Argent Newsletter - Issue #24

gm everyone - we hope you’ve all had a great week. If you have any feedback or suggestions to help improve this newsletter, please email edward@argent.xyz.

TLDR: 

1. zkSync 2.0 is less than a month away!
2. Breakdown of Beacon Chain deposits
3. We published Part 2 of WTF is AA

Now, let’s get into it all! 🚀

🚀 Not long left for zkSync 2.0

zkSync is an incredible Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution we’ve chosen to use in our mobile wallet. Transactions cost pennies and happen almost instantly. But right now, the network doesn’t support smart contracts, which limits what you can do.

That’s what zkSync 2.0 fixes. And it goes live in less than a month. We’re really excited about this update, as this is when the fun begins.

“Once Ethereum can scale — and truly scale — it's kind of like coming out of Plato's cave and seeing the rest of the world, and seeing these use cases we could have never even predicted.” - Steve Newcomb

To learn more about zkSync 2.0, zkSync’s Chief Product Officer, Steve Newcomb, has featured on numerous podcasts, notably with Bankless and The Scoop. These podcasts go much deeper than zkSync 2.0, with topics like why ZK rollups are the end game for scaling Ethereum and the use cases that will be enabled by Layer 3 being covered. If they won't get you excited about the future of Ethereum, nothing will!

🖥 Decentralization matters

When Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake, one change was replacing “miners” with “validators”. Validators are responsible for verifying transactions to keep the blockchain moving along. We won’t explain the differences between miners and validators, as you can read about that in our Merge blog. But with this change, critics of Proof of Stake have argued that this would lead to centralization. This isn’t great, as that’s the complete opposite of what blockchains should be!

Luckily that’s not the case for Ethereum. This chart produced by Etherscan shows Beacon Chain deposits by entity, including a breakdown for Lido. What this chart highlights is (1) who's running validators and (2) how much influence they may have. While there are 2 entities with over 10% of deposits, no one dominates. No one group has control. And that’s the way it should be.

📚 What we’re reading

Banks Are About To Face The Same Tsunami That Hit Telecom Twenty Years Ago - Caitlin Long

RIP MEV bot - Rekt

Censorship... wat do? The road ahead - Jon Charbonneau

💭 What’s happening at Argent 

Account Abstraction (AA) is key to bringing crypto to the masses as it provides a much better user experience, greater security, more flexibility, and much, much more. But we know that it’s a very unfamiliar term. That’s why our co-founder and CSO, Julien, is doing a 3-part series titled “WTF is AA”, where Julien explains what AA is and why it matters.

The second part has just been published and we highly recommend you give it a read. It's more of a technical piece as it explores previous attempts to bring AA to Ethereum and why they’ve struggled to be implemented. The piece ends by arguing that Layer 2s like zkSync and StarkNet give us the perfect opportunity to create the user experience we’ve all dreamed about from the start.

🤔 Smaller but interesting news

Here are a few smaller things we’ve found interesting this week:

A beginners guide to Squeeth

Smoothie - a new crypto platform - recently raised $1.2m. How did they do it? Their co-founder explains with some additional words of advice 

Vitalik’s book, Proof of Stake, is now available to read!

The CFTC is going after DAOs - how does this affect you?

Why am I punk now?

Using stable diffusion to create images for social media posts

NFT artist Tyler Hobbes sells out new collection of NFTs for $17M