Argent Newsletter - Issue #27

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. Is DeFi under attack?
2. zkSync 2.0 goes live next week. We tell you what you need to know
3. Account Abstraction explained in plain, simple English

Now let’s get into it all and more! 🚀

🤔 What’s going on with DeFi regulations?

Regulations are often a hot topic in crypto that gets the community talking, and this week was no different. Everyone was debating the proposed US bill - DCCPA - which outlines how the CFTC would regulate the crypto industry.

For many, this bill is viewed as an attack on DeFi as it would result in centralization.

Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX is one of the people assisting with this regulation, and he laid out his thoughts about how he wants to improve consumer protection:

But this received lots of pushback from the community. The best response came from Erik Voorhees', who explained why this regulation is harmful in its current form and provided suggestions to improve it.

👀 zkSync 2.0 goes live next week

zkSync is the Layer 2 scaling solution we use in our mobile wallet, and it’s already providing quick and cheap transactions for anyone, anywhere!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t support smart contracts, which limits what you can do.

That’s what zkSync 2.0 fixes, and it goes live next week for the Matter Labs team to test and iterate.

Only Matter Labs will be able to use the network at first, with no external teams, including Argent, able to use it at launch.

Once the initial waves of tests get completed, only then will dapp developers get onboarded. Finally, after everything has been battle-tested, that’s when users will be able to gain access to zkSync 2.0 and the over 250 dapps building on the network.

📚 What we’re reading

A Response to SBF and Principled Crypto Regulation - Erik Voorhees

Dynamics among categories of creative endeavors - Guiltygyoza

Quick post Devcon update on EIP4844 - Jesse Pollak

A thread on progressive scaling with smart contract application-specific chains - Ray Zhu

💭 What’s happening at Argent 

This week, we shared a great thread on Account Abstraction, explaining in plain English - what it is and 5 features that we’re actively working on.

It was a hit, as many in the community enjoyed reading about it, and if you haven’t already, make sure you check it out.

Over the coming months, we’ll be doing more content on Account Abstraction, explaining why we think it’s the route to bringing crypto to the masses. If there’s a particular feature enabled by Account Abstraction - like multicall or session keys - that you want to learn more about, please let us know so we can ensure we get that covered!

🤔 Smaller but interesting things

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

On-chain identity has been a hot topic for the last few months. What does identity look like in Web3, and what infrastructure is needed to support that vision?

The Parallel ecosystem explained...

A deck to simplify the narrative of rollups

Structuring Blockspace Derivatives

Joseph Delong's Guide to Developer Success in Web3

DeFi Llama’s yield dashboard is now live and available for free