial mechanics of the COMP distribution, and seek to both ensure the safety of the protocol and its users and ensure fair distribution of governance rights. Below, we highlight each proposal, from oldest to newest, and the broader significance for users and stakeholders of the protocol.

Proposal 8: Increase USDT Reserve Factor from 0% to 10% (008)

Status: Executed June 22nd, 2020
Proposer: blck
Voting Results: 1,413,016 For and 15,001 Against
Summary: With the rapid growth of USDT volumes on Compound, this proposal was introduced so that the liquidation mechanism accumulates USDT reserves to defend against any possibility of undercollateralized borrows.

Proposal 9: Set reserve factor for cUSDT to 20.0% (009)

Status: Executed June 25th, 2020
Proposer: Dharma
Voting Results: 758,651 For and 311,570 Against
Summary: Taking blck’s 10% USDT reserve factor increase even further, Dharma made the case for bumping up USDT’s reserve factor yet again to 20% to disincentivize a new trend called yield-farming.

Proposal 10: Adjusting COMP distribution speed to match Ethereum network block time and increasing higher-risk assets Reserve Factor (010)

Status: Executed June 27th, 2020
Proposer: blck
Voting Results: 1,198,438 For and 189,177 Against
Summary: This proposal has 2 parts: reducing the speed of COMP distribution to match the 13.1 second Ethereum block time vs the expected 15 second block time; and increasing the reserve factor for illiquid assets like BAT, REP, and ZRX to 50%, in order to mitigate inorganic yield-farming.

Proposal 11: COMP Distribution Patch (011)

Status: Queued June 30th, 2020 (Executable July 2)
Proposer: Geoffrey Hayes
Voting Results: 771,804 For and 1 Against
Summary: This proposal from Compound Labs CTO Geoffrey Hayes removes interest rates as a factor in COMP distribution by adjusting the allocation formula from: totalBorrows * borrowingRatePerBlock * USD Value to: totalBorrows * USD Value, so that every $1 supplied/borrowed will accrue the same amount of COMP in each market.

Join the Compound governance discussion on Comradery, or delegate your COMP voting rights to the delegate of your choice. Leading delegates can be seen on the Delegate Leaderboard.

Product Launches:

The launch of COMP has spurred the development of new tools, integrations, and methods of accessing the protocol and participating in governance.

COMP:

17 exchanges so far have listed COMP with FTX and Poloniex also listing cUSDT so users can earn interest and COMP just by holding the asset. Alongside listing COMP on Pro and Consumer, Coinbase has created an educational series on COMP for their Earn product, where users can learn about the protocol and get rewarded with $9 of COMP.

Compound APIs:

For developers looking to build applications on top of Compound, Ankr and QuikNode have both recently released APIs for calling Compound’s smart contracts. These APIs enable anyone to supply, redeem, borrow, and repay using Web2 programming languages like JavaScript, instead of running an Ethereum Node and programming in Solidity.

DeFi Products:

Opyn and UMA have both released innovative financial instruments for COMP that allows COMP holders to hedge their exposure. Opyn has created a Protective COMP Put Option with a strike price of 150 USDC and Expiry date of July 3rd, 2020. The platform also offers the ability to earn premiums on USDC by selling these protective put options. UMA has launched yCOMP, which allows users to permissionlessly gain tokenized exposure to the price of COMP.

Permanent Interface:

A community member ported the Compound Dashboard to Arweave, which is a derivative blockchain that enables permanent on-chain data storage.

Decentraland:

Dharma:

A month ago, the Dharma team gave users the ability to buy ETH using their unlocked Dharma balance. Starting July, users can buy ETH instantly, directly from a debit card:

Dharma Submits Compound Prop 12 to Update cDAI Interest Rate Model: The Dharma team proposes Prop 12 to the Compound Protocol, improving the cDAI interest rate model.

The team plans to work on additional improvements in the coming weeks.

Specifically, theyhope to help deploy a single model that all/most cTokens can reference and that is directly configurable via governance rather than needing to deploy new contracts.

Dharma Launched StackingStreakSweepstakes:

Gitcoin:

Gitcoin Grants Round 6:

Gnosis:

Omen and the Next Generation of Prediction Markets: Omen prediction markets are live at Omen.eth and via direct IPFS link.

