Solid recap of EthCC if you missed it.

Scroll down in the newsletter to find all the submissions of ETHParis (the hackathon that happened during the weekend) and video recordings of all the EthCC sessions.

Monica from Kleiner Perkins dropped the house view on the most exciting areas of crypto: financial infra, security tokens, dev tools, gaming/NFT, new models.

Monster report by Peter Van Valkenburgh of Coincenter arguing that applying the Bank Secrecy Act to regulating decentralized cryptocurrency software developers and individual users would be unconstitutional, as would be any attempt to ban, require licenses or force backdoors.

Fred Wilson reacts to Zuck's historic post (A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking) saying it's game on, drawing parallels with Microsoft attempt to reboot itself with the advent of the Internet 20+ years ago. Tl;dr: legacy can hinder.

Medium posts are so 2018. Delphi Digital published a 65 page in depth report on the state of Ethereum, with a particular focus on Serenity economic model. Save and read on the next flight.

Another *massive* report dropped last week, this one by Electric Capital who crunched a ton of development activity data, whose trajectory bears no resemblance to market prices. 

Tl;dr looking very healthy, time to update those fundraising decks :)

Super comprehensive report on MimbleWimble and its most popular implementations, thanks to Circle Research team.

I found this to be the perfect way to understand the differences with Bitcoin and how MW uses UTXOs but strips down a lot of other stuff (conditional transactions, use time-locks, state channels (e.g. Lightning network), cross chain atomic swaps) in order to achieve privacy.

Still it's not perfect, as "miners can see transactions in the mempool before CoinJoin and cut-through take place. As a result, nodes watching the network can build detailed transaction graphs, compromising privacy, which is opposed to MimbleWimble’s key value proposition. Though there are potential solutions like Dandelion and dummy UTXOs, they have yet to be perfected in practice."

The one and only Ric Burton in an ode to open finance. And a bold prediction.

Honestly, hard to not see this future happening.

STANDOUT article from the Human Rights Foundation about Bitcoin privacy.

This is your must read this week if you want to be more knowledgeable about how BTC transactions work and the new privacy enhancing schemes (eg. I learned that after CoinJoin we now have PayJoin).

Hasu and Su Zhu share the investment thesis for bitcoin, identifying three major global trends that could drive significant demand for the asset in the future. 

Anything by these guys is a must read.

Ryan Zurrer explores the new trend of crypto-governance, with a prediction for moonshot DAOs.

"I suspect we will see new iterations of VC-style capital-allocation DAOs for emerging industries. I call these “Moonshot DAOs” and predict that we see some for future-looking industries such as space exploration, quantum computing, and psychedelics."

Ah "holy-goddam-wow am I stupid" feel piece from a rocket scientist.

The key takeaways that I got are the presented Nakamoto Framework, which is fairly straightforward to understand, and the fact that crypto networks drastically bring down the costs of coordination and thus fuel more open source and cooperation.

For anything else you'll probably need some Adderal and 30 minutes.

Matt Lockyer on the importance and trade-offs of participatory models for onboarding engaged users into crypto. Sage words.

Here's a link to all submissions to #ETHParis, which just took place over the weekend, and was amazing as usual.

Some cools ones in no particular order:
- ZkDAO. Implement fully-anonymous voting on DAO proposals thanks to AZTEC Cryptography Engine.
- TX Flow. allows developers to see the whole execution flow for a transaction.
- goMommy. ENS domains marketplace built on 0x
- 12months. With an Estonian ID you can get a DAI loan by collateralizing a real asset like a car!
- Contract Genius. A smart contract explorer that uses machine learning algorithms to find vulnerabilities.

+ many many others.

And for those who didn't make it to EthCC (but also for those who made it and couldn't physically be in all the rooms at the same time), here's a link to all the video recorded sessions.

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PS: massive congrats to Asseth and everyone involved in organizing and pulling off an amazing week.

PPS: apologies for linking to the wrong 'blockchain week' in last week's issue. The right link was obviously blockchainweek.fr.

PPPS: thanks to Argent for helping out with the logistics of an impromptu dinner :)

The Linkdrop team have shared a proposal paper for a generalized protocol that allows Dapp developers to include digital assets and attributes into links and QR-codes, something they've been working for internally for close to a year now.

If this becomes a standard for wallets and dapps, it could really be a boon for referrals and onboarding new users more generally, as literally anyone can interact with links and any flow can be built into them. If you are a developer building a wallet or dapp, go take a look.

Another piece of the defi puzzle is falling into place. 

Bloqboard have partnered with Wyre to facilitate an OTC market for large CDPs (> 200,000 DAI). This way CDP holders who have spent or deployed their DAI can still close their position and extract the remaining collateral without having to bother about re-acquiring DAI or MKR in the open market, for a small fee. 

Wyre is the counter-party buying the CDPs for now, and sellers have to fill a form and then go through KYC. But it's only a matter of time before the whole process gets automated in a more trustless fashion.

DeFi is happening.
LoanScan is an analytics portal for financial instruments such as loans, money markets, derivatives, etc. issued on lending platforms and portals and routed via deсentralized finance protocols (open protocols).

Essentially, you can monitor and track any loan on any platform and access the info via API to add even more interoperability between all of the new marketplaces.

Along the same lines, here's an interactive loan explorer for Dharma protocol, with charts, dark mode and all the cool stuff.

And one more to add to the list of cool defi dashboards (did we just say defi again?).

This one shows ERC20 token holdings, CDPs, assets lent out on Compound, value of Uniswap liquidity tokens, etc per Ethereum address (integrates with ENS).

Another way to earn clean BTC is to get cashback from your purchases.

Kyokan has released the mainnet alpha of their Plasma implementation, which delivers 1,000 sustained transactions per second on commodity hardware

In a headline that brings us straight back to late 2017, Kakao closes a monstrous private token sale and prepares to raise as much starting this week for GroundX, its 'blockchain unit'. It's still unclear what it is they are building and need so much capital for, it sounds like an app store for games kind-of-thing. At a high-level, it's yet another centralized social/messaging business entering the blockchain space.

Participants in the rounds include IDG Capital, Cresendo Equity Partners and Translink Capital.

Nick Tomaino of 1confirmation shares his investment thesis for Cosmos ATOMs, a few days before mainnet launch.

tl;dr "A self-sovereign bridge that connects cryptocurrency communities is an important piece of infrastructure that the space needs."

(disclosure: we are personal investors in 1confirmation fund I)

Amun is building traditional exchange traded crypto indexes listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange, fully collateralized, custodied and insured. They are also building and planning to commercialize the underlaying infrastructure for others issuers to launch crypto ETF-like products.

They closed a $4M round with four undisclosed family offices, Adam Draper of Boost, Graham Tuckwell of ETFS Capital and Greg Kidd from Hard Yaka.

Chinese mining equipment manufacturer has reportedly raised “several hundred million U.S. dollars,” making the company a unicorn, on the back of a failed attempt to IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (btw Bitmain IPO window could also lapse at the end of March).

Tough times for miners across the board, but there still seems to be capital available for them.

ConsenSys Ventures is on a roll lately, announcing a couple of new investments:

- Ligero: a scalable protocol for secure multi-party computation and ZKP
- PDAX: a crypto exchange for the Philippines.

Horizon is a game publisher that will integrated ETH into its games to give control of assets to its players.

They apparently also raised a round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Coinbase (guessing Ventures).