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

😷 Another wild week

There’s not much crypto going on these days - most of the discussions are, naturally, focused around the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The last week was brutal - cases in the U.S started spiking with over 35,000 confirmed cases and over 450 deaths so far. Italy also saw days of 600-700 deaths and other European countries seem to be following that trend. Other countries are tightening their borders (here in Australia we banned all non-citizens/non-permanent residents from entering the country) and lockdowns are being put in place for many countries. The situation right now seems dire for the world, but I do believe we’ll get through it stronger on the other side which unfortunately could take 6-12 months or more. In the meantime, stay safe everyone!

Onto a happier note - last week I sat down with YouTuber ‘The Crypto Lark’ to discuss Ethereum (in particular, the latest DeFi drama) as well as TokenSets. Check that out here. Eric also published a new piece titled ‘Breaking Down Ethereum Wallets Options’ - have a read of that here.

Developers, developers, developers - they are the beating heart of Ethereum and Compound has put together some great resources for them. You can check out their developer guides here and also check out a few guides from Adam Bavosa here.

Oh and Gitcoin Grants Matching Round 5 goes live today - don’t forget to donate to your favorite projects!

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

Senator Kelly Loeffler (Republican-Georgia) sold off millions in stock ahead of the recent coronavirus-induced market crash, according to financial disclosures.

The disclosures reveal that Loeffler, former CEO of Bakkt, reported the first sale of stock on January 24, the same day her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private meeting on coronavirus. The Daily Beast first reported the news.

The first sale transaction was of stock Resideo Technologies, worth between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has declined by more than half since then.

Other sale transactions include stocks of Comcast Corporation, Keysight Technologies, Ross Stores and other companies - worth between $1,275,000 and $3,100,000.

Interestingly, Loeffler initially reported many of these sale transactions in the name of her husband - Jeffrey Sprecher, founder, chairman, and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange and chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Last week, i.e. on March 12, she amended the report to note that most of them were jointly owned.

In an investor letter reviewed by crypto news outlet The Block, Adaptive said that it plans to return remaining capital to its Limited Partners following a steep drop in bitcoin's price during the March 12-13 trading session.

"Adaptive has made the decision to close operations and return the remaining funds to investors," the firm wrote. "We are convinced that the risks of continuing operations in such an unstable environment outweigh the potential benefits."

Adaptive blamed "infrastructural insufficiencies" for its inability to respond properly to the sell-off. BitMEX, which isn't named in the letter, went out of service for about 45-minutes during the price-plunge. BitMEX said it had a "hardware issue" with its cloud service provider, which caused requests to be delayed between 02:16 and 02:40 UTC. Normal service resumed at 03:00 UTC, it added. Sources told The Block that Adaptive maintained accounts on BitMEX, which were liquidated.

"A number of respectable exchanges, platforms, and tools that we use daily have halted their operations during the selloff significantly hindering our ability to act accordingly," Adaptive said in the letter.

Project Updates

Latest updates from the Ethereum.org team including a style guide and design upgrade, simplification of Studio, and more.

Eth2 progress continues and Ben has collated all the relevant info from the last week including his thoughts on Vitalik’s 5-10 year unofficial Ethereum roadmap, research updates, and much more.

Slasher now running in prod and catching slashable actions, fuzz testing running on Prysm’s core functions, a revamp of the beacon state management, improved sync times and much more in this update.

New beacon chain spec release, new paper available for public review, updates on statelessness and much more in this eth2 update from Danny Ryan.

USDC is the third collateral type that users can now use to open Vaults on the MakerDAO platform.

ETH Dashboard is a simple, customizable dashboard to display whichever Ethereum data is important to you.

You can now use the Dharma app to send and receive USD from anywhere in the world - all while earning interest.

Native hardware wallet integration (Ledger, Trezor) and NFT (ERC-721) support is now live in the Gnosis Safe wallet.

The ENS Manager now supports custom text records which means people can use ENS to store a wide range of information without the ENS team having to add a new record type for each new use case.

DMM assets are backed by real-world, income-generating assets and you can easily gain exposure by simply depositing DAI or USDC.

Limit orders added for various trading pairs and dex.ag have integrated Curve Finance with their X Blaster for better prices on stablecoin swaps.

DeBank is an interface into the world of DeFi (similar to Zerion) that supports apps such as TokenSets, Uniswap, PoolTogether and others.

You can now mint and auction your time as NFTs using the Microsponsors marketplace (powered by 0x).

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the great work of Protolambda!

Protolambda is a core Ethereum community member - he spends most of his time as a researcher for the Ethereum Foundation (particularly around eth2). You can read his research on Ethresear.ch here.

You can view some of his work on his personal website.

Keep up the great work Protolambda!

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Misc

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