Omen is a decentralization maximalist prediction market platform launched, maintained, and governed by the DXdao. The DXdao built Omen on an open framework developed by Gnosis for prediction markets.

On Omen, anyone can create prediction markets on questions of their choice. When creating a market, you can customize its features, including:

Outcomes and initial probabilities;
Collateral token: markets can be denominated in an array of assets and stablecoins, including the OWL token designed by Gnosis for this use case;
Resolution date;
Category: markets can belong to any category, including but not limited to technology, cryptocurrency, and politics;
Arbitrator: markets can have a custom oracle.

Oracles are predefined data sources for bringing real-world information onto the blockchain and verifying a prediction market’s outcome. Whereas most prediction markets have a single platform-locked oracle system, Omen is oracle-agnostic, meaning technically you can specify the custom data source you’d like to use as an oracle. Omen v1 uses the decentralized tool Realit.io as an oracle with Kleros dispute resolution as the final arbitrator; in the future potential Omen oracles could include Chainlink, Aragon Court, and traditional legacy news outlets. Rather than being over-prescriptive, Omen is designed to be open and modular to allow different norms and best practices around prediction markets to arise organically within the broader ecosystem.

Omen’s design responds to a perceived flaw in early prediction markets predicated on lack of liquidity. Unlike other blockchain-based prediction markets that use traditional orderbooks resulting in high spreads due to insufficient liquidity, markets on Omen use an automated market maker to match trades and allow users to easily contribute to Uniswap-like liquidity pools. Enhanced liquidity means that a prediction market’s pricing can always reflect the latest expert opinion on its topic.

Omen is one of many platforms built on the conditional token framework. The conditional token framework essentially allows the creation of a new crypto asset class — called conditional tokens as you may have guessed — which enable higher-resolution information discovery for prediction markets. Since conditional tokens are ERC-1155 compliant and can be easily wrapped in the Ethereum standard ERC-20, outcome tokens created on Omen will soon be traded on external DEXs like Gnosis Protocol. This paves the way for prediction market assets to access a global liquidity pool and cross-platform interoperability, even among different prediction market providers such as Omen or Polymarket, both of which are built on the conditional token framework developed by Gnosis.

In addition to enhanced liquidity and interoperable tokens, another key to Omen’s innovation lies in its governance. Omen is the flagship product of the DXdao, which defines itself as a sovereign collective with open membership that develops, governs, and grows decentralized finance protocols and products. Composed of self-described decentralization maximalists, the DXdao mandates their applications have full stack decentralization on serverless hosting, application, and governance layers. With DAO-based governance, Omen preserves its tenets of decentralization and combats the “trust problem” of centralized prediction markets, whilst retaining the flexibility to upgrade for improvements to the platform over time.

How are prediction markets on Omen different from Augur?

For an overall comparison of Omen and Augur v2, you can check out the chart below:

Golem:

Introducing the Golem Community Incentives Program: The Golem team announced that they (the “Golem Factory GmbH”) are officially launching the Community Incentives Program (CIP). The primary objective of the CIP is to create an initiative that empowers individuals in a borderless manner, to further promote assistance between individuals in the Golem community.

Incentives Categories:

Content Creator of the Month: it can be a cool blog post, a Reddit thread (such as the Colony one), a video, memes, any Golem related content!
Tech Support: Helping other community members with technical issues they run into.
Super-user: Running and using Golem (hint: requestors are favoured, check out the Golem stats page).
Most Enthusiastic Community Member.
Task Force General: This person does it all, tech support, content creation, using/running a node, enthusiastic (extra points if you engage in Github).
Feedback Master: Give feedback that ends up included in improving Golem.
Telegram Moderator: Help the team with moderating and engaging with the Golem community on Telegram (https://t.me/GolemProject). Keep in mind, admins are added based on contributions to the Golem community and being consistently active.
UX Research Participant: taking part in the Golem interview study, user test sessions, a survey or any other research project (this category, however, is directed towards developers — and the DevRel will be conducting the reachout).

Rewards: The size of a reward is based on the below listed, non-binding guideline allocations:

Keep Network:

Kyber Network:

Katalyst and KyberDAO go live on 07.07.2020!

Kyber Ecosystem Report #16 — Katalyst Launch Special:

Compound (COMP) is now available on Kyber Network.

