A non-custodial portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor.

Alert: this is likely to bring back Uniswap levels of excitement.
Think of Balancer as a generalized Uniswap, where instead of providing two tokens to the liquidity pool in equal $ weight, n tokens can be provided in any weighting. Effectively allowing any portfolio of tokens to become a liquidity pool and a  self-balancing index (thanks to arbitrageurs).

Great summary tweetstorm
Whitepaper

Limit orders on Uniswap.

On Uniswap you can only trade at the market price net of slippage. With this project out of ETHBerlin, one can place limit orders for a fee. Relayers can earn that fee by monitoring the network, looking for new orders, and executing them when the trade conditions can be fulfilled.

Github 'how it works'.

Research paper on the design of a decentralized synthetic margin trading platform.

Team UMA have published a paper on a decentralized BitMex platform that uses priceless financial contracts (i.e. no centralized price feeds, only pull requests for an oracle service to resolve disputes when parties think someone’s in default) to create financial instruments akin to CFDs or perpetual swaps (but more generalizable).

Will be digging deeper into this, it came a bit late in the inbox, but looks fascinating as most things from UMA.

Tweetstorm tl;dr

A set of protocols built on Substrate powering synthetic asset and margin trading.

The Laminar team, a Polkadot ecosystem partner, has unveiled its Flow Protocols, a set of three protocols it is currently developing to mint synthetic assets onchain and margin trade with integrated money markets. At a high level, in this system traders can issue a synthetic token (eg fEUR) by depositing a USD stablecoin on a 1:1 basis, while liquidity providers overcollateralize the position and can earn transaction fees or a spread in return.
Interestingly, they are R&Ding on Ethereum but planning to launch their own Flowchain on Substrate mainnet in Q1 next year.

Flow protocol whitepaper

A protocol for a weighted, sibyl-resistant social graph built on Ethereum.

This was the crypto twitter sensation over the last week or so, though it hasn't quite caught on us yet (also been busy!). The high level idea, released by the Citizen Hex team, is very intriguing though: basically each Twitter username has a finite number of unique tokens (2,100) of which the account owners is entitled to 100. These tokens can be minted by locking DAI and stakers get rewarded newly minted tokens pro-rata per block over c. 5 years.

What this enables is a "mechanism to create long-lived, platform independent, identity-linked commodities" that other layer 2 apps can build less game-able social apps on. 2100 is currently on testnet, but they plan to launch publicly at Devcon.

A Defi dashboard app.

Another fine looking unified dashboard for visualizing all your defi activity across multiple protocols (Maker, Token Sets and Compoud for now). Available for both Android and iOS.

Initial thoughts on a decentralized credit union.

It's quite rough, but there is some interesting food for thoughts in Jacob's design for a credit union DAO. The general idea is to leverage an address' onchain identity (eg. holdings of KYC'd tokens, perhaps borrowing history from other platforms?) coupled with social proof (i.e. staking behind a trusted address) to extend under-collateralized crypto loans from the interest yielded by a capital pool on a binding curve. 
Really interested to see where this goes.

A new preprocessing zkSNARK with universal (and updatable) structured reference string.

The year of the SNARK continues to deliver. This is an improvement on SONIC by a high profile team of researchers from UC Berkeley and UCL, best suited for settings in which batching many proofs is not possible or applicable. It already has an implementation.

Whitepaper
Implementation

The revamped version of eth2dai.com frontend, built on the OasisDEX protocol.

As anticipated by the Maker team, the new Oasis is now live under a new front-end. Taking on the best bits of the original Oasis, the new version is a DAI focused non-custodial exchange with fully on-chain order book supporting the tokens used in Multi-Collateral Dai (so far BAT, REP,  ETH, and ZRX against DAI).

This is part of a broader play to build a defi hub aimed at increasing adoption of DAI, which will include services to access the Dai Savings Rate and Multi-Collateral Dai CDPs.

oasis.app

Design for a distributed virtual private network offering a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation mechanism.

The team of researchers at Brave, which counts recent Unplugger Ben Livshits, have just published a novel method for enabling dVPN nodes to simultaneously decide which traffic they want to carry with strong privacy guarantees (ie without learning the contents of the traffic being transmitted). This, they speculate, may also unlock a new use case for BAT where users carrying traffic could be compensated in it.

An application for interacting with Uniswap liquidity pools.

Fantastic dashboard released by Blocklytics, showing in depth data on Uniswap liquidity pools and historical returns for liquidity providers (including impermanent losses) by strategy, token, type of trade and even originating smart contract! Absolute gold.

Decentralized, censorship-resistant Soundcloud.

Audius is live! It's quite possibly the next paradigm shift in music after Spotify/Soundlcloud. Whether it will work at that scale is a different question but the proposition to artists seems potentially game changing: Audius can't take them nor their music down, even if it fails, and they get to keep 90% of the revenues. The other 10% goes to node operators who actually host the music, somewhat insulating Audius from record labels pressure. It's not the wild west though, there is an internal arbitration process in cases of copyright infringement, and owners can get revenues reassigned (even by song).

It's slightly less clear what the value prop is for users until their favourite artists are on the platform, but there's a token involved as well (which we haven't looked into) so maybe part of the answer is there.

Will be playing around with it.

audius.co

Plug & play, fully-managed, blockchain event processing solution for dapp developers.

We featured Hookpad in #104, but back then there wasn't much info. Now the product is available in beta for any developer to test. This is what it does: it hooks to Ethereum (or any EVM-compatible blockchain), listens and filters events and then deliver them through webhooks and API.