Block by Block Weekly Newsletter #8
By: Anthony Sassano
Tags: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Blockchain

News of the Week

🤯 Coinbase Acquires Earn.com

First, some history. Earn.com is a pivot of a failed Bitcoin mining company (21.co) and the platform now offers microtasking services such as paid email campaigns. Now, hot off last weeks acquisition of Cipher browser, Coinbase has acquired Earn.com for a cool $120 million and Earn’s CEO will become the first ever Coinbase CTO. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted out his own thoughts on the acquisition. Fred Wilson also laid out some of his thoughts in a blog post.

⚖️ New York AG Goes After Crypto Exchanges

New York’s Attorney General has launched a “fact-finding mission” into 13 major cryptocurrency exchanges including Gemini and Coinbase’s GDAX. The AG hopes to gather information on the use of bots, outages, consumer protections, and other issues. Kraken co-founder and CEO Jesse Powell gave his own thoughts on the information requests. The official press release can be found here.

🤔 Venture Capitalists Want Safe Harbour For Digital Currencies

Security. That’s the word on everyones lips in the cryptoasset space. Many are debating whether certain cryptoassets (such as ERC20 tokens) are securities. This week news broke that popular Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led a group of lawyers and investors that met with the SEC in late March to suggest that some cryptoassets be given a “safe harbour” against security categorization. Regulators have also indicated that they are considering whether Ethereum itself should be considered a security (Ethereum was initially sold in an ICO). Ari Paul weighs in with some thoughts on this.

💰 Basecoin Changes to Basis and Raises $133 million

Stablecoins are the “holy grail” of cryptoassets but many people doubt just how viable (or stable) they really are. Preston Byrne is infamous for his critic of Basecoin and other stablecoins, such as Tether, have been the subject of intense controversy. That hasn’t stopped Basis from raising $133 million from VC’s such as Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures and even Google Ventures. Basis aims to use the same operations that central banks use to keep a currency stable but control them with software instead of people. Learn more about stablecoins here.

🤣 Cambridge Analytica Planned To Issue Digital Currency

By now everyone has probably heard of Cambridge Analytica and the data scandalinvolving Facebook. Well turns out they had plans to do an ICO with a raise target of as much as $30 million. Laughably, a Cambridge Analytica spokesperson wrote in an email to Reuters “prior to the Facebook controversy, we were developing a suite of technologies to help individuals reclaim their personal data from corporate entities and to have full transparency and control over how their personal data are used”.

😬 Tezos Co-Founder Sanctioned by Wall Street Regulator

Tezos, the blockchain that aims to “formalize blockchain governance”, has found itself in even more controversy this week with co-founder Arthur Breitman being suspended from associating with broker-dealers for two years due to allegations of false statements that he made.

😞 Kraken Pulls Out of Japan

Popular cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has cited rising operating costs as the reason for its departure from Japan. This move comes as Japanese officials are moving to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges after the massive $500 million Coincheck hack last month.

Project Updates

Parity Proposes EIP999

Afri (user 5chdn) from Parity submitted Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP999) to restore the contract code for the Parity multi-sig contract that was deleted last November. This EIP has been mired in controversy due to the fact that in order for a fix to be applied, the Ethereum blockchain will need to hard fork in order to restore the contract code. This is controversial due to the immutable nature of blockchains — that is, the blockchain state cannot be changed without overwhelming consensus. So far, the community is rejecting the proposal. You can read the discussions on Reddit, follow along on the Ethereum Magicians thread and watch/participate in the coinvote.

Amazon Launches AWS Blockchain Templates

I’m really excited to see a big company like Amazon supporting the crypto ecosystem with this move. As their website puts it: these templates will let you launch an Ethereum (either public or private) or Hyperledger Fabric (private) network in a matter of minutes and with just a few clicks. The templates create and configure all of the AWS resources needed to get you going in a robust and scalable fashion.

MakerDAO and Dether Partner Up

Dether, a mobile app that makes it easy for anyone to buy and sell cryptocurrency or accept it in their store, have teamed up with MakerDAO to bring the Dai stablecoin to the platform. More info on Dether here.

Dow Jones Media Group Partners With Brave Software

Brave Software, the team behind Basic Attention Token, announced a partnership with the group behind Barrons.com and MarketWatch this week. Selected users will have access to a free 2 year subscription to either service by using the Brave browser.

ERC-948 — Subscription Services on the Blockchain

A great post from ConsenSys this week covering the history of the subscription model in e-commerce and how the ERC-948 token standard aims to make subscription services on the Ethereum blockchain easy to use.

OmiseGo Strategy Volume 2

Jun from OmiseGo reviews recent developments and outlines what the future has in store for the OMG network.

BitGo Adds Support for ERC20 Tokens

Popular blockchain security company BitGo now supports a basket of ERC20 tokens including OmiseGo, Augur and 0x among others.

Status Launches Incubator Program

Status raised ~300,000 ether in their ICO back in June and now they are sharing some of that wealth with other projects in the Web3 ecosystem. The incubator program offers a range of services including funding, legal and regulatory support and mentoring among other services.

Harbor Raises $28 million

Harbor is a platform for tokenizing private securities such as real estate and company equity. This week, they announced that they have raised $28 million from firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Pantera Capital.

Plasma on Loom Network dAppChains

The Loom Network team announced that they are adding Plasma support to Loom dAppchains! They also plan to integrate Plasma Cash into their own collectible card game CryptoZombies Battleground.

Vlad Zamfir Gives His Thoughts on the Ethereum Hard Cap Proposal

You can check out both of Vlad’s posts here and here.

FOAM Introduces Chanterelle

As the blog post puts it: Chanterelle is a tool used to manage solidity smart contract prototyping, testing, deployments, and migrations. It is similar in design to Truffle.

Prysmatic Labs Biweekly Development Update #2

Prysmatic Labs give an overview of their latest research into Ethereum sharding development.

Akasha Goes Web-based

Akasha is a decentralized social media network powered by Ethereum and the IPFS. As of this week, you can now access the service through your web browser using Metamask.

Next Steps for Golem

Following a succesul main net launch last week, Golem outlines the next steps in their roadmap.

Aion Network Rebrand & Main Net Launch

The Aion project went through a rebrand this week with a new colour scheme and website. They also announced plans for the launch of their main net on April 25th at around 10:00AM EST!