Loom Network:

Loom Network Roadmap 2020–2021: The Loom team published their roadmap for 2020–2021.

2020 Q3

The team aims to implement most of the core features of the next major version of the Loom protocol by the end of the year. To recap, this includes:

Upgraded consensus engine.
Upgraded EVM.
A WASM runtime to support performant and upgradable smart contracts to replace native Go smart contracts.
Transaction and storage fees.
Per-user transaction throttling and quotas that can be specified on a per-contract basis to allow dapp developers to control costs.

2020 Q4

Once the core protocol features are in place they’ll build out the document management platform that will handle document authentication, document storage, document sharing, and time-bound documents.

2021 Q1

The Extdev testnet will be upgraded to the new version of the Loom protocol and they’ll begin testing with the enterprise clients. Once any major issues found during the testing phase have been fixed and Extdev is deemed to be stable we’ll contract a third-party to do an audit of the protocol.

After the audit is complete the new protocol will be deployed to Basechain, this will require a few hours of downtime to migrate state and upgrade all the nodes in the network.

2021 Q2

The new version of the Loom protocol will be open sourced, and the team will begin on-boarding new enterprise partners.

They’ll make further announcements as major development milestones are reached. So far Thailand seems to have weathered the pandemic better than most countries, hopefully that continues to be the case as more businesses re-open, so the can avoid any further delays. In the next few articles they’ll explore some of the new features of the Loom protocol in more detail, starting with the per-user transaction throttling and quotas dapp developers will use to control costs.

Maker DAO:

Maker Governance Review: June 2020: The Maker Governance Review is a monthly recap of all Governance activity, from Governance Cycle progress and polling and voting history to blog posts focused on community decision-making.

Making Maker: June 2020: A recap of all things Maker for June 2020.

KNC and ZRX Approved by Maker Governance as Collateral Types in the Maker Protocol: As a result of an Executive Vote that ended last week, MKR holders have accepted KNC (Kyber Network) and ZRX (0x) as new collateral assets in the Maker Protocol. Both tokens can now be used to open Maker Vaults in order to generate Dai.

Executive Vote: Add Oracles, Lower the Base Rate, Raise WBTC & USDC Debt Ceilings and Risk Premiums: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol as outlined in these Polls.

Forum thread:

[Signal Request] USDC-A Stability Fee and Debt Ceiling adjustments

Therefore, voting for this Executive will:

Add multiple Oracle Feeds
Raise the USDC-A Stability Fee to 1% to 4%
Raise the USDC-A Debt Ceiling from 20 to 40 Million
Raise the WBTC-A Stability Fee from 1% to 2%
Raise the WBTC-A Debt Ceiling from 10 million to 20 million
Lower the Base Rate from 0.25% to 0% which, in conjunction with the Base Rate change, will set the following Stability Fees:
ETH-A: 0.0%
WBTC-A: 2%
BAT-A: 0.0%
KNC-A: 4%
ZRX-A: 4%
USDC-A: 4%
USDC-B: 50%
TUSD-A: 0%

The Executive Vote (FAQ) will continue until the number of votes surpass the total in favor of the previous Executive Vote. This is a continuous approval vote.

Governance Poll: Base Rate Adjustment, WBTC Debt Ceiling and Risk Premium: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents adjustments to the Base Rate, and WBTC Debt Ceiling.

Maker Foundation Offers a 25,000 Dai Prize to Winner(s) of Reddit/Ethereum Scaling Competition: The Maker Foundation offers a 25,000 Dai bounty to the winner of the Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation competition, The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off.

MakerDAO is exploring Peg Stabilization Modules, ie stablecoin to stablecoin trading.

Melon:

The Melon terminal has just been born:

Furthermore, the team announced that the RFQ system is now providing *much* better liquidity in BAT/ETH, KNC/ETH, LINK/ETH, OMG/ETH, REP/ETH, MKR/ETH and ZRX/ETH:

Melon x Token Terminal: Interview with Mona El Isa: In this blog series, the team interviews founders from the crypto space to learn more about them and the products they’re building. For the most recent interview, they sat down with Mona El Isa, the co-founder of Melon and Multichain Asset Managers Association (MAMA). Melon is a protocol for on-chain asset management. In this interview, they go through topics ranging from the team’s current product focus to future plans.

