February 13, 2019

The crypto ecosystem has begun the week as busy as ever. To help you stay on top of it all, I put together a 17-part thread not long ago. Can’t be bothered looking through the whole thing? All good! Below, I’ve put what I considered the ten most noteworthy inclusions. Enjoy!

[1] Will Warren (Co-Founder & CEO, 0x) announced an upcoming vote on ZEIP23 which, if approved, would provide “0x with native support for trading any arbitrary bundle of ERC20/ERC721.” If ZEIP23 is implemented, it would prompt the first-ever “hot upgrade” to the 0x pipeline. This is also a major event for 0x, for it represents its first exercise in community governance.

The vote will begin on February 18 and run for a week. All ZRX token holders may vote on ZEIP23. AMA to be hosted on r/0xProject at 11am PT on Tuesday.

[2] Coleman Maher (Head of Partnerships, Origin Protocol) published a blog post unveiling PeerArt, a feeless, peer-to-peer marketplace for art. There are a number of artists signed up to PeerArt at launch, including “the highly acclaimed” Trevor Jones, the first painter from Scotland to incorporate augmented reality (AR) into his work. PeerArt was made using Origin Protocol’s Marketplace Creator.

[3] Enigma (ENG) – whose team is building a privacy layer for the decentralized web – released its development update for January. Shared they “have nearly completed end-to-end full round-trip integration tests for deploying and executing secret contracts in [their] upcoming Discovery release.”

[4] Decentraland (MANA) revealed its new home page and visual identity. Looking good! Click here for a recap of the redesign process.

Decentraland recently announced a Creator Contest (see: FAQ), which is set to kick off at the beginning of March. Participants will be among the first to use the Builder, Decentraland’s first drag-and-drop editor; allowing anyone to compose immersive, static scenes to host on LAND.

[5] Web3Infra launched the Web3Infra Alliance, an open developer platform for Web 3.0 applications that thrive on “decentralization and the shared economy.” Founding members are Bluzelle (BLZ), NKN (NKN), NOIA Network (NOIA), and Portal Network.

[6] 0x-funded BoxSwap – a decentralized wallet-to-wallet swapping for NFTs – announced the launch of “an open-swaps discord bot, called SwapBot.” Also, the development team revealed that users can now include NFT price approximations in their wallet. Instant swap function added, too.

[7] New York-based Elevated Returns (ER) announced its selection of Tezos (XTZ) as the blockchain upon which it will offer its fully compliant tokenised real-estate offerings to qualified investors. Integration will be achieved in collaboration with Securitize and Tocqueville Group.

ER may be familiar to followers of the STO space. Indeed, they’re the asset management company controlling the St. Regis Aspen Resort, an asset that was recently tokenized on Templum (see: Aspencoin).

[8] Per The Block, Bloomberg Television anchor Cory Johnson “is no longer with Ripple.” Roughly a year ago, Ripple hired Johnson as its chief market strategist. Ripple blamed market conditions for Johnson’s departure.

[9] In more Ripple-related news, New York-headquartered SendFriend – a remittance service provider in the Philippines – announced the closing of a $1.7M fundraising round. Having partnered with Ripple (XRP), SendFriend will – when it goes live – become the first U.S.-based consumer partner of RippleNet, a global payment rail connecting banks, payments businesses, and exchanges to a single cross-border payments network. SendFriend will also use xRapid, a liquidity solution by Ripple that makes uses XRP as a bridge currency for settling payments. Investors in the $1.7M round include MIT Media Lab, Barclays, Ripple, the Mastercard Foundation, and 2020 Ventures.

[10] The FBI announced the sentencing of Homero Joshua Garza after determining he scammed $9M+ out of investors in his virtual currency, PayCoin. Sentenced to 21 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. This marks the first time the FBI has sentenced a crypto-related fraudster with a direct action.

Want to see all 17 parts of today’s thread? All you have to do is click below!

0/ The #crypto/#blockchain space is starting the week off strong! Many projects continuing to develop at a commendable rate. Let’s see what’s been going on over the 24 hours or so, shall we? 17 parts to this bad boy, let’s do this ? pic.twitter.com/LtCO59WV4l — Matthew Willemsen (@mwill_crypto) February 12, 2019

I compose threads like these several times a week. Following @mwill_crypto will allow you to read them hot off the press. If you loathe a clogged feed then, by all means, give me the flick and follow @NuggetsNewsAU instead. They actually do interviews and what not. Whereas I…well I just tweet about them!