#i feel very stonks about my investment in this game it will last me such a long time

[kimmkitsuragi]

playing bg3 in steam's honor here on this day

[cryptocoinguides]

MOST Bullish DeFi Project Possibly 500x

So you missed the last DeFi bull run or haven’t made crazy gains with Aave, Yearn Finance or Synthetix. You’re not the only one. The rally came out of nowhere and shocked the crypto space with its earth-shattering explosive parabolic moves. Some think it’s over DeFi. Although if you’re watching this channel, you know we ain’t stopping there. It’s time to unload the next DeFi gem for you.

Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! It’s off the gains we go! Let’s get it! BitSwap is the hottest new way to trade tokens. Crawling all the top decentralized exchanges, BitSwap gets you the very best price and value for your trades. BitSwap is changing the game. Try it now at bitswapdex.io. Welcome to BitBoy Crypto! The No. 1 crypto channel in all the Interwebs. My name is Ben.

Every day on this channel, I show you how to make money in cryptocurrency. If you like money and crypto, then make sure to hit that subscribe button and smash the like button if you like uncovering gems. This lets YouTube know that you’re digging DeFi and you want to know what the future of finance is going to be.

In today’s video, we’re going to take a look into the future of DeFi and explore a blue-chip that is backed by the same hedge funds supporting Aave, Yearn Finance and Synthetix. And just so everybody’s clear about this, I’ve never spoken to the team and this is in no way a sponsored video.

It’s just a super investigative piece about the next big thing. Centralized finance wants to be in charge of figuring out who rules the world and deciding who is rich, who’s richer and who’s destined to stay poor. Of course, it’s the majority. In crypto, we believe in decentralization. This means the community, the people, are in charge of our own future. Our own wealth.

Everyone saw GameStop flying through the roof. WallStreetBets, a Reddit community focused on investing in stonks, brought it to the attention of the space, as greedy institutional investors shorted the stock immensely, which, if successful, would have resulted in the complete destruction of GameStop. The Reddit vigilantes then repeated this with other stonks, like AMC, BlackBerry and others.

This is another example of CeFi deciding what lives and who gets BitConnected. WallStreetBets took it into their own hands and gave a strong push back into the current centralized finance structure. GameStop, of course, flew to Mars with the support of Elon Musk and other large media personalities who supported the rebellion. One can see now what a single group can achieve by striving toward one common goal— fighting centralized finance and catching them with their pants down. Ugly sight.

But wait, we’re in crypto, not decentralized finance world, right? Have you seen what the same group did with Dogecoin? They made it pump 10X, 1,000% in less than two days. Guess what, all the ones who made profit off of those sick gains are searching for the next big thing.

And I can tell you, they’re definitely looking toward DeFi. The success of Aave, Yearn Finance and Synthetix shows the interest of enterprises and retail investors in decentralized finance, and, well, that’s only the beginning. The rigged financial system is yearning to be replaced as soon as possible, and there’s many systems being built to do just that.

With all the economical and political drama going on, DeFi has been killing it the past 12 months. New groundbreaking protocols were built in the bear market and exploded even before the market sentiment turned bullish. The most outstanding ones, of course, are Aave and Synthetix.

Aave made an insane 260X! And Synthetix, an astronomical 407X in less than a year! This is DeFi, ladies and gentlemen, and this is only the pregame party. Let’s check DeFi Pulse stats. In one year, the total locked value went from $550 million to a whopping $37 billion, a 67X! Huge investment funds like Grayscale, NGC, Framework and Coinbase Ventures are betting big on DeFi as the leader in this bull run.

The trend is your friend. Remember that. The BitBoy Crypto research team, or that room you’ve seen from my screens called Super Secret Club, is tirelessly searching for the next parabolic mover, and, as we know, DeFi is a hot topic.

A few days ago, we came across a project which turned out to be the missing puzzle piece to the Yearn and Aave DeFi kingdom. It opens up the doors to yield farming for average investors and whales in just a few clicks, promising to make DeFi easy. It’s called APY Finance and the ticker, APY, a plug and play solution for investors which routes funds to the best yield farming strategies.

One won’t have to search for options himself and worry about changing yield aka returns. It’s all automated and is essentially an aggregator of DeFi. What’s more, this new project, APY Finance, is already connected to all the leading DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, SushiSwap, Aave, Compound, Curve, Yearn, Synthetix, dYdX and more. You deposit DAI, USDC or Tether stablecoins, and it finds the best risk-reward yield farming strategy options for you.

APY even spreads out the risk by routing your funds to multiple farms. This way, smart contract risk is way lower and the yield higher and more sustainable. The gas fees for transactions, pool deposits and withdrawals are seven times lower than at Compound, Curve and Yearn Finance, which, of course, is a game-changer as gas fees are skyrocketing on Ethereum. Now, on to the founder and the lead developer.

