Protocol Weekly #28

Protocol Weekly is a newsletter to exclusively showcase the progress of Ethereum layer-2 protocols.

Fun fact: we’ve already completed 10% of 2019! This week’s slightly recovery in price was good although things don’t look like they’re about to change anytime soon.

In the mean time we’ve seen continued growth with MakerDAO and Uniswap. What I find fascinating is that, despite the DEX space being already crowded, the ability to easily provide liquidity really made Uniswap stand out. Early adopters seem to understand and enjoy doing financial transactions such as creating a CDP via MakerDAO or being a liquidity provider for DEXs. A year ago these projects were hard to use or didn’t exist altogether. Within a year we’ve seen over $70m worth of ETH locked up by MakerDAO alone and many more DeFi projects locking up more and more ETH.

I’ve recently been reading the book “How The Internet Happened” and what strikes me as a big deal is how everyone thought portals were going to be The Big Thing. Turns out search engines would be the real “portals” to the internet. The path to crossing the chasm in crypto will be steps which no one has seen and will happen gradually in more bull and bear cycles. A key differentiator is the fact that crypto provides liquidity a lot earlier than most technology cycles. The internet had one boom and bust. Crypto has had a few cycles and will continue to have more cycles.

That’s all for this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions!

marketprotocol.io

From Bass:

• 2019 has already been big for our beta exchange MPX! We’ve made a number of significant improvements, which we have not yet released:
• Refactoring internals and UI to support a 0x relayer
• Improvements to wallet UI
• Redesigned user on-boarding flow
• New user home page and dashboard
• Steady work on our API endpoints for orders
• We’re getting close to an internal release of a feature complete MPX 0x relayer!
• Consensys’ Andrew Keys highlighted our project in his blockchain predictions for 2019. Our team is proud to be building a protocol that will give more people access to financial opportunity.

Airswap

From Jay:

• We released a blog post that outlines Stablecoins and their role in the new digital financial ecosystem.
• DexIndex.io, a price comparison tool for Ethereum DEXs, was launched two weeks ago, and we’re seeing more contributions from the community. As of this update, DexIndex can pull pricing data from Ethfinex, Radar Relay, ForkDelta, Bancor, AirSwap, DDEX, IDEX, Kyber Network, Saturn, Uniswap.
• Last Thursday (2.7), AirSwap rolled out its fiat on-ramp integration with Wyre (a registered money service business with licenses to operate in over 40 states). Traders will be able to exchange fiat currency (USD, GBP, EUR, AUD) for cryptocurrency (ETH) — all within their self-custodied wallet using the AirSwap trading interface. Try out the integration now at https://instant.airswap.io

kyber.network

From Shane:

• We recently launched an entirely new KyberSwap that provides a better token swap experience. KyberSwap.com is a fast, simple and secure way to swap ERC20 tokens such as ETH, WBTC, DAI, TUSD etc. Enjoy competitive spreads, with no orderbooks and deposits required. KyberSwap is a standalone token swap service powered by Kyber Network’s on-chain liquidity protocol.
• Congrats to MyEtherWallet (MEW) on the launch of their new interface! Kyber continues to support ERC20 token swap functionality directly on the new MEW, providing millions of users the ability to convert 70+ tokens including WBTC and DAI without leaving the platform.

Liquidity Network

From Patricia:

• Code review of the NOCUST Client and Server focus on parallel withdrawals and passive delivery.
• A new version of the library released bugs fixed and the documentation updated.
• Working towards the timeline within our Tech Road Map steps taken last week include lots of code review and bug fixing.

Parity

From Alexandra:

• At Melonport’s M-1, Gavin Wood discussed upcoming Substrate and Polkadot developments, including: HODL voting bonus, correlating multi-origin slashing, runtime parallelism, offchain compute, delegated voting, and more. Recording here.
• We were notified that a special RPC request can crash Parity Ethereum nodes pre-2.2.9 or 2.3.2. We released a fix the day we were notified — please update your Parity Ethereum nodes ASAP. While the vulnerability only directly affects Parity Ethereum nodes that serve JSONRPC as a public service (e.g., Infura, MEW, MyCrypto, etc), we recommend everyone to update their nodes immediately.
• New article on lip2p, a highly modular network framework that could be the standard for the decentralised web, and is being used by Filecoin, Agoric, Golem, IPFS, Substrate, Polkadot, and perhaps Ethereum 2.0.
• New Substrate-TCR-UI — a react-based frontend for the Substrate TCR runtime which uses PolkadotJs API for connecting to the Substrate node.
• Going to ETHDenver? Come hang out at our meetup.

aion.network

From Mike:

• If you like building developer tools and would like to get paid for your efforts, we’d like to bridge those two desires. 🙏
• We launched a test-net for the AVM that allows you to write and deploy java smart contracts. Why we went this route and why we think it’s a better approach than WASM was explored by team members. 🚀
• A second build of the Aion Kernel to supplement our Java implementation was released by our Shanghai team (Chaion) 🇨🇳
• Kim wrote a great guide on how she built a decentralized bidding game on Aion.
• A community member created this very cool mapping of the Aion Ecosystem. 🌎
• Alex McDougall of Bicameral Ventures on the CES2019 panel “How Blockchain is Remaking the Media/Entertainment Business”🗣
• This tweet storm from Matt Spoke, Co-Founder of Aion. 🐦
• This community AMA with Mike Mason, VP Ecosystem at Aion. ⌨️
• Rebuild Conference, the second incarnation of the Aionex conference is coming in April, there will be more announcements to come on this but block off your calendars April 23, 24th. 🗓
• Metalyfe, a blockchain based browser launched and announced investment from Bicameral Ventures, an ecosystem fund for Aion.
• A Whitepaper on Interoperability — The Aion Transwarp Conduit

dharma.io

From Brendan:

• Based on the increased confidence we’ve built in Dharma Lever’s smart contracts and feedback from early Alpha partners, we have made a few changes to the way Lever loans work. We now support loans of 28-day durations and enforce a 25k USD limit on loans (for both ETH and USDC).
• Right now we have some very aggressive lenders offering 0.10% APR on loans through Dharma Lever
• We are rolling out a brand new look and feel for Dharma Lever, including loan management tools for borrowers and lenders
• We’re hiring for a blockchain developer and a front-end developer. Our open roles are listed here: https://angel.co/dharma-labs/jobs

From Kerman:

• We’ve released the beta for our payroll application. If you’re interested in using our software to pay your team in crypto get in touch with us!

All Our Projects:

Parity, Loopring, Matic Network, The Graph, Origin Protocol, AirSwap, Kyber Network, Wanchain, Aion, ICON, CDx, Abacus Protocol, Enigma, Set Protocol, Codex Protocol, Colony, The Graph, POA Network, Connext Network, Dharma Protocol, Paradigm, Market Protocol, Liquidity Network.

Know a protocol that should be part of this list? Drop us an email at hello@8xprotocol.com.