We are in the midst of a heatwave in Europe. Stay hydrated, use sun lotion and make the most of the weather!

🚀 Startups

Web3 Foundation has closed its private sale of DOT tokens to fund Polkadot. 500,000 DOT were sold at a valuation of $1.2bn. Three Chinese funds reportedly bought DOT at sub $1bn valuation, so Web3 foundation latest fundraise could fall short of $60mm targeted. Web3 Foundation previously raised $145mm in October 2017 with a sale of 5 million Dot.

Executives from Golem Factory, which raised $240mm in 2016 for an ethereum-based cloud computing platform, are launching a new non-profit called the Golem Foundation. The non-profit will pursue higher risk R&D, although there are no firm details on areas of focus. Funding is provided by the Golem croundfund with over $40mm in ETH and GNT (Golem Network Token) transferred to the Foundation already.

eToroX has implemented an initial version of eToro tokenized assets on the Libra Network, as an exploration of the new plaform’s capabilities. Their source code, and a report is hosted on a public GitHub repo. eToroX described their two top takeaways from the trial as:

1. In Move, resources (data structure types) cannot be moved or copied — an extremely constructive and beneficial capability, especially for digital assets, since it prevents accidental duplication and loss. 2. Contrary to other blockchain languages, Move does not allow publishing data on behalf of other users. Because of this, it requires users to acknowledge this beforehand, thereby giving users full control of which data is associated with them.

🏛️ Enterprise & Regulations

Etienne Goosse, director general of the European Payments Council (EPC), described the Facebook Libra project as putting pressure on the euro zone to have an instant payments system: “The clock is ticking”. So far, only half of the euro zone’s banks have joined the scheme, and it is mostly used for domestic payments. By 2020, all banks in the bloc may share a payment system.



🎧 Podcasts

Zero Knowledge: From Warp Sync to SPREE with Polkadot's Rob Habermeier

In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier, one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity Technology, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients. We then discuss how this helped inspire some of the concepts and design of the Polkadot protocol. We also chat about some of the exciting concepts that he is discovering along the way - such as new architectures to promote interchain security, Trust Wormholes and more!

🧪 Research

Announcement from our Blockchain@Berkeley friends:

The Call for Papers for CryptoEconomics Security Conference (http://CESC.io ) is now open! Deadline for submission is July 31st. Apply now!

CESC 2019 will take place on October 28th and 29th at UC Berkeley during SFBW 2019 (Dates TBD).

Papers:

SoK of Used Cryptography in Blockchain

🎉 Events

August 19-21 - Web3 Summit 2019 - Berlin

August 19-29 - Blockchain Week - Berlin

Written by Isaac Sultan, Founding Partner at Delta Sequence (@deltasequence) - We support scientists and visionaries who are creating a more decentralised future.