Argent Newsletter - Issue #19

Quick summary

gm everyone - welcome to our newsletter, where we cover the latest updates from the Ethereum ecosystem.

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions last week, it was great to hear from many of you and that you liked the new section.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the newsletter, please get in touch and email edward@argent.xyz.

TLDR:

Miners might fork ETH. Ignore it.
Censorship resistance and Ethereum.
Crypto is proving to be an effective way to hedge inflation in developing countries.

Now, let’s get into it all! 🚀

⛔️ Ignore ETH Proof of Work forks

With the Merge less than a month away, a small group of miners has banded together in support of forking the Ethereum blockchain around the time of the Merge to keep an Ethereum Proof of Work blockchain alive.

It’s a disappointment to see as Ethereum, for many years, has planned to switch to Proof of Stake, and that goal is very close to being realized.

This has sparked conversations about “what is ETH PoW”? And, what, if at all, should you do? The best take on this was by Compound’s Founder Robert Leshner, who explained that you should do nothing. And that you should be very careful about ETH PoW.

Argent won’t be supporting any Ethereum Proof of Work forks as we’re excited about the benefits that will come from the Merge. You won’t need to do anything when the Merge happens, and we’ll be sending an email out closer to the time with more details.

🔒 Keeping Ethereum secure and censorship-resistant

After the Tornado Cash sanctions, there’s been a widespread discussion about how censorship resistance Ethereum is. Even the Ethereum core developers are talking about it.

Despite the recent events, it’s clear that the community cares passionately about this issue, and Ethereum is strong enough to fight off base-layer censorship.

One leading example is Coinbase co-founder and CEO saying that in the event of regulatory threats, Coinbase would shut down its Ethereum staking service in order to preserve the integrity of the blockchain network. As one of the largest staking providers, this decision was welcomed by the community.

⚖️ One of crypto’s many uses

In more positive news, one of our favorite Twitter follows shared some very optimistic data about the top 20 economies by crypto adoption. 19 of them are developing countries with significantly lower levels of financial freedom, economic equality, and rule of law.

But why does this matter?

It shows how crypto is being embraced as a way to escape government overreach and poor monetary policy that has seen inflation destroy local currencies. Put differently, crypto is slowly becoming a great equalizer between richer and poorer nations as financial services become more accessible.

However, there’s still lots to do to encourage people to escape intermediaries like centralized exchanges in favor of self-custody.

📚 What we’re reading

Why I Wrote PGP - Phil Zimmermann

ETH-flexive - Arthur Hayes

Analysis: What is and what is not a sanctionable entity in the Tornado Cash case- Coin Center

💭 What’s happening at Argent

This week we co-wrote a piece with Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync on why Account Abstraction it will be game-changing for crypto adoption.

“AA lets you build self-custody wallets that rival the experience of the best new bank apps. But owned by you and accessible to everyone, everywhere.

With zkSync’s native implementation of AA, Dapps and wallets will vastly improve UX and security for their users.”

Native account abstraction on ZK rollups promises scalability, security, and a great UX, that’s why we believe it’s a recipe for the mainstream adoption of crypto.

We also co-hosted a Twitter Space with Influence, a grand strategy space MMO built on StarkNet, where our Product Lead for Argent X, Ismael, spoke about building for the masses, account abstraction, session keys and much more!

Finally, if you want a good laugh this weekend, before you go back to work, check out this funny meme we did. We hope it puts a smile on your face!