Week in Ethereum News

Sep 29 issue

Eth News and Links

Eth1

• Beam Sync: gets all block headers, executes a recent block using the witness and subsequently fills in state as it executes blocks by getting data from peers. From the Trinity team
• Gary Rong reduces disk i/o 10x during Geth full sync by patching levelDB
• evmone v0.2.0 – 66% faster code processing and execution
• Parity v2.5.9-stable and v2.6.4-beta adds block numbers for the Istanbul testnet forks
• Hyperledger Besu v1.2.4 also adds testnet block numbers

Beam Sync could be a bit of a gamechanger. I would not be surprised if it were quickly adopted by other clients, as it is a good option to give your users. The Trinity team has been working on it for a few months. It is not far off from a stateless client.

Eth2

• “Wasm execution engine [running in] the shard chain/client we built in lighthouse”
• STARK-proving low-degree-ness of a data availability root
• Cross shard messaging in Casper CBC
• Lodestar Eth2 client update, in the weeds on networking
• A guide to getting started on the Prysmatic testnet
• Ben Edgington’s review of the Eth2 interop lockin

It’s exciting that ConsenSys’s Quilt has managed to patch together the Scout ewasm engine into their Sheth shard chain client in lighthouse. Otherwise this time post-eth2 interop retreat has been a bit light on news, but that’s not surprising when 1) we’re pre-devcon and 2) people are firming up all the networking stuff

Layer 2

• Connext v2 is on mainnet. Natively supports wallets, more trustless
• Hierarchical Plasma
• Matic’s next release will include Plasma predicates

Connext on mainnet, big step forward for state channels!

Stuff for developers

• Yakindu statechart tools for model-driven Solidity development
• Create a Solidity tutorial (“workshop”) in Remix
• ConsenSys Diligence’s Alex Wade found a bug in the Vyper compiler
• Add comments to your dapp with 3Box plugin
• Recreating geth’s event library step by step as a way to learn Go
• Implementing holographic consensus in Aragon, pt 3
• Intro to using web3j
• Get a UX audit at Devcon
• Mass NFT minting with Cargo. Interesting backstory to the product.
• “two types of bytecode on Ethereum but five different names”
• Brownie v1 – Python framework for Eth dev
• Ethereum.org now has a page for Python devs. Submit those pull requests

Love the fact that the ethereum.org releases are improving. It’s not slick, but functional and community built is awesome.

Ecosystem

• The Fairwin Ponzi scheme has critical security vulnerabilities. The vulnerability got fully announced today, fortunately about half of the ETH has been withdrawn in the past couple days. Also relevant: Daniel Luca’s tweetstorm.
• Guide to run a full node on a RaspberryPi 4 (model B)
• DeFi Summit vids
• Dataviz of mining pool % over time
• The most popular names in the ENS auction
• Ethereal Blocks hackathon winners and submissions

Does it bum you out like it bums me out that our network is clogged because of some poorly-constructed Ponzi? It’s a worthwhile reminder that technology is just a tool that gets used as often for bad as for good. With any luck we can tip the scales toward the latter, but it’s still an uphill slog.

Meanwhile another sad fact of life: mining pools are centralizing over time. That data viz is also a bummer.

Enterprise

• WWF and ConsenSys develop Impactio, a nonprofit funding platform
• uPort, Onfido and PwC to partner on identities in UK financial services
• Hong Kong traded Link REIT partners with Allinfra to tokenize a solar installation

Standards and governance topics

• ERC1620 money streaming is in last call
• Why wrapping TheDao in Delaware LLC governance makes sense

Application layer

• Maker: upgrading to multi-collateral Dai from current single-collateral Dai (it will be mandatory, though you’ll likely have a few months when it happens), and an update on the new Oasis DEX – trade ETH for MCD assets
• Rune floats ETH purity assets (ie, single-collateral Dai) in MCD
• DeFi Saver had a couple CDPs get liquidated. While they’re covering the cost, it’s always worth thinking about the risks for any product you use.
• Nuo v2 margin trading
• Golem chooses a metric for how often to verify wasm computation: reputation combined with a user chosen variable
• How to use SetProtocol if the front end is down. More apps should do this
• Dolomite launches exchange on Loopring with negative maker fees and a fiat onramp through Wyre.

Negative maker fees is super interesting. They call it a dex, but it’s hard to exactly call it one when you have to do a legacy web account name and password. Meanwhile, every week it becomes harder to understsate just how fundamental Maker has become to the Eth app layer.

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• IMF: the rise of stablecoins
• Spencer Dinwiddie wants to tokenize a portion of the next 3 years of his NBA contract. Minimum $150k investment though.
• Kik to shut down Kik. Bit of a headscratcher to me.
• Miners are accumulating ETH
• Nonfungible ERC20 tokens

The Dinwiddie thing is very interesting. It actually makes some sense for all involved. He can get more money upfront on his 3 year dealwhich he appears to want to buy crypto, incentives are still aligned, and there’s some upside for an investor as he may be able to opt-out in year 3 and make more for him and his investors.

