EthHub Weekly #196

Polygon Zero unveiled, Aztec Connect live on testnet, Slingshot raises $15 million, Voltz Protocol raises $6mil and much more!

Dec 14

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

🧊 Ice Cold

You may have missed it during the week but Ethereum went through another hard fork/network upgrade on December 9th that included just one EIP to push back the difficulty bomb to June 2022. Hopefully this will be the last time we need to push it back since it’s going away with The Merge - but we’ll see if we can get that shipped by June!

Quick shout out to Patrick McCorry who’s launching a free 8 week course on crypto with a special focus on layer 2’s - you can sign up here.

Have a great week everyone!
- Anthony

News of the Week

👍 Reddit is Bringing Its Tokenized Community Points to More Subreddits

Social network Reddit is expanding its Community Points beta, allowing any subreddit to request the ability to create its own token.

On Wednesday, Reddit released a waitlist for subreddits that wish to do so and has provided more information about Community Points on its website.

Community Points can be handed out as rewards for users who are active in the community. They can be given out based on the number of upvotes a community member receives within that subreddit, whether that’s for a post they made or comment on somebody else’s post.

Each subreddit can have its own Community Points, with a custom name, token and symbol. They can have value too and can be sold for other cryptocurrencies (and then fiat money if so wished).

👀 FreeRossDAO Emerges Winner of Imprisoned Silk Road Founder’s NFT Auction

A group called FreeRossDAO has won the auction for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s first non-fungible token (NFT) collection with a winning bid of 1,446 ETH (about $6.2 million).

Tweeting on Thursday, FreeRossDAO stated that it raised over 2,800 ETH ($12 million) from more than 1,300 supporters, spearheaded by the PleasrDAO community.

The NFT collection in question, dubbed “Genesis Collection,” is a collection of digital items including journals and art pieces created by imprisoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and showcased on the SuperRare platform.

Following its auction win, FreeRossDAO says it will fractionalize the NFT collection and distribute same on a pro-rata basis to all DAO participants. The distribution will be in the form of ROSS tokens. Meanwhile, the remaining funds held by the DAO will be held in a community-managed treasury.

Project Updates

Ethereum Cat Herders Update #51

Updates on Ethereum roadmap, Arrow Glacier upgrade, Kintsugi (Merge testnet), EIP-4488, EIP-4444, EIP Insight, ECH Discord incident and other updates.

Polygon Acquires Mir Protocol

The $400 million acquisition of Mir Protocol adds yet another ZK team to Polygon’s arsenal which has been renamed to Polygon Zero.

Polygon also released a new blog series called ‘ZKVerse’.

Aztec Connect Live on Testnet

Aztec Connect is a private bridge for Ethereum DeFi which allows for up to 100x gas savings - it’s now live on testnet.

Euler Live on Mainnet

Euler is an ambitious new primitive in DeFi custom-built to handle the risks associated with lending and borrowing illiquid or volatile assets.

Umbra Now Live on Polygon

The stealth payments protocol, Umbra, is now live on the Polygon PoS chain - offering users cheap fees for privacy payments.

Coinbase and Compound Team Up

Users can now earn interest on their DAI via Coinbase’s integration with Compound protocol.

mStable Emissions Controller Introduced

The Emissions Controller will move MTA emissions from a manual weekly distribution method to be completely on-chain instead.

FLI Launches on Polygon

The Flexible Leverage Index (FLI) from Index Coop has launched on Polygon alongside Set Protocol.

Index Coop also announced a $2.5 million raise led by Sequoia India, Blockchain Ventures and White Star Capital.

Arbitrum and Chainlink Partner Up

Arbitrum will be using Chainlink’s FSS technology for minimizing MEV on Arbitrum One and decentralizing the sequencer.

Messari Governor Launched

Governor is Messari’s free, first-to-market governance aggregator and voting platform for Ethereum.

LYRA Goes Live December 14th

The LYRA token will launch natively on the Optimistic Ethereum network on December 14th.

Slingshot Raises $15 Million

The Series A round was led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Electric Capital, Framework Ventures and others.

Moneyprinter.info Launched

This new website from David Mihal tracks the token issuance of different blockchains and applications.

Squeeth’s Road to Mainnet Detailed

Squeeth will go live on January 10th with the Crab strategy launching happening on January 24th and Squeeth will head to layer 2 in February/March.

Block Earner Exits Stealth

Block Earner hopes to be a portal for people to interact with DeFi. This week, they announced a $6.4 million raise with participation from Framework Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, DeFi Alliance and more.

Pods Live on Arbitrum

The Pods options protocol is live on the Arbitrum One network with a few put options.

Voltz Protocol Raises $6 Million

The seed round was led by Framework Ventures with particpation from Coinbase Ventures, Robot Ventures and more.

Mean Finance v2 Enters Beta

The V2 is completely decentralized, permissionless, composable and supports layer 2 networks.

JellyFi Raises $4.4 Million

The seed round had backing from Lemniscap, ParaFi Capital, Tioga Capital and others.

Argent X Introduced

Argent X is the first wallet for StarkNet and is now available on the Google Chrome store (it’s a developer tool for now).

Primitive Introduced

Primitive is an oracle-free solution to scalable and efficient on-chain derivatives, reflecting our belief that the future of decentralized finance should not depend on expensive (and often brittle) oracles.

Foundry Announced

Foundry is a portable, fast and modular toolkit for Ethereum application development built by Georgios Konstantopoulos.

Polygon and Wanchain Team Up

Polygon and Wanchain are launching a decentralized L2 to L2 cross-chain bridge that connects Arbitrum and Polygon’s PoS chain.

Inb0x Introduced

Inb0x is an end-to-end encrypted communication between wallets, secured by your Ethereum address. A service for anyone to send and receive messages to any wallet, using their ENS or 0x address.