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Since last week in New York, I don’t think I’ve ever been so confident in the future success of Etheruem. If it can be summed up in one phrase, Etheruem has spawned a movement while competitors are playing catching up to launch a product.
ETH New York was a reflection of the state of the community. Developers have plenty of protocols to choose from, great tooling and wide community support. My favourite project was probably Feline Term Deposit (https://devpost.com/software/feline-term-deposit-portal) which lets you stick your CryptoKitty on wall and earn interest via Compound in the mean time. Thing about it for a second: a collectible cat is given ownership to a 3rd party protocol which earns interest but simply shown as “stick your cat to a wall and earn money”. Memes are money. Another fascinating observation was the value prop of so many layer 1 projects incorporated as a layer 2 side chain (shoutout to SKALE Labs). Tech works, is interoperable with Ethereum and developers can use tools they’re already familiar with (Truffle/Web3/Solidity).
Ethereum Foundation publishes an update about how they plan to utilise the funds they currently still hold. 0.6% of ETH supply held + cash which amounts to roughly $150M and 5 years of runway (assuming they continue to spend $30M/year). It seems like they’ve also thought philosophically about how they want to play a role in the community moving forward and outlined what that looks like. We’re also at a stage in time where we know the things required to enable scalability and efforts are being consolidated into those core efforts (2.0 clients, 1.X, ZK-roll-ups). For the full update check it out at: https://blog.ethereum.org/2019/05/21/ethereum-foundation-spring-2019-update/
Veil forks out Augur. It almost seems like the fat protocol thesis makes less sense as time goes along. Base layer chains have enormous value capture as their networks effects are on the level of a public good however for layer 2 protocol keeping network effects can be harder to maintain as applications can fork off once they become big enough. Right now it seems there’s almost no usable way to use Augur since its main interface is moving away from it. One part which I’m unsure about is the trustless-ness aspect of the protocol being forked out for prioritising UX.
8x Protocol has moved to Helis with a new direction and brand to reflect their new direction. You can read more about it over here: https://medium.com/8xprotocol/farewell-8x-hello-helis-network-8b8dbb141f48
On Chain Statistics
Total Locked in DeFi: $534M. This is approximately $100m up from two weeks ago! With the general trend being bullish leverage seems like a no-brainer for traders and speculators.
Biggest Gainer: there aren’t any. We’re in an accelerating bull market!
Interesting Stat: MakerDAO stability fee falls by 2%. Important move as it shows that Maker isn’t a profit seeking entity but rather a public good. Fees are still high but the decrease shows the tone.
Community Submitted Links
What happens when the bar only accepts DAI: https://medium.com/depfi/drinks-paid-in-dai-what-happens-when-the-bar-only-accepts-crypto-766802622576
Project Updates
In Kyber's Ecosystem Report #2, we look at the volume growth on April's top performing DApps, highlighted recent #DeFi integrations, and gave a shout-out to a few talented independent developers that have built on Kyber!
#DeFi project Betoken is using the KyberWidget on its site to allow community members to easily donate and support its security audit campaign using various ERC20 tokens !
Loi talked about Kyber’s role in connecting decentralized liquidity within and across chains at the Fluidity Summit 2019 in New York! Watch his presentation here.
SNX and sUSD have been listed on Bittrex International against BTC!
Our community-focused trading comp has begun amid a strong week of growing traction on Synthetix.Exchange, as over 2m sUSD has been traded in the last month and over 500k sUSD in the last 48 hours.
A few members of the team have been in New York amid Consensus, and Kain is speaking at this event alongside representatives from MakerDAO, CementDAO, and Anchor.
Continued progress with our security audit prior to MARKET Protocol mainnet release
Added trade order validation flow to MPX UI and checks
Implemented new email verification and onboarding screens
Migrated from Redis to Postgres database
Implemented needed functionality for user notification system
LQD can now be traded on Uniswap.
New bounty on Gitcoin! Developers wanting to start with Liquidity can create a Liquidity Burner, a fork of the awesome Burner wallet!
Liquidity Canvas competition is back, full details can be found here.
Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner discussed Polkadot and Substrate on Laura Shin's Unchained.
Gavin Wood's presentation on "Governance: What, Why, and How" is up.
Gautam Dhameja built a Substrate runtime that allows the addition of validators using proposals or root privileges.
New People of Parity interview with Polkadot{.js} creator Jaco Greeff.
There's still some Early Adopter tickets left for Web3 Summit during Berlin Blockchain Week.
Web3 Foundation is providing grants to build the Web3 ecosystem.