Argent Newsletter - Issue #29

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. One year of the Argent newsletter!
2. New roadmap for Ethereum
3. We launched “Meet the Dapp” for StarkNet

Now let’s get into it all and more! 🚀

🎉 Celebrating one year of the Argent newsletter!

We launched our newsletter one year ago to answer a question friends and family frequently ask us: what articles, podcasts, and news do you recommend? 

We’re incredibly pleased that we’ve been able to answer that question over the past year and share amazing resources with you. So much has happened since we launched the newsletter that we thought it would be a nice idea to share the top 5 pieces of content that the Argent community has found most interesting.

Taking the top spot comes as no surprise is arguably the best podcast of the year - The World According to Punk 6529 with Real Vision. Over 3 hours, learn from one of the best in the industry about the future of NFTs, the risk of centralization in crypto, how fashion and NFTs blend together, and so much more.

In second place is this excellent article by entrepreneur and investor Cole South explaining why he no longer owns any BTC and why he’s much happier owning ETH. Cole describes his concerns with BTC, like it not being a productive asset, how the BTC community is more focused on tribalism than innovation and why there may be security and decentralization issues with BTC in the future as the block reward gets smaller. It makes for a great read and only gets you more excited about the future of Ethereum!

Coming in at third is this handy thread for making the transition into web3 as a non-technical person. With Layer 2s taking off, new and exciting use cases emerging, and crypto startups raising money, it’s the perfect time for you to break into web3! (psst - we’re hiring non-technical roles)

Number four is our first piece in a three-part series on Account Abstraction, explaining what it is and why it’s the route to bringing crypto to the masses. With Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and many others discussing Account Abstraction, it’s become one of the hottest topics in crypto!

Finally, taking the fifth spot is this optimistic piece about Web3 Use Cases: The Future by Packy McCormick. Despite the market taking a turn for the worse this year, that doesn’t change the fact that crypto will transform society in many different ways, as you will learn in this article.

Onto next year, where we will no doubt cover many more exciting topics as the future of crypto is bright!

🗓 There’s an updated roadmap for Ethereum

This week Vitalik shared the new roadmap for Ethereum and clarified the big changes since the previous version. If you want to know more about Ethereum and where it’s heading - this is key!

If you haven’t seen this diagram before, the now 6, formerly 5 parts: The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge (new), The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge are all happening in parallel and not separately.

💭 What’s happening at Argent 

This week we launched "Meet the Dapp," where you get to learn about StarkNet Dapps from teams building them. We started with Argent X - the most popular and only open-source wallet for StarkNet. We explained what it is and why you should be using it to explore StarkNet.

Why aren’t we covering zkSync Dapps? We will integrate zkSync Dapps when 2.0 becomes available to users. Read more about the zkSync 2.0 timeline.

There will be no newsletter next week as the writer (and the newsletter) will be away on a short holiday.

🤔 Smaller but interesting things

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

How RTFKT built an NFT empire

A story about a chart, a cookie, hubris, social proofing, and the future of DeFi

Why the "Veil of Abstraction" thesis is wrong

Vitalik Buterin on crypto regulation

Another Day in Crypto #101 - Nikolai