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

🎂 Happy Birthday to the Beacon Chain

This week was the Ethereum Beacon Chain’s first birthday (on December 1st) and what a first year it has been. There’s been over 8 million ETH staked, over 250,000 validators spun up, the Altair network upgrade went live and work on The Merge is progressing swimmingly. If you want a deeper recap on the Beacon Chain’s first year, you can read my piece here.

Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony

News of the Week

⚖️ Gensler Hedges on Classifying Cryptocurrencies as Securities in Response to Senator’s Questions

Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler is keeping mum on new guidance for crypto tokens.

After a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee in September, the committee's leading Republican, Sen. Pat Toomey, wrote Gensler a series of follow-up questions on cryptocurrencies.

In responses released on December 3, Gensler stuck to the broad interpretation of existing laws and the Howey and Reeves tests that he has promulgated since taking office. Effectively, Gensler argues that the SEC does not need to specify which crypto assets are and are not securities, as those laws and court cases established broad parameters — an attitude that has ruffled many in the crypto industry.

Following up on questions from the hearing, Toomey asked Gensler to "identify the specific characteristics that distinguish a cryptocurrency that is a security from one that has been deemed a commodity."

😔 Crypto Exchange BitMart Confirms Hack Resulting in Loss of $150 Million in Crypto

Crypto exchange BitMart said late Saturday that it has suffered a hack, resulting in the loss of $150 million worth of crypto. 

Security researchers PeckShield originally estimated that the exchange had been hacked for $100 million.

Founder and CEO Sheldon Xia later confirmed the incident, writing on Twitter: "We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets. At this moment we are still concluding the possible methods used. The hackers were able to withdraw assets of the value of approximately USD 150 millions."

Xia went on to write that the exchange is "conducting a thorough security review" and that all withdrawals are suspended until "further notice." 

Project Updates

AllCoreDevs Update 008

Arrow Glacier is coming (update your nodes!), updates on the Kintsugi Merge effort and coverage of EIP-4488.

What’s New in Eth2 - 3 December 2021

Updates on the Beacon Chain, The Merge, Staking, MEV and more in the latest edition of Ben’s newsletter.

ZKOPRU Live on Testnet

ZKOPRU is now live on the Gorli testnet and users can deposit assets in to make private transfers.

Lighthouse Update #38

Lots of updates from the Sigma Prime team including post-merge consensus sync research, post-merge MEV and more.

Flashbots Eth2 Working Group Announced

Flashbots is putting together an Eth2 working group to tackle MEV in a post-merge world.

Lemma Live on Mainnet

Lemma is the first basis trading vault and stablecoin backed by decentralized derivatives to launch on mainnet.

Perpetual Protocol v2 Launched

Perpetual Protocol v2 (codenamed Curie) has been launched on the Optimistic Ethereum mainnet.

Euler Live on the Ropsten Testnet

Users can participate in the testnet by claiming Ropsten ETH and Ropsten testnet tokens. Once the wallet has some ETH and tokens in it, head on over to the testnet platform at https://ropsten.euler.finance.

Hifi Finance Live on Polygon

Hifi is a fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing platform that is now live on the Polygon PoS chain.

Component Launches YTC

The Yield Token Compounding (YTC) tool is built on top of Element Finance and allows users to interact with the protocol recursively.

Lyra Community Rewards Detailed

Lyra is rewarding early community contributors, traders and LPs with a retroactive token distribution.

Premia Live on Arbitrum

Single sided staking for wBTC, wETH, LINK call and and DAI put pools are now available on Premia on Arbitrum.

1inch Completes Series B

The $175 million Series B round was led by Amber Group with participation from a bunch of other investors.

Interesting Tweets

• Rollups are the next logical step in crypto

• Vitalik’s updated Ethereum roadmap

• A summary of the Ethereum sharding roadmap

• The effect of EIP-1559 visualised

• Ethereum is inherently political as a confrontation to legacy institutions

• Metamask approval hygiene in detail

• List of projects on Arbitrum

• Detailed pie-chart of the ETH genesis allocations

• Why EIP-4488 is good for Ethereum

Ecosystem Bits

Blog Posts

• Cultured Beginnings - The Daily Gwei

• And Then They FUD You - The Daily Gwei

• How The Merge Impacts Ethereum’s Application Layer - Tim Beiko via EF Blog

• Redefining Scalability - SwagtimusPrime and Louis Guthman via StarkWare

• Unifying Cross-Chain Liquidity with Connext - Nichanan Kesonpat via 1kx

• Ultimate Crypto Tax Guide - Dan Hannum via Bankless

• Is Proof of Stake a Rich get Richer Scheme? - ChainLeft via Bankless

• On the Formalization of MEV - Alejo Salles via Flashbots

• Exploring the Modularisation of Blockchains: An Introduction to Rollups - Ben Harvey

• Historical Ethereum Data Access After EIP-4444 - The Graph Foundation

Podcasts

• Crypto Advocacy Panel - Bankless

• Decentralized Ethereum 2.0 Staking with Rocket Pool | Darren Langley & Dave Rugendyke - Bankless

• Sorare: Marrying Fantasy Sports and NFTs - Epicenter

Misc

• zkSync Dune dashboard

Meme of the Week

ETHey & BeTChy 🦇🔊 @ETHeyAndBeTChy

h/t @EthereumMemes

December 1st 2021

42 Retweets501 Likes

Looking for Work?

Top jobs listed on Cryptocurrency Jobs this week:

• DevOps Engineer - Ethereum Foundation

• Backend Golang Engineer - WalletConnect

• Content Marketing Specialist - Perpetual Protocol

• Back-End / Relay Node Engineer - Gelato Network

• +1000’s more on the Cryptocurrency Jobs website!