đ An opinionated recap of the most interesting news in crypto
Token Economy
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Aaaand we're back!
Sorry for the month-long radio silence. It's been an insanely busy last few weeks (and it's unlikely to change anytime soon!). Going forward, we'll publish under a slightly redacted format, with a focus on exciting new projects. We realized that's probably where there's still some gap in the curation market (a much different landscape from when we started out!), while also fitting more naturally with our day to day jobs. This one is the first iteration, it may change as we go. If you like it or hate it, let us know why.
We'll also try to make things slightly more manageable by having a link where teams can let us know what they have launched, instead of writing to either of us on Twitter, TG, email, etc.
So please head over here if and when you release a new product/paper/idea to market and want to bring it to our attention:
Last, we'll do our best at keeping up with the weekly cadence, however main business and family might have to take priority, so don't be alarmed if you don't hear from us every single week.
Decentralized app for continuous payments on Ethereum.
A side project by Paul Berg from the Aztec Protocol team, Sablier uses an Ethereum smart contract to release funds (atm DAI, USDC and GUSD) to pre-determined addresses at pre-defined intervals, using average block time (~15 secs) as time proxy, with the option for the payer to redeem the balance at any time. This is based on the 'money streaming' ERC-1620 that Paul proposed back in Nov '18.
Pay-as-you-go payroll is the obvious use case (the monthly salary cadence is pure legacy financial system after all!), however it will no doubt be adopted to enable novel applications (e.g. something along the lines of what Paul is suggesting here).
A soon-to-be-launched Dapp built on Numerai's Erasure protocol to monetize provable point-in-time stock predictions.
Numerai has unveiled details of Erasure's first application to be released later this year, a decentralized stock-picking tournament built on top of Ethereum and IPFS. Numerai is announcing it not to encourage data scientists to gear up and developers to fork it and roll out their own tournaments, with $1m in NRM grants up for grabs.
A proof-of-concept highly-scalable settlement engine for non-custodial exchanges using STARKs.
The Starkware and 0x teams have released a demo of their DEX scalability engine on Ropsten, featuring simulated data sampled from a live Binance feed. The goal is to showcase the viability of STARKs for Layer-2 scalability, and the numbers look đĨđĨ, settling over 500 trades/second (or ~200x more than Ethereum peak capacity today), at less than 1,000 gas per trade. How? StarkDEX processes most of the settlement computation off-chain, while only submitting to the Ethereum blockchain a "zero-knowledge" proof of integrity of the computation and correctness of the settled batch of trades. Scalable DEXs are coming.
Aragon has released their vision for their upcoming Fundraising product.
Aragon Fundraising aims to implement Vitalik's DAICO model, so that companies can have accountable fundraising.
The thing we like the most about Aragon Fundraising is that for the first time, companies are in control and have a direct benefit from the activity around their token. Given the existence of the bonding curve and pool of assets, as more buyers buy, companies have direct access to more capital (vs in traditional markets where secondary traders and shareholders get almost 100% of the value).
On the other hand, the investors also have some pretty peculiar advantages, most notably the "stipend" or "tapping" from the reserve pool, so that projects can't exit scam.
(disclaimer: Stefano is employed by the Aragon Association)
A super cool release from the Samourai wallet team:
"Dojo is professional back end software infrastructure that sits on top of and augments a Bitcoin Core full node to power the most private bitcoin wallet on the market, Samourai Wallet."
Essentially a super private way to run your own nodes, trust no one and still use a super cool wallet.
A minute of gratitude for the people bring us privacy enhancing software!
A decentralized autonomous risk-sharing pool built on Ethereum.
Nexus Mutual goes live on mainnet, accepting new members and ETH contributions to the DAO in exchange for the $NXM token (subject to KYC). As soon as the pool reaches 12k ETH, smart contract cover will be available for anyone to purchase. In the meantime risk assessors can already put money where their mouth is by staking the native token against smart contracts that they deem secure (like Argent are planning to do on their own wallet contracts).
A fascinating example of how a token-powered decentralized organization can blend in with real world legal frameworks and create the right incentives to solve a new problem (insecure smart contracts).
S3-compatible object storage powered by Sia decentralized cloud storage network.
A bit out of nowhere, but it looks like the Sia network has been quietly growing at a steady pace lately, recently crossing the 300TB of used storage mark. Filebase has emerged as an independent user-friendly service that claims to be abstracting away the complexities of interacting directly with the network (e.g managing Siacoins, syncing, staying online etc). 5GB for free and 1/5th of the price of Amazon S3 according to their pricing page.
Team Poketto have officially released their app for iOS. It's a super simple, intuitive and slick mobile wallet for xDAI that facilitates near instant and free transactions and stores keys in the phone itself. As a reminder, the xDAI Chain is an Ethereum compatible sidechain with DAI as the native currency of the network, developed by the POA Network team. Getting xDAI in still takes a few too many loops, so unless like me you had some hanging around in your Burner wallet, it's somewhat daunting to get started. Eager to see what Poketto have in mind on that front.
An open ended decentralized governance game using xDAI.
Fasten your seat belts folks, Austin Griffith of Burner wallet fame is onto something new. He's going back to his early passion (games) to explore the overlap between new game mechanics made possible by web3 infrastructure and decentralized governance. The project is funded via a grant from the POA Game Fund.
A key-less, seed-less, password-less non-custodial crypto wallet for iOS.
After a few weeks in beta, ZenGo opens up to the public, introducing guaranteed account recovery independently of ZenGo the company still being operating. Their approach to security is unique in the market for using biometric authentication and a threshold signature-based architecture that distributes 'secret shares' between the user device and ZenGo servers. We haven't tested it ourselves yet but it all sounds like a huge improvement in wallet UX without major compromises on security, and it got some high-profile praises already.
Spec for a minimal mixer design to obfuscate user addresses when sending fixed quantities of ETH.
By Vitalik himself: "The goal would be to have a look and feel similar to Uniswap, except instead of being for exchanging tokens it would be for making private sends".Â
Source code for a portfolio tracking tool that runs locally.
Tracks portfolio NAV over time and, when run locally, preserves privacy by reducing the risk of linkage to IP. There's an experimental version live at Cryptoblotter.io for testing, though the author encourages to clone it and run it on your machine.