Kik shutting down Kik is so bizarre to me. I think so many people in crypto feel like they’d like to defend Kik, but Kik just makes it hard. Could they really not run a barebones staff and pay for servers? Why do they need money to run Kin, which is essentially just a fork of Stellar’s permissioned chain? And the whole “we’re one of the world’s most used cryptocurrencies” is one of those things that no one I know in crypto believes. It also seems bearish for Telegram’s new token. Apparently having a messenger app doesn’t really do that much to make people want to use your token or your app.

General

• Chiesa, Ojha, Spooner: Fractal efficient recursive composition of post-quantum SNARKs
• Vitalik: understanding PLONK
• Understanding gas accounting and the fee market
• Filecoin hopes to launch mainnet in March 2020
• Major Lightning Network vulnerability allowed BTC to be stolen
• Your TV is tracking you

The TV tracking isn’t surprising, but it is infuriating.

Meanwhile snarktember (h/t to Mikerah, I believe) is wrapping up. Lots of ZK research published. That graph in Vitalik’s PLONK article is helpful for thinking about the different tradeoffs.

Meanwhile I really want to believe that Filecoin launches in March 2020 and we get a data layer. I don’t think I believe it, but I want to. We really need more secure and censorship-resistant front ends.

This is very likely to be the last annotated edition of the newsletter. Thanks for buying the NFT.

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

• Sep 30 – Gitcoin CLR matching ends
• Oct 2 – Istanbul fork on Ropsten testnet at block #6485846
• Oct 4 – Enterprise Ethereum in Banking Summit (Seoul)
• Oct 5-6 – Cryptoeconomics System Summit (Boston)
• Oct 7 – ENS workshop (Osaka)
• Oct 8-11 – Devcon (Osaka). Link to agenda.  Social events: OffDevcon and Kickback
• Oct 19-20 – Crosslink (Taipei)
• Oct 26 – Zero Knowledge Summit (SF)
• Nov 1 – Ledger EU apply for 200k euro startup funding
• Nov 5-6 – Decentralized insurance D1Conf (Malta)
• Nov 8-10 – ETHWaterloo
• Jan 1 – Augur v1 cutoff

If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys

This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.

I own 100% Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been me.

If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum,” then here’s a hint: don’t email me. Do put it on Reddit.

It’s amazing to me how many people email me when every issue has a link at the bottom saying not to email me to get in the newsletter.

If you’re unhappy with editorial decisions or anything that I have written in this issue, feel free to tweet at me.

This headline stays as long as so many people continue to link to old URL and not the right one: weekinethereumnews.com

Archive on the web if you’re linking to it: 

Follow me on Twitter, because most of what is linked here gets tweeted first: @evan_van_ness

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Sep 22 issue

Eth News and Links

Eth1

• Geth v1.9.5 – hot fix release for a larger 1.9.4 maintenance release that sets the blocks for the Ropsten, Rinkeby and Görli testnet forks
• Parity v2.6.3 beta and v2.5.8 stable – Istanbul-ready but without blocks set
• Nethermind v1.0.8 – set for Istanbul
• Latest core devs call. Live tweeted notes.
• Perez, Livshits: attack resource metering in EVM. Bring on 1884’s repricing.
• BloXroute says their mainnet test shows they can reduce block propagation time by 25%

Deciding to do another annotated issue was easy because I didn’t think I had much to say this week. We’ll see.

Core devs call locked in the blocks for all the testnet forks. Meanwhile an academic paper again confirmed that we do need some opcode repricing because we are at some risk of a DOS attack.

The BloXroute thing is pretty interesting, and has gathered relatively little attention. I’ve done zero digging in on the tech or who pays for this, but it seemed worth including.

Eth2

• Danny Ryan: Eth2 interop in review. Check out the progress made on networking, tools, and running on raspberry pi’s.
• Latest What’s New in Eth2, discussion of BLS sig standardization
• Latest Eth2 implementers call. Notes from Ben Edgington and Pooja Ranjan
• Prysmatic client update – all about faster BLG sigs
• Alternate phase 2 architecture proposal

Danny did the formal writeup of Eth2 interop locking. Pretty clear that BLS sigs is an important issue – Lighthouse already reduced their BLG sigs by ~10x iirc, which is why it is likely the most performant client at the moment. Though there’s still time to go and we’ll see what the results are when proper benchmarking gets done.

Layer 2

• Matter Labs releases their zk rollup code
• Hijacking routes in payment channel networks. arxiv paper showing how to DOS attack Lightning Network
• OmiseGo’s More Viable Plasma

I generally don’t include when people open source their code (just often isn’t newsworthy), but Matter’s zk rollup code seemed like an exception.

