This week brought the publication of an important new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP).

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Facebook's internal blockchain project (codenamed "Libra") is aiming to be a full blown payments network.

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) has announced they are rolling out a major upgrade to their smart contract based registrar system next week.

This week, Binance launched the mainnet of its own blockchain-- Binance Chain.

This week, an active member of the Zcash community proposed a "friendly fork."

Coinbase has announced a new feature for its "Coinbase Custody" customers: staking as a service.

The privacy focused Monero network successfully executed another of its semi-annual maintenance hardforks.

This week marked the mainnet launch of the Cosmos Hub, the first piece of the broader Cosmos ecosystem its creators hope to enable.

There wasn't much technical news to focus on this week in the blockchain world. Rather than weaving a narrative where there isn't one, or recounting less technical happenings that other outlets cover adequately, I've decided to focus this issue on the biggest player in Decentralized Finance ("DeFi") ecosystem: Maker.

The long-planned, twice-delayed Constantinople network upgrade has successfully activated on the Ethereum main network.

On February 12th, a well known Canadian Bitcoin hacker who goes by @nvk on Twitter revealed he'd sent $40 worth of BTC via amateur shortwave radio.

Protocol Labs has open sourced the code behind Filecoin, which is still under heavy development.

This week, the team at the Zcash Company revealed a critical security vulnerability which had existed in Zcash.

Last week Michael Cordner, one of the lead developers behind the Grin cyrptocurrency, initiated a fundraising campaign to pay for his work.

On January 16th, the Grin mainnet was launched and the first block was mined.

Ethereum core developers were forced to delay this week's network upgrading hardfork, codenamed Constantinople, after a security vulnerability was discovered at the 11th hour.

This week saw a successful 51% attack against the Ethereum Classic network.

This week saw the mainnet launch of a new cryptocurrency called Beam.

The team at Coin Metrics published an extremely well researched and clearly written report detailing a discrepancy they discovered in the Bitcoin Private blockchain.

Bloomberg published a scoop reporting that Facebook is developing "a cryptocurrency that will let users transfer money on its WhatsApp messaging app."