Argent Newsletter - Issue #26

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. Workshops, talks, panels, and much more at Devcon
2. The largest DeFi dapp is coming to zkSync 2.0
3. An exploit on Solana full of twists and turns

Now let’s get into it all and more! 🚀

🤔 What was everyone talking about at Devcon?!?

Devcon happened this week in Bogata, Colombia, which is a fantastic event where many people across the Ethereum ecosystem meet up and discuss, educate and bring awareness to topics that interest them through workshops, talks, panels, and more.

One panel we want to highlight is the one our co-founder Julien did with Vitalik Buterin and others to discuss one of the hottest topics at the moment - Account Abstraction.

Without Account Abstraction, crypto will get stuck in a local maxima. As a result, Dapps will never rival the best UX of web2. And wallets will always be too hard to use and too insecure - pushing people to rely on centralized solutions where they have no control and limited use cases. With Account Abstraction, on the other hand, we can finally unlock crypto’s potential for mass adoption as the panelists discussed:

We don’t have a list of other talks we enjoyed at Devcon. However, you should check out this thread where others shared their favourite talks

🎉 Uniswap voted to deploy on zkSync 2.0!

Uniswap, the leading DeFi Dapp, recently had a community vote to decide whether they should deploy Uniswap v3 to zkSync 2.0. Their response? A resounding YES, PLEASE!

72,421,473 UNI was used to vote for the proposal, with only 120 voting against.

zkSync 2.0 is coming later this month, but no external teams, including Argent, will be able to launch as the Matter Labs team will be conducting stress tests to esnure everything is working as intended. 

Once they’re happy, they’ll begin to onboard teams, but zkSync 2.0 will remain closed for users. Only when everything has been stress tested, then Matter Labs will raise the gate and allow open access for users, which is when the fun begins!

😬 Another devastating hack

This week, Mango Markets - a margin trading and lending dapp on Solana got exploited for around $116M. The exploiter did this by pumping the price of Mango’s native token - MNGO - which is illiquid, making it easy to manipulate and then drained all the liquidity from the protocol.

But what made this hack different from others is that the exploiter then made a governance proposal using the MNGO they manipulated to pull off the attack. This proposal would return some of the stolen funds to ensure that users of Mango wouldn’t lose any money. It also would mean the exploiter would retain around $50M from the attack and face no legal charges…

This story is full of twists and turns and will continue to develop over next week. If you want an in-depth breakdown of what happened, check out this thread:

📚 What we’re reading

zkSync peak into the future - Blockworks

Attack of the zkEVMs! Crypto’s 10x moment - Cointelegraph

CZ’s Principles - CZ

💭 What’s happening at Argent 

Our co-founders were all at Devcon this week, with Julien not only doing a panel with Vitalik but also a presentation on Account Abstraction and why it’s a gamechanger for Dapps. 

We highly recommend that you give it a listen as Julien succinctly explains what AA is and how it’ll improve the UX and security of crypto by 10x!

Julien also published Part 3: WTF is AA, the final piece in this series which covers 5 features enabled by AA that we're working on: Multicall, Session Keys, Social Recovery, Multi-factor authentication & enhanced security, and plug-ins.

We genuinely believe that Account Abstraction is how we bring crypto to the masses. And over the coming months, we’ll be doing lots more content on it. So, if you have any questions or you want to learn more about a specific feature enabled by AA, please get in contact with us!

🤔 Smaller but interesting news

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

Cryptography Fundamentals: Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Can Aztec Win the War on Privacy?

A primer on Managed Liquidity Pools and how we think they're going to be the next big thing in DeFi

When it comes to oracles, you just have to make up your own damn mind

Introducing "DefiLlama: Hacks”

Magic Eden the NFT marketplace, has decided to move to optional royalties

Is Money Just A Game?