EthHub Weekly #190

Facebook rebrands to Meta, Optimism introduces EVM equivalence, Across Protocol announced, Phonon introduced and much more!

Nov 1

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

[Sponsored] DeFi users, you no longer need to pay expensive and unpredictable interest rates on your ETH-backed loans. Liquity, an immutable and governance-free borrowing protocol, allows you to borrow interest-free against your ETH. Loans are paid out in LUSD — a USD pegged stablecoin, and need to maintain a minimum collateral ratio as low as 110%. Get started here.

🎉 Conference Season

The last conference I attended was EthDenver in February of 2020 - then the pandemic hit and I’ve been stuck at home in Melbourne for the better part of 2 years. Though over the last few months crypto conferences have had a resurgence and there’s been plenty of event such as Mainnet in NYC and EthLisbon in, you guessed it, Lisbon.

The one conference everyone is itching to go to is Devcon VI in Bogota, Colombia and over the weekend it was announced that it will take place in late 2022 with another related conference being teased for early 2022. While I’ll hopefully be attending both of these conferences, I think the first conference I’ll be attending since EthDenver in 2020 will be… EthDenver in February 2022 - how poetic - and I hope to see as many of you there as possible!

Have a great week everyone!

News of the Week

🤔 Facebook Rebrands to Meta and Announces Focus on the Metaverse

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”

“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now, and is still closely linked to one product. “But over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.”

⚖️ Financial Action Task Force Releases Finalized Crypto Guidance with Clarifications on DeFi and NFTs

The Financial Action Task Force has released revised and finalized crypto guidance, containing clarifications on who falls under its recommended requirements.

The global anti-money laundering watchdog first issued its virtual asset guidance in 2019. That draft called for crypto exchanges and money transmitters — which it refers to as virtual asset service providers (VASPs) — to meet standards applied to traditional financial companies. Much of this proposed approach focused on a so-called travel rule, which asked VASPs to collect and transmit originator and beneficiary information on parties participating in a transaction.

Since then, some jurisdictions have begun the process of implementing these standards, and the FATF has continued to review and amend its draft guidance. The body has also conducted reviews of the implementation process in jurisdictions and absorbed industry feedback on its proposed standards.

Project Updates

Introducing EVM Equivalence

In this post, the Optimism team explains why they believe that EVM Equivalence — complete alignment with the Ethereum Virtual Machine specification— will become the next universal standard across the L2 space.

StarkNet Alpha 3 on Testnet

Highlights include an improved testing framework, improved compilation time and syntax for short strings.

Across Protocol Announced

The Across Protocol bridge allows users to take a short-term loan on L1. This loan is trustlessly guaranteed using transaction insurance.

0xPARC Announced

0xPARC is a new organization supporting decentralized application R&D. The aim is to foster a budding community of researchers, developers, thinkers, and builders - a distributed "skunk works" for the Ethereum and decentralized tech ecosystems.

Phonon Introduced

Phonon is a powerful new scaling and privacy primitive for the entire crypto ecosystem. The protocol uses secure hardware to allow users to transact off-chain, endowing any cryptocurrency with all the properties of a cash transaction: fast, free, and privacy-preserving.

Yield Protocol V2 is Live in Beta

New features include multiple new collateral types, more stablecoins to borrow, improved use of gas & transactions and more.

Adobe Introduces Content Credentials

Content Credentials is Adobe’s new way to provide and assess digital content provenance and attribution.

Alchemy Raises $250 Million

The Series C round was led by a16z with participation from Lightspeed and Redpoint and existing investors Coatue, Addition, DFJ, and Pantera.

Immutable and ESL Partner Up

ESL is the world’s leading e-sports company and they have teamed up with Immutable X to build CS:GO NFTs on Ethereum.

DeversiFi Updates

Updates include multi hop swaps, a complete new UI, an improved deposit & withdrawal process and more.

Hyype Guarded Launch Now Live

The guarded launch includes support for popular NFT series such as CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats and many more.

Lyra Launches Ignition

Ignition is a 6-week journey to launch the LYRA token and transform Lyra into DeFi’s volatility engine.

Balancer and CowSwap Team Up

CowSwap is now integrated in Balancer natively and brings together features such as gasless trading, MEV protection, minimized fees and more.

Sismo DAO Introduced

The Sismo DAO members, also called Zikies, are the friends of Sismo. They coordinate through their governance-power-bearing ENS subdomains (eg. ziki1337.sismo.eth), which they claimed for free on sismo.io. Today, the Sismo DAO voting method is 1 subdomain = 1 vote. This, of course, can be changed in the future.

Perpfect Game Introduced

The Perpfect Game, the trading competition for Perp v2 testnet, is a different kind of game. The addresses that can join the game are pre-selected and put into 10 different teams based on the value of the tokens each address holds on 10/22 (Sat.) at 21:00 (UTC+8).