The founder and CEO, Will Shada, is an OG developer who has won multiple hackathons including Consensus Quorum, ConsenSys NYC Grants, ETHBoston, Uniswap Prize for HackMoney 2020 and more. He’s an experienced and skilled developer with some strong connections, which, of course, we’re going to discuss below.

The second lead developer of APY Finance, Chan-Ho Suh, has worked as a Capital One quant developer. Capital One aka the financial corporation with a revenue of $34 billion specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking and savings accounts.

I can’t imagine better backgrounds for DeFi engineers. The project is also backed by well-known hedge fund whales such as CoinGecko– yes, the largest cryptocurrency ranking website after CoinMarketCap– Alameda Research– remember that one– Rarestone Capital, Cluster Capital, Arrington Capital, Vendetta Capital, DeltaHub, Master Ventures, WolfEdge Capital, BlackEdge Capital, The LAO, Genblock Capital, TRG Capital, Twelve Capital, White Palm Ventures– basically everybody else under the sun.

But I would be here listing them all day. They tried to hide it, but we found it all. Some of these venture capitals have a lot of connections that have a lot of voices in this space. And, of course, I don’t want to end up getting killed, so I’m not going to tell you who they are right now. But the thing is, is that these VCs are pushing a lot of projects. And I will say that all of these are betting on APY Finance, so I’m looking deeper into it.

The mainnet is launching anytime now. The team is even aiming for this quarter. Now, APY has a market cap of only $15 million with a token price of 90¢, which is over 60X away from Yearn Finance’s market cap and an astonishing 407X away from Aave’s. According to the team, APY has a tier-1 listing ahead of it with its mainnet launch, which makes me even more bullish.

And it’s pretty easy to tell which CEX, or “CEX”, will most likely be first to list it— FTX Exchange, as it is tied to Sam, who’s behind Alameda Research, which is invested in APY, as we already mentioned. For anyone who doesn’t know who Sam is, he’s one of the most influential people in crypto and a self-made crypto magnate.

He’s even earned a spot at Forbes 30 Under 30 recently as well. Now, of course, I have not been contacted for the 38 Under 38. With such large backing, I have no doubt they will get a top tier exchange listing before you know it. Now, I also got a strong feeling that there’ll be an Aave and Yearn Finance scaling solution as investors seek the best yields and least risk, with importantly a solution that is easy to use.

Interestingly enough, Hacker Noon, a blog that is known for predicting upcoming trends, wrote a dedicated article on APY Finance and another article on yield aggregators being the next big thing in DeFi mentioning the project again. APY is still somewhat under the radar, but, of course, after this video, it won’t stay there for much longer. We see you, BitSquad.

DeFi is warming up for its second parabolic run, and the BitBoy Crypto team is striving to pick the winning horse before the race even get started. What do you think? Which projects will have the biggest potential to pull an Aave or Synthetix type run during this bull cycle? Make sure to drop your comments down below.

The post MOST Bullish DeFi Project Possibly 500x appeared first on Crypto Coin Guides.

via MOST Bullish DeFi Project Possibly 500x

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition for the June 7, 2020, Week in Ethereum News

Here’s the most clicked for the week:

Here’s the things I’ll highlight for Eth holders who want to keep up to date without getting too far down into the weeds.

Danny Ryan: the state of Eth2

Loopring Pay is live. Free, instant Eth/token transfers on Loopring’s zk rollup

Deversifi went live on mainnet using StarkEx’s engine and offchain data (kept by a consortia) for 18000 transactions per second

Defi will do to banks what the web did to newspapers

Certainly the must read of the week is Danny Ryan’s attempt to communicate the bigger Eth2 picture by writing it down in one place.  It’s a great read, though perhaps on the long side if you’re not a hardcore enthusiast - as it also addresses side issues like how Stateless Ethereum fits into Eth2. 

As a community, Ethereum needs to improve on communication: one tiny thing we could do is break it up into bite-size chunks and spoonfeed it via Twitter in order for people absorb it all.  

[Sidenote: I often think this about podcasts as well.  People always say things like “how do I get involved?”  One thing to do is simply to listen to podcasts, write down everything you learn into a blog post, and then make a tweet storm out of that blog post.]

Meanwhile, Loopring made it free to transfer on their rollup.   Right now, this means you go into their dex and click transfer in order to send it to someone else who is on Loopring’s dex.  This was relatively easy for them to do (or so I say from my armchair) because a transfer is just half of a dex trade.   For now, the feature is free - so if you have ETH or tokens on Loopring’s rollup, you can transfer back and forth for free as much as you want.

