Projects updates

The Melon protocol team added support for 0x v3:

Dissolving the Flock grants program: The team announced Aragon Flock in late 2018. The idea was to decentralize the development of the project by offering sizable grants to teams who would build the Aragon Network and its core infrastructure.

They wanted to find founders willing to assemble teams to build core infrastructure. The Aragon Association would give them funding and vested ANT, so that they are aligned with the network long-term.

Unfortunately, the team found out that the grants program had significant issues and wrong incentives. Mainly these were:

Checklist-based approach

Public feedback didn’t work

Upfront funding

No-strings-attached funding

High coordination costs

On top of these root issues, Flock was too early for the stage of the project. Even though usage metrics are growing considerably, Aragon hasn’t reached strong product-market fit yet.

In September 2019 there were several discussions in the community with regards to Flock. It became clear to me that it was important to focus on them. Luis Cuende decided to stop leading Aragon One to become the Executive Director of the Aragon Association. He focused all my energy in evaluating the situation, always with the intention of maximizing the odds of Aragon being massively successful.

This required tough decisions that were needed for the project to be leaner and be able focus on what’s most important.

After running the experiment for more than a year, and with careful consideration, the Aragon Association has decided to shut down the Flock program.

They will keep funding proven teams and doing lean grants and small-scale fund allocation experiments. And once the Aragon Network DAO reaches Phase 3 later this year, it will be sovereign to make its own capital allocations.

You can read more about the Aragon Association’s plans for 2020 and how the team is evolving Aragon Network governance.

Aragon Buidler plugin 0.1.0 released:

The Aragon Committees app v1.0.0-beta.2 has been released:

Tim Draper Backed Aragon, Disrupts Traditional Governance With A Decentralized Court: Aragon Court and TiDraper’s stake featured on Forbes.

Augur Weekly — New Hampshire to Nevada: A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.

More on Augur:

Brave Browser partners with Wayback Machine to fight 404 errors:

What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately? Episode #2: Third-Party Cosmetic Filtering: Brave is releasing a new system for hiding unwanted, privacy harming page elements. These include empty page space caused by blocking trackers, and third-party ads that cannot be blocked at the network layer. Brave’s system uniquely attempts to hide tracking third-party ads, while supporting sites that use privacy-preserving first-party ads. You can help test this system by downloading and using Brave Nightly. If everything looks good from testing, third-party cosmetic filtering will be in Brave’s stable release soon.

Failure to enforce the GDPR enables Google’s monopoly:

Things You Need to Know about the Bitcoin Halving and Ethereum’s Competitors Nearing Launch. Coinbase Around the Block sheds light on key issues in the crypto space. In this edition, the team reveals key takeaways from the upcoming Bitcoin halving as well as Ethereum’s newest competition.

Coinbase becomes a Visa principal member: Coinbase becomes the first pure-play cryptocurrency company to receive Visa membership.

Onboarding thousands of users with React Native: A retrospective for companies considering React Native.

Reliable fee-less Bitcoin transactions in Custody with Child-Pays-for-Parent.

Send crypto more easily with Coinbase Wallet.

Kyber Network (KNC) is now available on Coinbase.

The gates to Decentraland have opened! Over $100k USD in prizes to be won.

The Metaverse is officially open to the public, the culmination of many years of hard work and the beginning of a brand new era for Decentraland.

It sees the final implementation of a range of features integral to the development of the Metaverse:

SDK: allowing Builders to create any sort of interactive 3D scene

Builder: a drag-and-drop 3D editor that lets you build interactive scenes on your LAND without the need to code

Marketplace: where people trade their virtual LAND, as well as Avatar accessories, wearables and names and our main product, the World Explorer, the web application that opens up the world to absolutely everyone

Read about another of the major implementations at our DAO Landing Page.

The Treasure Hunt has ended! 66k rewards were given to over 6k users, incl. 700k+ MANA, 590k ANJ, 82k+ MATIC, 10k+ wearables, 2k+ Cryptokitties, 33 Axies, 25 LAND and two HTC Exodus 1 phones. Congrats and thanks to the 12k+ active users who joined the fun!

Building the foundations for a decentralized virtual world: Setting up a DAO to decentralize policy, assets, and infrastructure; and a foundation to further Decentraland’s mission.

district0x Network Roadmap 2020: Where the team has been and where they are going in the coming year.

