Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, April 5 issue

Listening to Fountain of Wayne’s Sky Full of Holes, which is unfortunately their last album because lead songwriter Adam Schlesinger died this week at age 52 from COVID19. Unappreciated genius.





For me, the big news of the week is that about 10 days ago I decided to leave ConsenSys:

I’ve been doing this newsletter for almost 4 years now, it seemed like the right time to make the jump.

My expectation is that the newsletter stays free, while this annotated version goes subscriber-only of some sort. Figuring out the pricing model isn’t super easy - I think the way to maximize revenue is to price quite high, but I don’t particularly want to do that. If I spend the time on this, I’d like it to be read more widely. My tentative pricing is $9 a month or $99 a year.

The bigger question is whether the main newsletter can stay free long-term. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I mostly enjoy doing it it. But I strongly believe in listening when the market speaks.

Roughly speaking, the audience is the 15,000 most important people in Ethereum and web3. That strikes me as quite valuable, and it should be apparent that sponsors and ads will transparently take a more prominent position. Of course, surveillance capitalism has trained people to think that the only value to advertising is what they can track - which I think quite understates the value of this audience. There’s no other way to reach all the insiders, devs, investors, journalists, and power users in one place.

More on this in the future, but the bottom line is: if you like Week in Eth News being free, I hope you’ll check out the sponsors. If we do it right, the sponsors should be value add and worth your attention.









Here’s the most clicked this week





Gitcoin extended the CLR round, my grant is here. I’d love it if you put 11 somewhere after the decimal so I can track the donation to the annotated newsletter. 1 Dai currently gets matched 73 Dai.





Eth1

Gnosis is resuscitating the client formerly known as Parity as OpenEthereum, a welcome contribution to client diversity.

The Stateless Ethereum tech tree is an interesting exercise in decentralized ecosystem vs centralized VC coin.

If you talk to many of the VCs, they don’t believe in Ethereum’s decentralized ecosystem. They want large dev teams gathered in one central location under centralized leadership - hence all the VC coins with 9 figures to spend, but zero ways to deploy that capital effectively (nor do they even seem to try!) and zero community.

Ethereum isn’t like that. People show up and pitch in from all corners of the world. Often they start out making pull requests, and people see the quality of their contribution, then eventually they work their way into being a paid contributor. It’s decentralized, messy, and there’s often a lot of complaints from those who aren’t good enough to get funded full-time or fall through the cracks for a variety of reasons.

But it’s been working so far.





Eth2

The tldr of Eth2 right now is that the long-running multi-client testnet before eth2′s beacon chain launches is close.





Layer2

What is Zeropool? A privacy-first optimistic rollup that functions like a mixer. Next step: rewrite in Rust

Burner Wallet on Fuel’s rollup. Check it out on burner.fuel.sh

Dharma is doing a rollup chain with interstate, using the spec published on ethresearch

The emergent order of rollups is an interesting example of what I was talking about above. They’re all working out what their selling point is. Some are going after dexes (ie, loopring, idex, deversifi), payments (Dharma, Fuel), some privacy (Zeropool). That’s an extremely incomplete list, because I was pointing out the stuff from this week plus the stuff that’s live (loopring) or imminent.





Stuff for developers

RicMoo continues his exploration of CREATE2 magic. It’s still something that is underappreciated (possibly good, as users probably also need some education) in our ecosystem among devs.

Samczsun continues his reign of terror when he shows up in your discord/telegram/riot/it doesn’t matter. As predicted, he’s the clear winner of this round of Gitcoin grants. Fun fact: I was his first contributor during the CLR round.

Fortmatic’s magic link is pretty cool, and applicable outside of our relatively small web3 circle.





Ecosystem

I included the https bit because ethereum.eth didn’t work for me without explicitly including the https.





Enterprise

Also could have added that EY is doing a (obviously virtual) conference in mid to late April.





Governance, DAOs, and standards

It’s an underrated thread that most of the apps are in progress of decentralizing themselves this year. That’s a trend that will continue.





Application layer

Every week I get to this section, and my first instinct is to count “DeFi or not?” This week it’s 5/11. That doesn’t include prediction markets - though of course that’s an arbitrary distinction. Defining the contours of DeFi isn’t easy.

Given the stresses on centralized video infrastructure, Livepeer looks like a prescient bet from Doug and Eric, and something where decentralization can really deliver unique value.

Also very cool to see Brave using Origin Protocol. We need more of this.





Tokens/Business/Regulation

Fat Brands bonds live on mainnet show how Ethereum will eat Wall Street’s settlement layer

USDC grows 50% in a month

Subcontext of USDC growing is that many folks moved to USDC because DSR went down to zero, plus liquidity crunch etc etc.

However, the interesting part about Maker adding USDC is that USDC ended up being quite symbiotic for Dai. While USDC seemed like a competitor (and is to some degree!), it turned out that there’s a symbiosis there that emergent order created in a way that a centralized planner would never have come up with.





General

I wonder how long CMC remains dominant. Having an exchange as an owner seems like untenable in the long-run. While their dominance is enshrined by Google, that depends on 1) links which may disappear now that it is owned by an exchange and 2) Goog’s (human thumb on the scales) algorithm.

One has to wonder whether Bitmain can extend their ASIC again with another firmware update?

Bump to OpenVDF, a very interesting open hardware collaboration.