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

🙃 So that happened…

What an insane week - where to even begin? The crypto markets got absolutely destroyed (we saw double digit ETH again!) and Ethereum had gas prices of 150 gwei+ (some of its highest ever). This resulted in lots of things falling over - the biggest being MakerDAO. The high gas fees led to some CDPs/Vaults being completely liquidated - that is, no ETH collateral was leftover at all. This was due to ‘keepers’ - those who usually bid for the underlying ETH collateral during a liquidation - not being able to get their bids in. Only 1 keeper participated and bid in these liquidations - and they got all the ETH for $0. Yes - that’s right - $0!

This all means that there is now a shortfall of DAI in the Maker system which requires a “backstop auction” to recollateralize. This involves printing and selling new MKR in an open auction (which is happening Thursday). If you’d like to get involved, be sure to join the MakerDAO Backstop Syndicate by heading here.

On top of all of this, we had more major global news about COVID-19 and it seems this virus is really taking off now. I wont’t give any hot takes on coronavirus here, but be sure to tune in to this weeks weekly recap podcast to hear Eric and I’s thoughts on everything. Also, for those who attended EthCC or ETHLondon, be sure to monitor this form as numerous attendees to that conference have since tested positive for COVID-19.

Also, due to COVID-19, the Ethereal New York Summit that I mentioned in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago has been cancelled and replaced with an all virtual summit. Check that out here.

One last thing - off of the back of the recent ProgPoW debates - Eric wrote a blog post giving an overview of the Ethereum DAG Size growth and the impact it’ll have on the networks hash rate. Read it here.

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

Amid growing competition between providers, institutions in the traditional finance space are looking at blockchain as another way to offer value to their clients – but it might not be their top priority, according to experts who appeared at the MIT Bitcoin Expo this weekend.

"If you remove yourself from the crypto space, there are tons of events happening in finance," said Ada Kokoshi, vice president and digital asset lead at State Street. "For example, the stock market last week just didn’t behave well. And with things like 401(k) plans, exchange-trusted funds (ETF), and mutual funds, there are tons of competition between providers which are driving the fees down."

As a result, she said, even though financial service providers have the desire to understand emerging technologies like blockchain, their top priority remains to provide value to their customers.

"Crypto might be one way to do that,” she said. "But that involves redesigning their entire value chain, and there’s still a lot of work to be done."

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the country's central bank, is set to regulate cryptocurrencies after banning local banks from processing crypto payments in 2018.

The central bank has already started drafting a policy framework to guide operations of crypto firms, local newspaper The Chronicle reported on Monday. The RBZ has apparently admitted that the crypto trend is a reality.

"We have already started to come up with a fintech framework because in regulation everything should be well structured. The framework, which is a regulatory sandbox, will be assessing the cryptocurrency companies as to how they are going to operate," said Josephat Mutepfa, deputy director of financial markets and national payment systems at the RBZ, while speaking during a Sound Prosperity Economic Forum in the Bulawayo city on Friday.

"Once you enter the sandbox you either exist as a bonafide product to enter the market or you are guided to say that you need to partner a bank, a mobile money platform or your product needs to be licensed like a microfinance company," Mutepfa added.

Project Updates

Due to recent market activity and the resulting accumulation of protocol debt in the MakerDAO system, an MKR token auction will occur on the Maker Protocol, March 19th, tentatively starting at 6:25am ET (March 19, 10:25 am UTC) to recapitalize the system.

Gnosis’ prediction markets platform, Sight, is launching political prediction markets. You can apply now to take part in Sight beta at bit.ly/join-sight, and check out the live markets at sight.pm/#markets.

Monthly update from the MetaMask team going over everything that happened during February.

You can now login to TokenSets using email (via Fortmatic), Ledger, and other web3-enabled wallets such as Status, Alpha Wallet and DappPocket.

After almost two years of active research and development, the team has come to the decision that without significant product-market fit and limited resources to pursue emergent opportunities, Paradigm Labs needs to be shutdown.

You can now view market data for many of the Uniswap liquidity pools/trading pairs using CoinMarketCap.

The Synthetix team have put together an update that goes over everything coming to the protocol in 2020 - including major upgrades, improvements and more.

After several months of heavy development, the Balancer core contracts are now open-sourced here.

The Synthetix team have put together an update that goes over everything coming to the protocol in 2020 - including major upgrades, improvements and more.

ConsenSys and EY announced their working project, Baseline Protocol, joined by 12 other firms and organizations including Microsoft, AMD, ChainLink, and MakerDAO. The new protocol allows enterprise synchronize data with collaborators via the Ethereum blockchain without having to publicize all business records

Anthony’s note: I missed this one in last weeks newsletter.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the great work of DeFi Dad!

DeFi Dad (formerly known as Crypto Dad) aka Travis is an incredibly active Ethereum community member. He works at ConsenSys and is responsible for planning the various Ethereal conferences around the world. He’s also the host of the Ethereal Podcast.

DeFi Dad constantly puts out great DeFi-based Tutorials on Twitter that will keep you up to date on all that’s happening - I highly recommend following him.

Keep up the great work DeFi Dad!

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

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Misc

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