FOMO - Crypto News Digest

In this week's episode we discuss Aragon's potential move to Cosmos, the Libra hearing, China embracing blockchain, and a few other topics.

The second episode of this - still experimental - weekly format. We cover Devcon5, Libra, the FED, decentralized exchanges and more.

FOMO is back with an experimental weekly show!

Today’s show is still mostly about Ethereum, as Devcon is still going on in Prague with plenty of news to talk about. The most important one in my opinion is something that’s flying a little bit under that radar, but it marks a huge milestone. It came from Hoard, a company you might have not heard about. Hoard released a new game yesterday, Plasma Dog, and what makes it very special, is that it’s built on OmiseGO’s Plasma MVP, in fact it is the first live Plasma proof of concept ever created. It runs on the OMG Plasma testnet. MetaMask, a browser extension for Chrome and others has been the most important gateway to using decentralized applications on the Ethereum network. MetaMask has become better and better over the years, but it has frightening issues. The worst issue, by far, was that website could simply ping MetaMask for the associated Ethereum addresses, public keys, so any website could have access to the users’ balance, and transaction history. This was known for some time, and MetaMask is finally fixing it. And lastly, John McAfee announced this 2020 bid for US presidency. The popular billionaire and troll extraordinaire doesn’t actually want to win the office, but he thinks a presidential campaign is the best platform to promote cryptocurrencies.

We will dedicate this show mostly to Ethereum, as the yearly developer conference, Devcon, is happening in Prague, but before we go there, some good news from Korea. Banking has always been a particular challenge for crypto exchanges. Yesterday, the commissioner of FSC, the Korean equivalent of SEC reaffirmed that as long as cryptocurrency exchanges in the country have adequate AML and KYC systems in place, banks should be able to cater to these companies. So looks like banking problems are gone in Korea. We just wish regulators in other countries would be as sensible as the Korean FSC. With the pop of the ICO bubble, people started to look at Ethereum almost like a scam. And the competition got much stronger, too. Some of the other projects are really good like Stellar or ICON. Long story short, Ethereum, is not in a great shape. But Ethereum is the absolute cornerstone of the ecosystem, 90% of the top 100 market cap coins depend on it, and Devcon is always a great opportunity to inject some enthusiasm into the community. Vitalik gave a long-awaited talk about the scaling efforts. He acknowledged Ethereum today is not what Ethereum was meant to be, the world computer, because of the poor scalability. He also acknowledged that many of the efforts to solve the scalability problems were basically dead ends like super-quadratic sharding. Enter Serenity. Serenity is the new name of the next iteration of Ethereum. It's not a new thing, rather a new name for all the scaling efforts which, as it looks like, are finally pointing to one single direction.