Melon’s project update from Mainnet 2020 is out:

MetaMask:

MetaMask Version 8 announced: Version 8 comes packed with features such as better privacy control, a slick new UI, more features for developers and much more.

Ocean Protocol:

Ocean Protocol decentralized data marketplace solutions for the automotive industry: Ocean Protocol is working with companies to build data marketplaces to unlock valuable private data for monetization.

OMG Network:

AMA #30 — Vansa & Kasima.

How Bitfinex overcomes Ethereum Congestion with the OMG Network.

Raiden Network:

New Raiden WebUI Released: Along with the release of Alderaan the Raiden team also wanted to give the WebUI a visual overhaul. This overhaul has now been finished and they announced the all-new Raiden WebUI. The WebUI is a graphical interface for the Raiden client that makes interacting with Raiden easy and intuitive. The Ethereum mainnet version of Raiden as well as the testnet versions are supported. It serves the purpose of making the barrier of entry low for new users interested in understanding and trying out Raiden. If you’re trying out Raiden for the first time, it is strongly recommended to give the new WebUI a try. Starting at version 1.1.0, Raiden comes with the new WebUI by default and can be downloaded here.

Moreover, the Raiden team announced that they’re giving a grant to Hub20 worth $45,000 in RDN. Check out the blogpost announcing the grant here, and check out the project here.

Raiden Weekly:

Set Protocol:

Set Labs — Set AMA Series.

Balancer Labs — Set Social Trader AMA Series.

How Techemy Capital Has Been Bridging CeFi With DeFi — Set Social Trader Spotlight.

Status:

Status v1.4 with Keycard integration and Android notifications.

Status Core Dev Call #33 — June 29, 2020: The team catches up on the topics ranging from Notifications on iOS, Stimbus, audio messages & much more.

“Nimbus on Android: Part 3/Validatoring”.

How to Connect Your Keycard to Your Status Account: Keycard provides hardware enforced security to your Status experience. Follow these simple steps to connect your Keycard to your Status account.

Storj:

Development Update 37 from Storj Labs.

Synthetix:

The Acrux release is now complete and binary options are now live on Synthetix.

The Aldebaran release: A summary of the Aldebaran release. The team deployed an upgrade to the Synthetix system that resolved an issue that was caused by a change made in the Acrux release earlier.. Thanks to SIP-66, gas costs for SNX transfers from non-staking wallets are reduced once more.

How binary options work: An explanation of the new binary options trading feature.

Optimize your sUSD yield with Idle: sUSD is now available for deposit on Idle. Idle is a yield optimization tool that automatically rebalances funds to guarantee exposure to the highest yield available while taking risk into account.

Uniswap:

Uniswap Interface + IPFS:

In an effort to continue decentralizing, the team has created a mechanism for the community to host the Uniswap Interface
The open-source Uniswap Interface built by the team and community is automatically deployed daily to IPFS
Community members can pin the IPFS hashes to ensure availability
The team uses IPNS + DNSLink to point /ipns/app.uniswap.org to the latest IPFS release
app.uniswap.org is now served exclusively from the latest IPFS release, however any IPFS gateway can be used directly
The URL uniswap.exchange now forwards to app.uniswap.org
The ENS contenthash for uniswap.eth now points to the latest IPFS release allowing the URL uniswap.eth.link to be used

Zilliqa:

Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — June 2020.

Other project’s updates:

Staking is now live on Matic Network:

Skale sidechains launches with POA and no transfers.

GridPlus Update: June 26, 2020: First Lattice1 units being delivered, GridPlus Energy customer accounts up 70% since the last GridPlus update, a new feature road-map and more in this months update.

ArchiveNode.io Launched: ArchiveNode.io is a public access Ethereum archive node that developers can use at no cost. It was created by Ethereum community members DeFi Dude, Chase Wright, Dan from PieDAO, Thomasz from Nethermind and Ken from the Ethereum Foundation

Opyn Raises $2.16mil: The fundraising round was led by Haseeb Qureshi and Tom Schmidt at Dragonfly Capital with participation from Version One Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, 1kx, A. Capital, DTC Capital, CoinFund and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Robert Leshner, Dylan Field, Linda Xie and more.

Introducing Recipes by HAL: HAL is a 1-click-setup IFTTT for Ethereum, featuring dApp-specific integrations with webhooks, Discord, Slack, Telegram, Twitter and emails. Recipes are a new, collaborative way to create and share your favorite triggers.

