Relayer Report #5 — Governance With A Cherry On Top

The latest updates from the 0x ecosystem: July 2nd, 2018

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Tom recently announced the launch of 0x V2 on the Kovan test net. V2 is coming along nicely, with a first round of audits coming from SoHo Token Labs. As a review, 0x V2 will include ERC-721 support, more efficient order matching and cross relayer arbitrage, an open source framework for forwarding contracts, and more. This week, we will be skipping the Relayer Spotlight but wanted to highlight a new project joining the newsletter: welcome to Matt and the LedgerDex team!

A Medium post from a researcher at Wyre Capital made the rounds this past this week, and took a critical view on the current incentive model of the ZRX token. The author recommends two changes: a token burn, which will send a percentage of tokens from every trade to a burn address to incentivize people to hold, and an opt-in incentive system for market makers where they are paid in ZRX. The general argument of this critique: governance is not a good enough use case by itself to accrue massive amounts of value to a token.

Thankfully, this is crypto and great public discourse is had on Twitter. Will replied within the hour in this tweetstorm: “You can’t force value into a token. Period. Grafting artificial incentives onto a token (velocity sinks or mint/burn schemes) inherently adds friction (more gas per trade) to the detriment of users… I’d much rather put my effort into building something worth governing. This is what the 0x core team is going to continue focusing on and I’m glad that our community seems to be focused on this too.”

Ecosystem

LedgerDex (Matt):

OpenRelay (Greg):

Thanks to the awesome response we got for the Embiggen exercise, we’re in beta! (Blog post at blog.openrelay.xyz)

13 of 15 microservices converted for 0xv2

OpenRelay will support for 0xv2 on Korvan very soon, will announce on Twitter when it’s live

The Ocean (Monica):

Radar Relay (Joe):

Our beta is officially complete

In addition to coming out of beta we launched a new developer site containing documentation and developer tools for our API and SDK

Mobidex (Abraham):

Mobidex will begin its invite-only Alpha on the Kovan test network on July 17th! Check out the announcement on Medium

We’ve changed up our website and hope it’s a bit simpler

The app has gone through some pretty drastic changes. The flow has been simplified and we’re working on Touch ID authentication to reduce friction when trading

Paradex (Katrina):

Paradex is live for our non-U.S. customers at app.paradex.io! We’re still exploring the regulatory environment here in the U.S., and hope to be back online for the rest of our customers soon. In the meantime, we do have a view-only version available

We’ve been working to improve our mobile experience, and are now listed on Toshi!

ERC dEX (Lindsey):

Shark Relay (Suchit):

Shark Relay fills positions in engineering and design growing our team size to 11 people

Shark Relay is hosting a webinar on Thursday, July 12th, 1:00–2:00 PM New York time where we will demonstrate trades on our Trading Dashboard and show participants how to get the most out of it

We have added new tokens AVT, DFS, E10, SENT, ZIL

Jobs

Community Ambassador (Native Chinese / Japanese) / Full-Stack Engineer / Product Designer @ RadarRelay

Blockchain Engineer / Community Manager @ Shark Relay

Links

ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token Standard (Ethereum Foundation):

Good news for all NFT fanboys — ERC-721 is in final status as an EIP (Ethereum Investment Proposal). The diverse assets listed as possible ERC-721 tokens include houses, artwork, collectibles, and loans. The proposal also specifies the implementation of a standard API for NFTs. In other NFT news, check out this post that diagrams the emerging NFT landscape, the Nifty license from Crypto Kitties, as well as the NIFTY conference in Hong Kong. It feels like the NFT landscape has already grown a lot since our last issue.

Colorado Awards First Blockchain Grant (Denver Business Journal):

Radar Relay received $250,000 from the Colorado government. Congrats to Alan and the rest of the team.

Why Stablecoins Matter (MakerDAO):

The first in a three part series by MakerDAO. I think this post does a good job of underscoring just how big of an impact stable coins could have — in a best case scenario, a stable coin could become the global medium of exchange, replacing all government backed currencies.

Analyzing Activities on Decentralized Exchanges (Consensys):

The Consensys team used Alethio, “a data engine allowing the extraction of rich data from the Ethereum blockchain,” to closely examine many of the leading decentralized exchanges. Some cool visualizations here.

Fun Stuff

Joy’s Law — “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This is why it is better to create an open system anyone can build on as opposed to a walled garden.

Chris Dixon and Katie Haun are teaming up for an A16Z crypto dedicated fund. So far it has $300 million in capital commitments — I was reading through Chris Dixon’s old blog posts and he has one called “Climbing the Wrong Hill” that really resonated with me as a recent college grad. I also read this Horowitz blog post from 2011 called “Nobody Cares.” Two great quick reads.

Polychain’s fund is now worth a billion dollars. In this interview, Olaf Carlson-Wee says the hedge fund is long only. Doesn’t that make it a venture capital firm then? The lines are quite blurred on the crypto investor side of things. It would be very interesting to see what the internal structure of many of the top investment firms looks like.

What if mining was done under the sea? Proof of Lake.

To celebrate Lebron James coming to the Lakers, here’s the intro to the 1996 Chicago Bulls team in Game 6 of the NBA finals. Gives me chills.