The District Weekly — February 29th: News and updates from the district0x Network.

The District Weekly — February 22nd.

Global Communities: Hackathon Retro.

Skynet Virtual Hackathon: Launching on Gitcoin 2/28.

How to Securely Manage Company Crypto Funds with Gnosis Safe Multisig. In the post, Eric Conner explains the benefits of securing crypto in a multisig and walk through the 1-minute Gnosis Safe setup process.

Meme-Driven Audience Profile Development: Golem & the Web3 Stack: As the team continues evolving their software and vision, they’re asking ourselves all the hard questions about what are they building, who are they building it for, and if they’re communicating it accordingly.

Introducing tBTC: The Safest Way to Earn with Your Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Earn Wins ETHDenver tBTC Hackathon Prize.

Kyber’s On-Chain Liquidity Protocol enables Axie Infinity to accept ERC20 Payments for NFTs.

KyberDAO and a new KNC model will be launched in Q2!

UBT is now available on Kyber Network:

Loom Network Company Update.

Matthew Campbell has recently stepped down from his role as CEO of Loom Network, and with this departure, Vadim Macagon has taken over.

Vadim has been with Loom Network since its inception, and has held multiple roles during his time at the company, most recently as the Blockchain Engineering Manager.

What’s Changing?

Effective immediately, the team is discontinuing the bounty program. It didn’t work out how they expected it would, and just caused a lot of resentment.

Recently, they’ve been working on a couple of new projects, one targeting the healthcare industry and one targeting the travel industry. They’ll be posting details about these projects in the near future.

What’s Staying the Same?

Boosting Basechain performance remains a core goal for 2020, as well as expanding interoperability with other useful blockchains, and keeping a healthy token staking ecosystem with reputable validators.

They’ve previously mentioned improving the speed of Basechain using WASM and sharding, but performance is not just about the speed at which the chain can chew through transactions. The tean has been running blockchains for a while, and are well aware of the ever expanding disk usage and associated costs. So they’ll continue tuning the resource usage of Basechain nodes to drive down the costs.

At the same time, they’ll continue supporting all kinds of dapps on Basechain, improving the documentation, and providing dev support via Telegram.

Making Maker: February 2020: February was pretty darn amazing for Maker and for the community as a whole. From hitting a huge decentralized finance (DeFi) milestone (hint: it starts with a “B” and ends with “illion”) and Maker’s debut in the Forbes Fintech 50 to the release of the new white paper and Dai integration in Coinbase Commerce, ….. More news in the blog post, including Governance updates, new integrations, and event highlights, but let’s first look at the numbers from Daistats.com as of Feb. 28, 2020, 10:00 am PT.

Governance Polls: Adjustments to Dai Stability Fee, DSR Spread, Sai Stability Fee, and Reducing the frequency of DSR Spread — March 2, 2020.

Executive Vote: Activate the Debt Ceiling Adjustments and Set the Dai Savings Rate Spread.

Distributed Ledger Technology and the Trust Revolution.

How to Read Cryptocurrency Price Charts, and Why They Matter: This is the final installment of the six-part Welcome to Crypto series, which covers everything from the advantages of digital assets and how to buy crypto to how to read cryptocurrency price charts, and why they matter.

Governance Polls: Adjustments to Dai Stability Fee, DSR Spread, Debt Ceiling, Sai Stability Fee, and Reducing the frequency of DSR Spread — February 24, 2020.

Executive Vote: Activate the Dai Debt Ceiling Adjustment, Set Dai Savings Rate Spread, Set Sai Stability, Lower Surplus Auction Bid, Set Governance Delay Module.

MEW Welcomes Aave DeFi to Dapps Page.

Ocean Protocol partners with ProtoFire to build dApps: Expanding Ocean ecosystem and the open data economy with dApps. Ocean Protocol and ProtoFire are collaborating to build decentralized data marketplaces to facilitate the continued expansion of the open data economy.

Write Wasm smart contracts with ink! 2.0.

Nimbus status update — February so far.

Streaming Mobile Money with Sablier.

What is Status Multi-Account?

Mobile DeFi: Advanced financial tools in your pocket.

Announcing the #stick2web3 Sticker Market Competition with over $1,500 in Prizes.

