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

🤔 ProgPow: A New Hope

Another busy week of ProgPow discussions on Twitter so I figured I’d summarize everything here for you. Mid last week Justin Leroux submitted EIP-2538 to the official EIP repository on Github. This EIP was submitted as an ‘Informational Position Statement Against Activation of ProgPoW’ which contains signatures from over 80 people in the Ethereum community (Eric and I both signed it as well). This EIP resulted in a tonne of arguments/drama on Twitter which I won’t summarise here (look for that in our weekly recap podcast).

Moving on from that, we had Cyrus Younessi from the Maker Foundation put together a thread on why DeFi is at risk due to ProgPoW, Eric wrote a post about what we can learn from the whole ProgPoW situation and he also put together a thread about why he believes that miners won’t interfere with the transition to eth2.

To finish up this summary, we had Ben DiFrancesco publish ‘A ProgPoW Compromise Pre-Proposal’ that offers up a compromise between both the for and against ProgPoW camps. TLDR is that Ben proposes that ProgPoW be kept in the Ethereum communities back-pocket until there is clear evidence that an ASIC-led attack is happening on the network.

Alright, enough ProgPoW talk - I just quickly wanted to mention that EthHub has now been accepted into the High Priests (just in time for Gitcoin CLR matching round 5)! If you’re unfamiliar with High Priests, it’s basically a coordination mechanism for open source funding that mixes social and economic capital.

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

Coinbase is among more than 2,000 entities from around the world working with Clearview, a controversial facial recognition technology provider.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed revealed New York-based Clearview AI – a startup facing legal threats from Apple and Google as well as calls for greater scrutiny into its practices – had already shared or sold its technology to roughly 2,200 companies and authorities around the world.

Clearview's software trawls websites and social media platforms to scrape data and match images posted online to persons of interest. Coinbase was among the organizations that had used the software for at least one search, BuzzFeed reported Thursday.

A Coinbase spokesperson confirmed in the article the exchange had tested Clearview's software regarding its "unique needs around security and compliance," but added customer data had not been used in any of its tests.

The exchange tested Clearview AI "to see if the service could meaningfully bolster our efforts to protect employees and offices against physical threats and investigate fraud," the spokesperson said. It hasn't yet committed to using the product, they said.

Martial artist and actor Steven Seagal has been charged for his role in promoting a 2018 initial coin offering (ICO).

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a statement on Thursday that Seagal did not disclose payments received in return for promoting the token launched by Bitcoiin2Gen (B2G) in February of that year.

The SEC said Seagal had not disclosed he was offered $250,000 in cash and $750,000 worth of B2G tokens in exchange for his services in promoting the ICO. These had included social media posts calling on his followers and fans not to "miss out" on the token investment, according to the SEC order. He also issued a press release titled, "Zen Master Steven Seagal Has Become the Brand Ambassador of Bitcoiin2Gen."

Seagal was further quoted in a B2G press release saying he backed the ICO "wholeheartedly."

Project Updates

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.

Anthony’s note: I’m super excited about this launch - scalable DEXs are here!

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!

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.

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.

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.

You can now access Aave through MyEtherWallet’s new native integration in their dapps section.

Latest update from the Nimbus team going over their first mobile eth2 testnet, recent discovery v5 work, BLS implementation updates and much more.

Compound introduced their 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.

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

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

You can now send your PoolTogether tickets to different wallets, friends or family as they are now standard ERC20 tokens.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the great work of Evan Van Ness!

I’m sure Evan needs no introduction at this point - he’s been a very long-time Ethereum community member, has been publishing the popular Week in Ethereum newsletter for years, attends and judges a tonne of Ethereum conferences, and has worked at ConsenSys in a variety of roles.

Keep up the great work Evan!

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