Curated by Anthony Sassano (@sassal0x) and Eric Conner (@econoar)

💸 Ethereum 2.0 Economics and Edcon!

Eric published a blog post this week titled ‘The Basics of Ethereum 2.0 Economics’. The aim of the post was to shed some light on the current thinking around how the different economic mechanism in Ethereum 2.0 will most likely work. You can also check out our EthHub page for more info on Ethereum’s monetary policy.

I’ll be at Edcon in Sydney on Thursday and Friday (AEST) this week. This is my first Ethereum conference so please come up and say hi if you see me - I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of my internet friends! I also have lots of EthHub stickers to give out!

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued a “no-action” letter to TurnKey Jet, Inc., agreeing that tokens used by the business-travel startup are not securities. The regulatory stamp of approval is contingent upon the company using its tokens under certain conditions.

Some of those conditions include: Token-generated funds cannot be used to develop the company’s platform technology, the tokens must be immediately useful, they must remain at a fixed price of one U.S. dollar among a few other conditions.

Perhaps the most interesting provision requires that the tokens not be transferable. The SEC’s letter says, “TKJ will restrict transfers of Tokens to TKJ Wallets only, and not to wallets external to the Platform.”

A few in the crypto space weighed in one this news: Coin Center published an analysis, Katherine Wu put together a comprehensive tweetstorm and Marco Santori weighed in with his thoughts.

Announced this week, PayPal has joined the extension of a Series A funding round in Cambridge Blockchain, a startup that helps financial institutions and other companies manage sensitive data using shared ledgers.

Neither PayPal nor Cambridge Blockchain disclosed the investment amount, but recent filings with the SEC indicate that Cambridge Blockchain has raised a total of $3.5 million in new equity from several investors over the past nine months. That follows the $7 million close of its Series A in May of 2018, and brings the total capital raised to $10.5 million.

That first $7 million consisted of $4 million of new capital plus $3 million of converted notes, and came from several investors, including HCM Capital, the VC arm of Foxconn, which manufactures the iPhone for Apple, as well as Digital Currency Group.

The subsequent $3.5 million came from PayPal as well as Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm started by the founder of eBay (PayPal’s former parent); Flourish, Omidyar’s financial inclusion investment spinoff; and Future/Perfect Ventures.

Andreessen Horowitz can now back crypto startups with potentially up to $1 billion, after reportedly making some recent internal changes.

The company’s founders – Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz – told Forbes that the firm had applied to become a registered investment advisor, so as to allow it to place larger bets and invest more heavily into high-risk asset classes, such as cryptocurrencies.

As such, a16z is shifting away from being a traditional venture capital firm.

According to Forbes, the company can now put as much as $1 billion in these riskier bets, such as cryptocurrency or other digital assets. The firm can also “buy unlimited shares in public companies or from other investors,” under current U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules.

ConsenSys Ventures, the investment arm of Ethereum development studio ConsenSys, has selected 10 blockchain startups for the second cohort of its accelerator program Tachyon.

Announcing the news on Monday, ConsenSys Ventures said that the selected startups for the Tachyon 2.0 program are focused on building new blockchain-based solutions across data privacy, encryption, healthcare and decentralized finance, among other areas.

Project Updates

Sigma Prime’s Eth2.0 client, Lighthouse, is now live and available for testing in a functional testnet environment! Sigma is the second development team to release an Eth2.0 testnet client (the first being Status’ Nimbus) and we can expect PryLabs to release their Prysm client in the next few days.

The team from Rocket Pool gives us an update on everything they’ve been working on over the last few months - including a video of Rocket Pools Beta UI in progress. They’ll also be at Edcon so be sure to say hi if you see them!

The BlitzPredict Exchange is a peer-to-peer betting exchange built on Ethereum and utilizing Augur and 0x. The exchange allows users to either post a bet they would like to make or take the other side of an already posted bet.

You can now track various DeFi projects historical data in both graph and table formats plus they’ve added project descriptions to each page.

You can now view real-time interest rates to borrow and lend crypto on various DeFi (and CeFi) apps by using the LoanScan website.

TrustToken announced the launch of TrueGBP, a stablecoin backed 1-for-1 with British Pound Sterling. TrueGBP will utilize a similar legal and technical infrastructure to the team’s first product, TrueUSD.

Quantfury announced the addition of the Dai Stablecoin as a collateral option in the Quantfury app, to let Dai holders trade stocks, crypto pairs, commodities and ETFs at the real exchange prices of NASDAQ, NYSE, Bats Europe, CME or Bitfinex, free of any commissions, maker and taker, or other kinds of fees.

Frame, the ‘OS-level Ethereum Interface’, went live on mainnet this week with transaction monitoring and the ability to access and verify addresses.

Arthur from the FOAM team digs deep into how the FOAM protocol is working with the Althea network to form a symbiotic relationship.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the work of Ethereum community member Latetot!



Latetot is responsible for building EthGasStation - a very popular tool for tracking various gas-related metrics for Ethereum. EthGasStation recently became part of the Concourse Open Community.

Latetot also recently built a Dai price tracking website aptly named DaiPrice. The site displays various DAI price metrics as well as a table of the best DEX prices for DAI.

On-Chain Activity

ETH volume across DEX platforms dashboard

Over the last 3 months both Uniswap and Compound have been chipping away at Makers dominance

The Token Analyst website has a live feed of ‘whale movements’ for Ethereum, ERC20’s, Stablecoins and Bitcoin (check the right side of the website)

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts

Podcasts

Misc

Looking for Work?

Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week

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