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

📝 A Few Things of Note

Firstly, we launched the redesign of our docs website this week! If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out and let us know what you think.

Secondly, the CFTC Request for Input document is due February 15th and we have a document on EthHub ready to submit. We’d love it if people could review it over the next couple of days (especially those familiar with CFTC culture/proceedings) and provide feedback to us so that we can be sure we have the best document possible before submitting it.

Lastly, we’re looking for someone that is capable of building an xDai Twitter tip bot. If that’s you (or you know someone that can) please get in touch with us directly via Twitter.

Have a great week everyone!

- Anthony

News of the Week

Social media giant Facebook is growing its blockchain efforts by hiring staffers from Chainspace, the startup behind a smart contracts platform.

The researchers behind Chainspace may be well suited to help Facebook scale blockchain across a range of applications. According to its website, Chainspace uses sharding – the process of breaking a database into smaller units – to alleviate the scaling problems faced by blockchain networks.

Four out of the five researchers behind the academic paper on which Chainspace is based will be joining Facebook.

U.S.-based crypto startup Abra is adding a new feature to its blockchain-based app that will allow global users to buy portions of traditional investment instruments.

Announcing the news on Wednesday, Abra said the app will utilize the bitcoin blockchain and smart contracts technologies to support fractional investments in stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The app already offers investment in 50 fiat currencies and over 30 cryptocurrencies.

The feature will be made available to investors in over 155 countries, offering zero trading fees for the remainder of 2019 on stock and ETF investments, the firm said, adding that the minimum investment is $5. Interested users can currently sign up for early access on the company website.

Kraken, the San-Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, announced the acquisition of Crypto Facilities, a regulated crypto derivatives trading platform and index provider. The move will allow clients to trade derivatives and spot crypto side by side. According to Kraken's press release, the nine-figure deal is Kraken's largest acquisition to date.

Crypto Facilities was one of the first regulated trading platforms to offer futures trading for bitcoin, ethereum, XRP, litecoin, and bitcoin cash. The firm also provides pricing data to the CME Group, which powers the CME Group's bitcoin futures product.

Zcash released a notification earlier today regarding a serious security vulnerability. Originally identified by an internal engineer in March, and subsequently patched during the October "Sapling" network upgrade, this vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to mint an unlimited amount of tokens without being identified by the broader ecosystem.

At a deeper level, a hacker may have been able to circumvent a crucial protocol check point, and transform a zero-knowledge proof of one statement into a valid-looking proof of a different statement, thus breaking the soundness of the proving system. This issue likely exists in all platforms using zero knowledge proofs, but the Zcash team doesn't believe the vulnerability was exploited before the upgrade.

Investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been ordered to pay back $45,000 in legal fees incurred by entrepreneur Charlie Shrem as part of an ongoing lawsuit that alleges he failed to broker a series of promised cryptocurrency purchases on their behalf.

In the order, filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York on Thursday, Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled Shrem should be reimbursed for a prior court ruling that gave the plaintiffs the ability to seize up to $30 million worth of his assets.

The initial order was rolled back on November 8, at which point Shrem filed a motion to recoup attorney’s fees and related costs to defending the motion.

Project Updates

To determine the current state of Ethereum 2.0, a group of Ethereum community members interviewed the researchers and implementers working on the protocol and put together a comprehensive document.

Ben Edgingtons weekly update on all the developments happening with Ethereum 2.0. He also goes on a “slight rant” about ‘The State of Ethereum 2.0’ document linked above.

Plasma Testnet Zeta anchored its first Plasma block in the Rinkeby network on Friday, and since then has become available for the public use and testing.

ForDex is the worlds first decentralized FOREX relayer that allows users to trade stablecoins such as DAI, USDC, KWRB and PAX.

Somway Jain from InstaDApp gives an overview of the teams accomplishments so far and explains what’s next for the project - including the concept of a “Giant CDP”!

Gnosis, LTO Network, MakerDAO, Polymath Network, Ripio Network, Storecoin, Streamr and Waves Platform are among the new entrants.

You can now earn Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) on Coinbase by watching the educational videos that Coinbase has put together.

Harbor Platform V2 is a new customer-branded digital securities platform for compliant fundraising, investor management, and liquidity.

In this update the Rocketpool team features some early information and screenshots of the new Rocket Pool 2.0 beta as well as outlining how the Rocket Pool 2.0 beta will work.

Dharma, the protocol for decentralized lending, announced their $7 million raise this week that was led by Green Visor Capital and included other participants such as Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital and Y Combinator.

TCR Party is an attempt at distilling a Token Curated Registry into something more familiar for humans to use– not just the crypto-elite. TCR Party comes in the form of a list of the best handles in crypto Twitter, all retweeted by the party bot.

You can check out the leaderboard here.

DIRT allows anyone to deploy a datastore on Ethereum that is openly editable. The team calls this a Community Moderated Datastore (CMD) because there is no single owner. All the data is community owned and managed, and any service or application can use the data in a CMD.

You can get started with the alpha over here.

Richard Burton from the Balance team provides us with app updates, how the team is working with MakerDAO and a recap of his trip to California.

Ethereum Foundation grantee Nomic Labs has released the first beta of their Buidler developer tool.

MKR token holders voted to increase the Dai stability fee from 0.5% to 1% this week with the new stability fee going live on the 10th of Feb.

This week the AirSwap team announced that they will support a fiat on-ramp directly on AirSwap through their integration with Wyre.

Community Member Spotlight

This week we’re highlighting the work being done by Hayden Adams of Uniswap - a decentralized exchange protocol that uses automating market making to guarantee liquidity.

You can learn more about Uniswap by reading Cyrus Younessis excellent piece - ‘Uniswap - A Unique Exchange’.

Uniswap was awarded a $100k grant from the Ethereum foundation in August of 2018.

On-Chain Activity

All time high for DAI issuance this week - over 77 million!

Taylor Monahans on-chain sleuthing of Quadrigas non-existent ETH reserves

Averages for funded CDPs by percentile

Multiple Uniswap records broken this week

Interesting Tweets

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts

Podcasts

Videos

Misc

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