Token Terminal Introduces a New Metric: The new metric, Total Value Locked-to-Earnings, gives an estimate of the capital-efficiency of a protocol. TVL/E shows how much capital the supply-side of a protocol needs to lock up to generate X amount of dollars.

MCDEX Now Live: MCDEX is a decentralized exchange offering perpetual contracts with up to 10x leverage. It uses an on-chain AMM & off-chain order book hybrid to process transactions. ETH-PERP is now live — you can get started here.

Tornado Fund Announced: Tornado Fund is a DAO to invest in Tornado Cash and help it develop into the first, fully decentralized privacy-preserving technology for Ethereum.

Introducing xToken: xToken is a platform for simple, efficient staking and liquidity strategies. The xToken team are creating smart contracts that wrap complicated staking and liquidity strategies into single set-and-forget ERC20 tokens.

Introducing Web3Torrent: Web3Torrent is a browser based torrenting client that supports incentivized peer-to-peer filesharing using micropayments.

The Graph Raises $5M: This week, The Graph announced that they closed a $5M funding round from crypto funds including Framework, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, CoinIX, Tally Capital, with continued participation from Multicoin Capital and DTC Capital.

Introducing DerivaDEX: DerivaDEX is a decentralized exchange for derivative contracts built on top of Ethereum. It’s a community-owned exchange with a liquidity-mining token model that puts control directly in the hands of users.

Introducing Ronin: Axie Infinity’s Ethereum Sidechain: Ronin is an Ethereum-linked sidechain made specifically for the Axie Infinity game. Ronin will come with fast & seamless transactions, drastically reduced gas fees, a block explorer and much more.

SKALE Mainnet Now Live: After over 2 and a half years of work, the SKALE network, smart contracts and an initial set of nodes are up and running.

DeversiFi Community Update #05: A healthy update from the DeversiFi where they recap their v2 launch, showcase their KPI’s, and give insight into what their roadmap is for the next three months.

xMOON Exchange Now Live: You can now visit xmoon.exchange to bridge ETH to DAI to xDAI to xMOONs to reddit MOONs and back.

mStable’s Second MTA Reward Pool is Now Live: You can now earn MTA tokens by contributing to both the mUSD/USDC and mUSD/WETH pools on Balancer. mStable’s June development update was also published this week.

Nexus Mutual Launches Pooled Staking: This new system of pooled staking allows a deposit of NXM to be staked on multiple contracts simultaneously to amplify potential rewards and to improve the capital efficiency of staking materially.

Introducing Gelato Network: Gelato Network is a protocol that makes it easy to build automated dapps by sending IFTTT-like transactions on Ethereum.

Major Financial Clearinghouse Is Exploring Ethereum for Digital Asset Management: The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s new prototype leverages the Ethereum blockchain to streamline capital markets activity.

Introducing Debt Swap: Debt Swap from Instadapp allows users to easily switch their Compound stablecoin debt from USDT to DAI in a single click. Pay less interest and earn more COMP.

Balancer Pool Incident: An incident occurred on Balancer last week which allowed an attacker to drain funds from 2 pools that contained tokens with transfer fees (sometimes referred to as deflationary tokens). STA and STONK were the tokens in each pool. More info here.

Presenting: VeeDo: StarkWare’s STARK-based Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) service is now live on Mainnet.

PolyMarket prediction markets live on mainnet using USDC and Gnosis.

SportX v2.5 — noncustodial betting app on Eth adds tournaments and referrals.

HAL Recipes 1 click IFTTT for Ethereum.

Opinion and research articles

Architecture of a geth based eth1 engine inside of Eth2.

Secret shared validators in Eth2.

Igor Mandrigin explains the ReGenesis proposal for curbing state growth with transaction witnesses

Regenesis: a Cosmos-like reset proposal from Alexey Akhunov.

Sharding state with discovery and adaptive range filters.

Deanonymization using time sync.

Public single leader election with secret probabilistic backup.

Podcasts

The Ethereum Opportunity | Chris Burniske on Bankless.

COMP Growth Hacking DeFi | Dan Elitzer on Bankless.

DeFi vs Banks with Hasu on Bankless.

ETHGlobal HackMoney Finalists Walkthrough on Into the Ether.

