Good take on why decentralized prediction markets platforms like Augur matter: they represent a new format for online communities to express themselves.
A really interesting game theoretic perspective by David Hoffman on what drives MKR value: it's a long waiting game for who'll be the last to sell out to the perpetual auction. Incentives are a beautiful thing.
Placeholder continue to build on the 'governance is valuable' narrative with a thoughtful post by Joel where he argues that the power to change the rules of a cryptonetwork is a form of capital.
A Naval-inspirated take on the crypto trias politica, in which the the executive branch is represented by the development team, the legislative one by a Foundation and the miners are the Judiciary.
Tendermint is essentially the default for anyone that needs to roll their own consensus or chain, so I feel it's somewhat of a duty to understand how it works.
That, plus Cosmos (which obviously uses it) should be launching hopefully in the coming years, it's even more relevant.
Stanford's cryptography stars Dan Boneh and Benedikt Bünz, with two researchers from Visa, have dropped a super interesting whitepaper for an Ethereum-compatible private payment mechanism that provides both anonymity and confidentiality using an improvement over Bulletproofs (as opposed to the ZKP approach used by Aztec).
Pretty expensive gas-wise at the moment, but room for optimization. Exciting times for privacy-preserving tech (h/t Mihailo Bjelic).
It's great to see some seller infrastructure getting built for OpenBazaar.
Zokos allows sellers to setup an OB storefront from the web, without having to download and run the software. It compromises some of the censorship-resistance and security features of dealing directly with OB in the name of more convenience.
MyEtherWallet is far from dead after the split from MyCrypto.
The product is actually beautiful and has also added Bity support.
You can cash out crypto to any bank account, with just a phone number.
Now, here it says it is KYC-less - but obviously you are providing name on the account, address, and so on. But still, you're not giving away your passport data to another website.
eth.events has added SQL on top of their ElasticSearch offering, so now anyone can query the Ethereum chain for data like it's interacting with a Postgres database (cause they are).
Not fans of the centralization aspect of it obviously, but we think it's very needed to get more devs on the platform that it's a great compromise in the short term.
Burner wallets can be a game-changer. They can enable instant KYC-less commerce. The folks at Gitcoin chronicle the usage of burner wallets with DAI / bufficoins at Etherdenver.
The folks at Blockstream have released the code for their MuSig implementation which produces more secure signatures for Bitcoin and other chains that use ECDSA signatures.
Pantera Capital's third fund is getting closer to its $175M target, having secured $125M so far (an extra $25M since summer last year when it announced the $100M milestone).
Crypto winter is being blamed for the relatively slow pace of fundraising.
Japan's Recruit Holdings has launched a $25M corporate venture fund focused on blockchain tech. The fund is based out of Singapore and can invest in equity, tokens and other funds.
Gnosis announced the first batch of projects that will get funding from its ecosystem fund: - Protofire: interface for DutchX bidders - PoolX: a pooling application to kick-start markets on DutchX - TasitSDK: JavaScript SDK for native mobile Ethereum dapps that integrate with the Gnosis Safe - Flyingcarpet: integrating prediction markets into a decentralized geospatial platform.