This week, the Thesis team, which is behind the TBTC project, announced they had raised $7.7 M via a token sale. TBTC is a project which aims to create a trust minimized bridge allowing Bitcoin to be transferred to the Ethereum network.

On Thursday, March 12th, 2020, as the seriousness of the emerging covid19 pandemic began to set in around the world, global markets sold off. Stocks, bonds, precious metals, and commodities all dropped precipitously. Crypto was not immune.

It's mid-morning on Friday, March 20th, 2020…

In recent weeks, a debate has been reignited amongst members of the Ethereum community over whether or not to change the mining algorithm used on the network.

Earlier this month, the smart contract based lending protocol called Fulcrom, which is built on top of Ethereum by the team at bZx, was exploited on two separate occasions. In total, nearly $1 Million worth of ETH was taken. In both instances, the attacker (or attackers) leveraged so-called "flash loans" to manipulate markets and make off with Ether.

Last weekend, from February 14th through 16th, several thousand enthusiasts gathered in Colorado's capital for the third annual ETHDenver conference and hackathon.

This week, the Aztec Protocol went live on the Ethereum mainnet. Aztec is a smart contract toolkit for building privacy centric assets on top of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

This week, the total value of the Dai stable coin held in PoolTogether— a smart contract based "no loss" lottery built on Ethereum— reached $1 Million for the first time.

This week, in tech news outside the cryptocurrency world, Reuters reported that Apple scrapped plans for end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups under pressure from the FBI.

This week, The Plasma Group announced they are pivoting away from their state channel based layer 2 scaling solution, choosing instead to pursue a scaling solution using Optimistic Rollups. The public benefit company has also rebranded under the name "Optimism.”

The New Year is here, and Build Blockchain is back to break down dense technical topics, along with their implications, in an approachable manner. I hope you're ready, because 2020 is shaping up to be a critical year for crypto. A number of high profile projects, many of which have been under development for years, are set to ship sometime in the next twelve months.

As 2019 comes to a close, plenty of outlets will be recapping the biggest stories of the year. From DeFi to Libra, the most obvious stories have been thoroughly discussed. In this year's final edition of this newsletter, I'd like to do something different. What were the most underrated and under-covered stories in crypto this year, relative to their potential importance and impact?

This week, the Zcash network — known for using a mind bending form of cryptography called zero knowledge proofs to enable privacy preserving transactions — successfully executed an upgrade hardfork.

Lord knows there's plenty to be dismayed by in the crypto world right now. In the spirit of the season, though, I'd like to spend a little time engendering a sense of gratitude for decentralized cryptonetworks, and for the whole community of enthusiasts, technologists, and early adopters that has coalesced around them.

This week saw the successful launch of Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD), the upgraded version of the decentralized, dollar-pegged Dai stablecoin built with smart contracts on Ethereum.

Two years after "The DAO" was hacked, leading to a hardfork that recovered the stolen funds but split the Ethereum community, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are undergoing a renaissance.

In the coming weeks, two new blockchain networks will launch, and both are positioning themselves as practical alternatives that combine and improve upon the best parts of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

On October 10th of this year, the team behind the MetaMask browser wallet announced an upcoming change which may prove pivotal for the advancement of the Ethereum ecosystem.

This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the United States Congress for a marathon six hour session, ostensibly to discuss the company's digital currency project, Libra.