The Team Has Reached $2 Million STORJ Tokens Paid to Storage Node Operators.

Catch Storj recent town hall and hear their latest company updates from the leadership team:

Streamr Community Survey Results.

Swash news: updated features, mobile compatibility and the road ahead.

Zilliqa wraps up token swap: 98.3% of interim tokens were exchanged for native ZIL, which can now be used for transactions, by DApps on the Zilliqa blockchain, and as gas fees.

Welcoming Industry Heavyweight Colin JG Miles as Head of Marketing at Zilliqa.

Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — January 2020.

Other project’s updates:

Compound Announces Governance Plan: Compound introduced its governance system this week that includes a new governance token called COMP. This new system will gradually turn over the governance of the Compound system to the community.

Compound hits 200m in assets:

Loopring Exchange Now Live: Loopring Exchange is the first publicly accessible zkRollup exchange on Ethereum mainnet. It is 100% non-custodial, inheriting Ethereum-level security guarantees while capable to perform at a throughput 1000x greater (and 600x cheaper settlement cost) than the current state of the art layer-1 DEXes.

Melon Terminal v2, a new frontend for Melon to go with Melon v1.1 adding assets and Uniswap/0x v3.

Melon as asset management automator.

Synthetix’s Achernar release is live, adding ETH as collateral: In the Achernar release, the Synthetix team is introducing Ether as an alternative form of collateral in Synthetix. It’s a major piece of new functionality, so they’re launching with a three month trial period to observe demand and user engagement.

Dharma Android App Now Live: Following last weeks iOS app release, the Dharma team have released their app to the Google Play store which means Android users can now earn 6.6% APR on their dollars in minutes.

Dharma now has fee-free debit card fiat<>Dai deposits and withdrawals.

Due to sponsors, PoolTogether is higher EV than just holding cDai/cUSDC.

PoolTogether tickets are now tokenized, here’s how to get a free one:

LINK RSI Set Launched: The LINKRSI Set from TokenSets implements a crossover strategy on the ChainLink Relative Strength Index oscillator indicator. LINK is the first crypto-asset other than ETH or BTC that is a components of a Set.

RealT Rent Payments V2: RealT is using Compound Finance to bolster the rental payments to RealToken holders. Rental income to token-holders will be increased by 1/2 of the Compound Dai Supply-Rate.

DeFiZap Integrated into Frontier: Mobile wallet app Frontier has integrated DeFiZap which means you can now access the dapp on the go.

Coinbase Wallet Integrates ENS: You can now send and receive ETH and tokens using your ENS name right inside of the popular Coinbase Wallet mobile app.

Introducing Decentraland Virtual Mortgage: You can now acquire up to $10,000 of LAND paying 12–40% interest over 6 months by collateralizing the loan with an NFT.

Announcing DeFi Audits: DeFi Audits is a new initiative to bring increased transparency to various DeFi protocols on Ethereum.

1x.ag — an automated leverage aggregator.

Uniflash Introduced: Uniflash is a decentralized flash loan protocol that gives all fees to users. It currently supports Ether and ERC20 tokens.

Remco Bloemen, Austin Williams and Stephane Gosselin also have some flashmint contracts out there.

Introducing saveDAI: With saveDAI, in just a few clicks you can open a dollar-based savings account that earns interest, has built-in insurance and can be easily transferred to another person or account of your own — all without dealing with a bank.

Introducing Burni: Burni is an experiment in creating non-fungible tokens with a proof-of-burn fungible token investment. As Burni-NFTs (“Burnins”) are minted, 97.5% of the original ERC-20 tokens are “used up” and removed from the total circulating supply, such that the base cryptocurrency becomes a finite deflationary resource.

Dripscore Introduced: Drip is an on-chain achievement dashboard. If you’ve completed any of the listed challenges on Drip (such as minting a Set, summoning a Cheeze Wizard, using Compound), you get more drip score.

Zora: a marketplace for Unisocks-style sales, from Saint Frame.

Nori: a marketplace for carbon removal, and how it fixes the problems with carbon offsets.

Creepts, a tower defense tournament on Rinkeby testnet.

Introducing DeFi Watch: Founded by Chris Blec, DeFi Watch is curating info on all things related to DeFi security and risk.