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

🎉 Happy 2nd Birthday to Us!

A small note this week - as this is edition #104 of the newsletter, it means that it’s the newsletter’s 2nd birthday! I humbly started curating this newsletter back in March of 2018 (then called Block by Block) and I never really knew where it would end up. I’m super happy that I’m still able to do this and that we have so many subscribers that read it every week! This is a huge personal milestone for me so I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for your support - it keeps us going here at EthHub!

☠️ RIP ProgPoW

Well, where to begin? It was another big week for ProgPoW but as the title states, ProgPoW is pretty much dead at this point. I’ll outline what happened over the last few days below but if you want a more detailed breakdown be sure to catch it on the weekly recap podcast.

We started the week off with a blog post from Hudson Jameson of the Ethereum Foundation giving a comprehensive overview of the entire saga (including history, the arguments for/against and much more). He concluded his post with “In my opinion, ProgPoW isn’t worth it and is dead based on overwhelming evidence of community dissent.”

Next, we had kikx disclose a vulnerability in ProgPoW just a couple of days after Hudson’s post which resulted in a flurry of conversation across all channels (twitter, reddit, gitter etc). James Hancock also started a new newsletter that will be sharing updates on EIPs and the status of upcoming Ethereum Network upgrades. I highly recommend subscribing!

Finally, we had the much-anticipated All Core Dev call which ended up being the longest in history at almost 3 hours. You can watch it here (ProgPoW talk starts at around 60 minutes in). I won’t summarize the call myself but Trent Van Epps put together his own tweet thread here that gives a great breakdown. We also got Ethereum’s best meme from the call.

Oh and something unrelated to ProgPoW - EthHub is now an official High Priest! You can pledge DAI to us here and the interest earned will be used to donate to Sam Sun (White Hat Hacking), Chris Blec, and DAppNode’s grants on Gitcoin!

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

The Supreme Court of India has ruled against a decision imposed by the country's central bank nearly two years ago that stifled crypto trading in Asia's third-largest economy.

According to a report from Bloomberg, a three-judge bench of the court ruled on Wednesday in favor of petitions by crypto exchanges and startups that opposed the decision made by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in April 2018 banning domestic financial institutions from providing banking services to crypto exchanges.

The central bank's decision at the time forced crypto exchanges in the country to either close, relocate to other jurisdictions or shift their business model to crypto-to-crypto and over-the-counter trading.

While crypto exchanges immediately filed petitions to the Supreme Court after the central bank's decision in 2018, a clear decision had not been reached until Wednesday after several rounds of hearings. Some exchanges had been forced to close as trade plunged while the case was ongoing.

Justin Sun has seized control of the Steem blockchain – with the apparent help of several prominent crypto exchanges.

On the Steemit Blog (which is newly owned by Sun), a post announced the new regime:

"For the next 4-6 weeks, the Steemit team will be using the voting rights to resume the order of the community while having an open channel for meeting community members and Witnesses."

However users are complaining about app instability on Steemit and some are signaling outright revolt. This is an archived version of the original post because Steemit has been unstable.

In a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system such as Steem, this Orwellian update is only made possible by enough of the network’s native currency, STEEM, being thrown behind a new set of blockchain validators.

In short, exchanges have staked STEEM they controlled (seemingly from user accounts) to “vote” for new leadership.

Project Updates

This update mainly goes over the performance gains and optimizations that the Sigma Prime team has made to the Lighthouse client including 70% faster block processing times, 75% reduction in RAM usage and much more!

In this update, Ben gives us a great rundown of the state of the eth2 testnets, an EthCC recap, research updates and much more.

Testnet updates, code updates, upcoming work and more from the PryLabs team in their bi-weekly update.

Sigma Prime is building a staking interface for their Lighthouse eth2 client and would like community input - do that here.

The ETHGlobal team have built a survey to help better understand the developer community. You can win various prizes for helping to fill it out - do that here.

Zora is a marketplace to buy, sell and trade limited-edition goods. All of these goods are launched as tokens which enables these goods to be dynamically priced, fractionally traded and launched before the item even exists.

A healthy update from the Ethereum Foundation (EF) regarding this years Devcon 6 including the announcement that the location will be announced shortly.



Anthony’s note: Announcement of an announcement? Did Justin Sun buy the EF?

Ethereum mobile wallet Argent has raised $12 million in a round led by Paradigm with participation from Compound’s founder Robert Leshner , Index Ventures, Creandum, and firstminute.

A massive ecosystem report from Kyber this month going over everything that happened during the month of February for the team. Highlights include huge network growth (and KNC price growth), new DeFi integrations, Kyber in the media and much more!

The LINK/ETH RSI Ratio Trading Set implements a crossover strategy on the LINK/ETH simple RSI. At a high level, if the LINK to ETH ratio falls below support, LINKETHRSI rebalances 100% LINK into ETH with the expectation that ETH will continue outperforming LINK. Conversely, if the ratio rises above resistance, the Set rebalances into LINK expecting that LINK will continue to break out against ETH.

Kollateral aggregates liquidity from the largest flash lending pools like dYdX and Aave.

The Pie DAO is a decentralized organization dedicated to bringing market accessibility and economic empowerment by providing a governance layer to tokenized portfolio allocations available to anyone on the Ethereum network.

dYdX is building a business model around their exchange and are introducing trading fees starting Mar 10, 2020.

8 additional protocols are now supported including Synthetix, Curve, PoolTogether, Aave, 0x, iEarnFinance and InstaDApp.

DeFi Accounts are a platform that provides users and developers with a single point of integration to access all the DeFi protocols.

Semaphore is a generic privacy layer for Ethereum applications based on zk-SNARks. This open-source library allows any user to signal their endorsement of an arbitrary string, revealing only that they have been previously approved to do so, and not their specific identity.

The round was led by Initialized Capital with participation from ConsenSys, CMT Digital and Regah Ventures.

The Ren Alliance is a consortium of DeFi companies and/or projects that are helping secure, develop, and utilize RenVM.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the great work of Loi Luu!

Loi is a Co-Founder of Kyber Network - the on-chain liquidity protocol that has experienced explosive growth lately. You can check out his previous work here.

Loi also holds a PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore and was selected in the Forbes 30 under 30 list for Asia, and Top 10 Innovators under 35 for Asia Pacific by MIT Technology Reviews.

Keep up the great work Loi!

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

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Misc

Meme of the Week

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