Balancer: A Protocol for Programmable Liquidity on Into the Ether.

Nexus Mutual: The Decentralized Insurance for Ethereum on Epicenter.

Exploring Loopring with Matt Finestone on POV Crypto.

Money Lego: Techemy Capital launches investable DeFi portfolios on TokenSets on Crypto Conversations Podcast.

Videos

What is Yield Farming by DeFi Dad:

Yield Farming, DeFi, Risks & Opportunities with Kain Warwick of Synthetix:

Starkware Project Update — Mainnet 2020:

Finance

Information from Etherscan.io (July 7th, 2020):

USDC hit 1 billion in circulation on Eth.

A new Flippening tracker.

Common Stack’s trusted seed token.

$188 Million in ETH tied to PlusToken Ponzi Moves for First Time Since December: Nearly 790,000 ETH — worth roughly $188 million — held in a wallet connected to the PlusToken Ponzi scheme were on the move in a pair of transactions. Those two transactions, accounting for 789,533 ETH, can be viewed here and here. The last time these funds moved was on December 19. The transactions come two days after a significant quantity of EOS also held in a PlusToken wallet moved. In that instance, some $67 million in EOS — representing 26.3 million tokens — moved to a new address.

Roadmap

Vitaliks eth2 and beyond flow chart:

An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap.

To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.

Check out the original timeline for the Ethereum development stages and the intermediate hard forks here.

Eth2 — Serenity

Serenity is the last stage of Ethereum development. It will introduce Eth2, the new Ethereum blockchain that will finally have Casper, a new Ethereum Virtual Machine, and much more. The goal of Serenity is to improve the scalability, security, and programmability of Ethereum. Instead of 15 TPS on a single chain, Eth2 will process thousands to tens of thousands of transactions per second without compromising on decentralization.

The majority of developers foresee these main phases of Eth1’s evolution to Eth2:

Phase 0: Beacon Chain (Q1 2020)
Phase 1: Shard Chains (2021)
Phase 2: eWASM (New Ethereum Virtual Machine) (2021/early 2022)
Continued Improvement (2022)

Phase 0 — Beacon Chain Shipping in late Q2/early Q3 of 2020

On the beacon chain, we will finally see Casper. The Beacon Chain will be a separate blockchain from the main Ethereum blockchain. This new chain will have a PoS consensus algorithm, and it will run in parallel to the main PoW Ethereum blockchain. Initially, the blockchain will be created for simplicity and will not support smart contracts or accounts.

Phase 1 — Sharding Shipping in 2021

Sharding will be introduced on the Beacon chain, and it will have initially 100 shards. Validators will validate transactions from their own shard, and in the first phase, they won’t approve any smart contract, account or asset.

While sharding will bring more scalability, there are a few setbacks to take into account. Validators have a small pool of transactions to validate, which makes it easier for a 51% attack, as they only need 51% computing power (or stake) of the shard they are in, instead of the whole network. This technique can also lead to higher centralization, as each shard can be validated with a small group of validators.

It will be fascinating to see how this stage is implemented, as it still needs thorough testing to ensure all validators are randomly selected to avoid centralization and any risk attack.

Phase 2 — State Execution Shipping in late 2021/early 2022

During Phase 2, the foundational aspects of the previous Eth2 releases will come together and provide functionality for the updated network. A new operational mechanism called Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) will be launched instead of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. eWASM will work much faster.

One of the main issues with the current EVM is that it processes transactions sequentially. With the PoS and Sharding changes, there’s a need to process transactions in parallel, and the current EVM won’t be suitable for this.

The new EVM called stands for Ethereum WebAssembly, an open standard defining a portable binary code format for executable programs. This new architecture for the EVM will allow for much better performance and will make it possible to support smart contracts, accounts, states and much more on the new blockchain. The current status of the eWASM development is at the very early stages, as it is planned to be released in 2021. There’s still a lot of research to do around this phase.

Continued Improvement

Continued Improvement is the code name to encompass all the future changes, fixes and improvements of the previous stages, and whatever comes along. The following technologies to be implemented:

Cross-shard transactions
Lightweight clients
Super-square charting
Closer ties

See the Eth2 Phase 2 Wiki for current progress, discussions, and definitions regarding this work. The Eth2 Project Management repo holds ongoing notes and meetings.