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

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Gitcoin Grants continues to be the best way to support us here at EthHub in our continued work on this newsletter, the 2 podcasts we put out almost every week, the EthHub docs website, and our monthly livestream that we do with top minds in the Ethereum community.

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News of the Week

A new political action committee (PAC) is hoping to push crypto-friendly public policy by providing financial support to Congressional candidates.

Founded by former Cato Institute staffer Tyler Whirty, HODLpac seeks to advocate for blockchain legislation by directing funds to different congressional candidates – but with a decentralized twist.

Donors may ultimately use Ethereum-based tokens to vote for which candidates should get their support, though initially voting will not tap any crypto tokens. The PAC will rely on We the Peeps, a fundraising platform built by Peeps Democracy, Whirty said.

According to Federal Election Commission filings, the PAC’s founding donors include a who’s who of crypto notables.

The documents list Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Emilie Choi, Donald R. Wilson Jr of DRW, Polychain’s Olaf Carlson-Wee, Nathan McCauley of Anchorage and the Blockchain Association’s Kristin Smith.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the country’s central bank, is said to have moved one step closer to issuing its national digital currency.

A Global Times report on Tuesday, citing “industry insiders,” said the PBoC appears to have completed the development of digital currency's basic function in collaboration with private companies.

The central bank is now reportedly drafting relevant laws to circulate the digital yuan.

An anonymous industry insider told the Global Times that Alipay’s recent patents revolve around the basic function of digital currency, including circulation, payment and issuance.

Alipay is the financial arm of Chinese tech giant Alibaba and is said to have publicized five patents related to China's digital currency earlier this year.

"Judging from the patents, the first step of technological development has been basically completed," the insider was quoted as saying in the report.

Project Updates

Dragon Quest, MetaCartels first virtual hackathon, goes live on April 1st and will run until the end of April. Partners include Aragon, DappHero, 3box and there is over $7,000 in prizes and bounties! Visit the Github page for more details.

Least Authority has released their full report for their eth2 phase 0 spec security audit. You can read it here (keep in mind that its quite technical).

Uniswap V2 will be bringing a suite of new features to the Uniswap protocol including token to token trading pairs, flash swaps, price oracles and much more.

This week, the Maker Foundation announced that the transfer of MKR token control from it to the Maker governance community is now complete. The MKR token contract is now 100% in control of MKR holders!

Aztec is now actively working on ZK-ZK Rollup, or in shorthand, ZK² — so-called because it comprises SNARKs at two or more layers:

‘Lower Level’ ZK-SNARKs each representing a private transaction ‘Upper Level’ ZK-SNARK, which is the Rollup SNARK, succinctly proving the correctness of the Lower Level SNARKs

Additionally, Aztec will soon allow you to send private payments at 100 tps on mainnet, with both balance privacy and user privacy baked in.

UMA’s new DeFi contract design allows for synthetic tokens that have no on-chain price feed, are multi-sponsored to pool risk and are completely synthetic ERC20 tokens.

The $6 million funding round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from FMR, LLC, Castle Island Ventures, Communitas Capital, Collaborative Fund, Avon Ventures, Raptor Group, Coinbase Ventures, and Digital Currency Group.

Ceramic is a new permissionless protocol for creating and accessing unstoppable documents that serve as the foundation for a connected, interoperable web without silos.

You can now lend out your crypto and earn interest on Compound and dYdX by using the Coinbase Wallet mobile app.

Justin Leroux gives us a brief update on GridPlus including details on the teams continued work on hardware & firmware for the Lattice1, their work on GridPlus Energy and more.

OpenSea have created a way for you to now embed an NFT directly in your blog, Medium post, or website!

User balances page, transaction history page and lots of general UX/UI upgrades were added to dex.ag last week.

Lots of technical updates from Nimbus this month including work on interoperability, audits, libp2p and more.

20+ new countries (including Australia, Denmark, Norway) have been added to Wyre’s Apply Pay/Debit Card widget.

Yul+ is a new low-level intermediate language for the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

The seed round was led by Accomplice and Placeholder with participation of CoinFund and Inflection.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the great work of Mike Demarais!

Mike is the Co-Founder of Rainbow Wallet - an in-development mobile crypto wallet for Ethereum (currently available on iOS).

Mike is also a self-declared “part-time hypeman” for Uniswap and has been a big supporter of the project since day 1.

Keep up the great work Mike!

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts

Podcasts

Videos

Misc

Meme of the Week

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