Deversifi went live with “18000 transactions per second” or “9k trades per second” because of the same reason: a trade is 2 transactions.   This off-chain data proven with zero knowledge proofs had been called various things (Plasma, rollup, ZK plasma, rollup with offchain data, etc) but now it seems like folks are using the Validium term.   

Validium or “Offchain data” means that Deversifi and StarkWare don’t publish any data to the chain, but they also have a committee holding the same data which can publish the STARK proof to the chain if necessary.   It’s a big upgrade on a traditional centralized exchange, even though Loopring and Deversifi feel the same as a centralized exchange.   It’s important to understand some of the attack models (see layer2 section below) though the attack vectors look much harder than in a centralized exchange.

Finally, DeFi will do to banks what the web did to newspapers.  In some number of years, everyone will look back on this as obvious.   

I remember reading Gannett’s annual report in the mid 90s, as I was considering investing my meager lawnmowing money ($30 a trade I had to pay for my ~$200 stonk investments.  Teenage me was clearly not as good at math and finance as he thought).  Gannett seemed like a great business (and it was!), but the fact that newspapers were already for free online just kept me from ever putting money in.

Things start out looking like toys.  They’re hard to use, they’re risky, they don’t have many users.  Then the next thing you know it, they’re the incumbents.

Eth1

Expectations and limitations of upcoming Turbogeth release

Compilation of the history of account abstraction work

YOLO testnet is live – an ephemeral testnet to try to break EIPs for the upcoming hardfork

Since publication, the Turbogeth post has been updated with some pretty graphs.    tldr stats: syncing with Turbogeth should sync in a few days and use just 700 GB of disk space for an archive node.

Account abstraction is the idea of making Ethereum smart contract wallet addresses and “normal” addresses essentially be the same thing.  It’s been talked about since the early days, though stuff has always gotten in the way.

Eth2

Danny Ryan: the state of Eth2

Latest Prysmatic client update. Syncing to spec, adding eth1 clients, relaunch testnet plans

Teku: an Eth2 client for enterprise

Stats from crawling Eth2 testnets

More eth2 validator agent based simulations in CadCAD

A guide to testnet staking with Nethermind and Lighthouse

I expect there to be lots more step-by-step guides to staking on testnets as we continue to get closer to launch.

As Danny called out in his post

if there is more than one viable and secure client, it is your duty to run minority client software to promote a healthy distribution of client software on the network.

So test a few clients.  Read the audit reports.  

Layer2

Deversifi went live on mainnet using StarkEx’s engine and offchain data (kept by a consortia) for 18000 transactions per second

Offchain data with zk proofs is now being called Validium

What is the difference between zk rollup (data onchain) and Deversifi’s Validium (data offchain)?

An attack illustrating Validium trust assumptions

StarkWare demo of onboarding 1.3m Reddit accounts onto Eth using Validium

OMG goes live with their More Viable Plasma implementation (running POA for now); Bitfinex integrated USDT on OMG

Loopring Pay is live. Free, instant Eth/token transfers on Loopring’s zk rollup

As mentioned above, Layer2 was the thrust of the week, and there is more coming soon.

Just in time!  Those gas fees continue to be absurd.  For the last few weeks, they’d been coming down a bit on Friday and Saturday night (Texas time, of course), but this weekend they did not.   Fees go through the roof when demand outstrips supply even by a little bit, so there is some glimmer of hope now that a popular Russian ponzi has apparently died.  But still, at the time of writing, you’re looking at a 30gwei fee to get your fee confirmed in the next few minutes.

I’d be up for temporarily bumping the gaslimit.  It seems like a reasonable thing to do.

The first layer2 which gets significant liquidity will be a big deal in reducing tx volume.  The tech now works, now it’s time to make it happen.

This newsletter is made possible by Celer!

Celer is a coherent layer-2 scaling platform on Ethereum powered by Generalized State Channel Network and Hybrid Rollup technology. Real money games built using Celer’s gaming-focused SDK just reached top #15 ranking in App Store. You can easily set up and join Celer’s growing layer-2 State Channel Network to support Ethereum’s layer-2 scalability. Follow us on twitter, blog, discord and telegram.

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.6.9 adds SMT-checking to solc-js, allows calldata for all variables and provides a mechanism to specify an import directory.

