Argent Newsletter - Issue #9

gm - our thoughts are with Ukraine, where some of our team (and their families) are based. This week we highlight some of the organizations helping there, and the role crypto is playing, before we go into a broader crypto news roundup.

Crypto community 🤝 Ukraine 

The Ukrainian government is using crypto for fundraising, with more than $50m donated so far. The ease with which people can contribute shows crypto's advantages for international payments compared to the legacy financial system.

Ukraine has now announced it will sell NFTs to raise further funding. 

The Ukrainian government's efforts prove that governments and crypto don't always have to be at odds with each other. It's a welcome change after the issues in Canada that we highlighted in our last issue. 

One area of concern for some crypto critics was whether crypto could be used to bypass sanctions. This is extremely unlikely, as Jake Chervinsky, a well-respected crypto lawyer, explains (TLDR crypto is too small and transparent for Russia's purposes). 

Our last point on the topic of Ukraine is to raise awareness of Helping to Leave, an organization helping refugees leave Ukraine safely, including a family member of one of our team. They’re doing a fantastic job. If you need their help or want to support them, you can do so here. 

🧱 BUIDLing for the future

Turning to other topics, ETH Denver was recently held. Its several thousand attendees highlighted how quickly the community has grown in the last year or two (and how hungry people are to meet up after so many months of covid). 

If you missed it, check out this Bankless video.

Our product manager, Matt, was there and recommended these three talks:

1.  StarkNet: The Rise of L2 Native dApps by Louis Guthmann 
2. A Rollup Vision for Ethereum: zk vs optimistic - panel 
3. The Rollup Developer Experience - panel 

You can find all the videos from ETH Denver on YouTube.

⚡️ ZkSync 2.0 testnet is out!

ZkSync, the Layer 2 scaling solution we’re building our mobile wallet on, announced that their public testnet is live. This is the first EVM-compatible ZK Rollup on a public testnet, meaning smart contracts from Ethereum L1 can easily be moved onto zkSync. There’s a blossoming ecosystem being built, backed by a huge $200m fund to help builders. 

Here’s Alex Gluchowski, CEO & Co-Founder of Matter Labs and zkSync, explaining the importance of this:

🚀 StarkNet growth

Argent X, our StarkNet wallet, which is currently for developers, hit 40,000 downloads! There's so much going on with StarkNet that keeping up can be difficult. That’s why we wanted to share two Twitter accounts that fix this: Swagtimus and Odin Free. They include Dapp developments, how to get involved, and interesting conversations, like this one with Argent co-founder Julian Niset discussing why account abstraction matters for adoption. 

The slides, event details, and resources can be found here.

🎧 Our favorite podcasts & reads

Instead of podcast recommendations, we think the ETH Denver talks will make for the best recommendation this week.

To read, we have an article by crypto-journalist Laura Shin discovering the identity of who hacked The DAO back in 2016. The DAO hacker stole 3.64m ETH - 5% of the total ETH supply at the time. The identity of the hacker was unknown for years - until now!

📣 Argent announcement of an announcement

Next week we have something big in store. Before you ask, no, we won’t be doing a token, but we are hoping to make a splash across social media. If you haven’t got your friends and family signed up, next week will be the perfect time to get them to join.