Testing the effects of a call in Waffle

Buidler v1.3.6 adds Solidity v0.6.x

Sourcify decentralized automated contract verifying service

Covalent’s DeFi SDK for historical data

VS Code extension to write DeFi applications in NodeJS

Using Dapphero for your frontend

How Aragon minimized gas costs for Aragon Court

Loredana’s Taylor lisp-like language is on four testnets

Austin Griffith’s tutorial on building a simple decentralized exchange

Tornado Cash integrates Chainlink gas price oracles for TOR users

Verifying merkle multiproofs in Solidity

Trail of Bits found 20 bugs fuzzing the Solidity compiler

I thought it was pretty neat to use of Chainlink oracles to get around the fact that prices wouldn’t update through TOR

i just realized I spelled it “buidling a simple decentralized exchange” in the original publication.  Freudian slip?  I fixed it now.

EthPM and Sourcify are both things that should be getting more adoption in our ecosystem but as of yet have not.  Coordination problems are real.

Ecosystem

ETHGlobal’s HackMoney finalists and all sponsor prize winners

Receive email notifications to renew your .eth names

1inch releases Chi, an optimized gastoken

If you bought ENS domains when they came out, remember that they expire soon.  Go sign up to get an email.  

Lots of neat things came out of HackMoney.  My judging panel didn’t have any make the final 10, and yet I was very impressed with all the projects that presented to me.

To go with the enterprise section immediately below, I was having a conversation today about how big businesses often can’t hold ETH, much less tokens.  Thus what enterprise needs to use mainnet is a relayer that has predictable transaction prices.   

Basically someone buys a bunch of 1inch’s Chi gastoken and then can sell an enterprise-friendly relayer so that enterprises can buy $1000 worth of “cloud subscription fees” (ahem, ETH) and then get their transactions relayed at any gas price.  

Something like this would probably use any.sender as well to make sure that it got transactions included in the specified timeframe at the lowest cost.

Enterprise

Newly updated client specs for Enterprise Ethereum from the EEA

Federal Reserve Chairman says AMERIBOR (built on a private Eth chain) meets the benchmarks for a reference rate, though “it may not be a natural fit”

There was a boomlet around Chairman Powell mentioning AMERIBOR, but if you actually read the letter, it was a bit less sanguine.  

Lots of the crypto media will breathlessly run anything at full hype level. 

DAOs and Standards

Democracy Mars: a DAO to fund Mars-related projects

ERC2696: JavaScript ‘request’ method RPC transport

ERC2700: JavaScript Provider Event Emitter

Application layer

Synthetix adds liquidations

Maker adds TUSD and USDC-B (a second set of collateralization parameters for USDC aimed at emergency situations)

Satellite – sign data with your Eth address, with data distribution on IPFS and BitTorrent

Simplified pricing for Nexus Mutual

View keys for Tornado Cash to show origin of funds

Abritrary what % is DeFi?  I get 3/5.

A couple people pointed out that I counted wrong last week.  A ha!  That’s why I always say it’s arbitrary - I could certainly count Tornado Cash as DeFi, but this time I didn’t.   

And also because if I count incorrectly then I can just say it was arbitrary.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

Defi will do to banks what the web did to newspapers

Opyn put options as a trading strategy

Kaiko launches historical tick-by-tick order book data for Coinbase, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp

Better backtesting is pretty neat.

General

MyCrypto’s mnemonic phrase explainer

Bobbinthreadbare’s STARK-based VM has more instructions

Multi-scalar multiplication ZK study club video

Haseeb Qureshi’s latest installment of his intro to crypto class

Matic Network is now live

Brave hits 15 million monthly active users and 5m daily

Respect to folks who continue to push out great educational materials like MyCrypto’s mnemonic explainer and Haseeb’s class.

Brave got a bunch of pushback this week when someone discovered that they were adding an affiliate code when you typed binance.us into the url box.  They quickly corrected.  Despite that, it was impressive how riled up people got over basically nothing.  

It was a mistake, they quickly admitted it.  Doesn’t make sense to add it into the URL, but it literally costs you nothing as a user.  If you lived through the meteoric rise and fall of Netscape in the mid90′s, you know that browsers aren’t a super easy business.  People should probably relax a little - and Eth folks should be especially understanding of one of the most mainstream uses of a crypto token.

People often talk about privacy being Brave’s biggest selling point.  But by blocking so much JavaScript and autoupgrading you to https, I consider security to be a more important selling point than privacy.   And saving me on bandwidth, battery use, CPU cycles, etc etc.  I love that.

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I’m going to be announcing a bunch of things soon.  Paid annotated version with two tiers, podcast, probably some things in this newsletter as well.  Stay tuned.

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Housekeeping

Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter on Monday or Tuesday. Plus I tweet most of what makes it into the newsletter.

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Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-june-7-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

June 15 – Gitcoin CLR matching grants begins

June 16 – deadline to apply for Gitcoin’s Kernel incubator

Oct 2-Oct 30 – EthOnline hackathon