Stuff for developers

• Debugging Solidity with Remix and Ganache
• Decentralized storage with 3box for Solidity tutorials from within Remix
• Terminal, dev and manage artifacts in a unified workspace
• Zabo, a wrapper for any wallet/interface
• Get started with ColonyJS
• Austin Griffith’s Signatorio, a simple way sign, verify, and share messages signed with your Eth keys
• Intro to the AZTEC toolkit: how to use their zk proofs

Always fascinating to me to see the ebb and flow of stuff in the dev tools section. What is production ready, what is announcements of projects more than finished product. I struggle a little bit with this and the criteria for inclusion arguably changes issue to issue depending on how long this section is.

Ecosystem

• Gas limit has moved up around 10m per block, so we’re at all time highs in terms of throughput, and puts us in the low to mid 30s for possible transactions per second. However it seems like much of that gas has been used by a ponzi scheme marketed in Asia.
• List of ENS names that resolve to TOR sites
• Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin interview at Ethereal Tel Aviv
• Gitcoin CLR matching is live, and there will be additional 1:1 matching for $50 grants
• ethereum.org dev update. Sam Richards leading web dev, website translated into 17 languages, specific pages for Java devs and enterprise

Translating stuff into other languages has historically been one of Ethereum’s weaker points. It’s good to see it happening and we should all probably do a better job of praising the translators.

I’ve got about 13 ETH to distribute from these annotated editions (thank you!) and certainly some will go to Gitcoin’s grant matching.

Enterprise

• Complete transaction privacy using Kaleido’s zero knowledge proof services
• Manage identities on Hyperledger Besu
• Harbor tokenizes 100m of existing real estate funds
• Deutsche Bank joins JPMorgan’s IIN built on Quorum

Standards and governance topics

• ERC2280: erc20 extension for native meta transactions support
• ERC2294: Explicit bound to Chain ID size
• ProgPoW was again largely debated by the community this week, with several places trying to catalog pros and cons. I wonder how many miners know that in the next few months, they can transcode video on Livepeer on their GPUs without loss of hashrate?
• Get compensated when anyone uses your deployed code?
• Aragon having an interesting conversation about whether the current system of voting on grants is the best way to fund working on their stack

The oddest part about the latest ProgPoW flareup is that it was sparked by Bob Summerwill uninviting Kristy-Leigh Minehan from the ETC Summit. I thought it was a strange decision to be honest, though the potential licensing issue from anon contributors is an interesting possible attack vector. I’m skeptical that it’s really an attack – who do you sue? – but worth considering.

I’m fairly skeptical of this “get paid when someone uses your code” idea. (Interestingly NEAR is going to use this idea, so relatively soon we should get some data on how it works in the wild). So far, we’d have given even more money to exit scammers and Ponzi schemes. Perhaps it would have a positive effect overall? It would certainly change the incentives, and that’s worth thinking through.

The Aragon thread is also super fascinating. Alignment of incentives is hard.

Application layer

• Balancer, a “non-custodial portfolio manager, liquidity provider, and price sensor” using automated market makers. The new thing from Nikolai
• Maker and Tether will be added to Compound
• A tour of the many flavors of Dai
• Should there be non-trustless assets in multi-collateral Dai?
• Why did the Synthetix attacker get his balance deleted? Because his frontrunning got frontrun
• Nexus Mutual tracker
• Another week, another Set: 26dayEMA
• AtStake, an escrow app with an internal reputation system. 2 person agreements where ETH/tokens are later programmatically distributed. Disputes by pre-agreed 3rdparty
• Hoard compiler on Golem Unlimited
• Codefi (that’s ConsenSys DeFi) releases DeFi Score, an open source framework for evaluating DeFi risk.

Nikolai returns post-Maker! It’s like a general purpose Uniswap, very interesting, not sure I’ve really thought through it yet. re: MCD, I’ve made peace with non-trustless assets in MCD, to me the question is “what is the max %?” and I think it should be fairly low. But non-correlation is important.

Codefi shows a renewed ConsenSys focus on DeFi. I’m pretty interested to see how this evolves.

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• Neufund’s first retail security token offering of Greyp, an electric bike maker
• first draft of the legal agreement for an Income Share Agreement for American university
• A Fee Flippening occurred this week. This has happened before, but the magnitudes of difference in fee volume between ETH/BTC and every other chain it underscores how only Bitcoin and Ethereum have any traction whatsoever.
• SEC charges ICObox for selling a security and broker activity
• Steven Nerayoff and Michael Hlady arrested for extortion of a company that did a token sale. Nerayoff once incorrectly claimed to be a “co-creator” of Ethereum.
• Ether is the best model for money

That Nerayoff complaint is crazy. If even half of it is true, that’s really awful. It makes me wonder if 2017 was even worse than I realized.

General

• Marlin by Chiesa, Hu, Maller, Mishra, Vesely, and Ward. Compared to other SNARKs, small proof sizes and fast verifications, however it requires large Fast Fourier Transforms
• BitPay to support Ethereum
• Everyone’s skeptical EOS predictions have been proven true.
• From Zero to DeFi Hero: a guide for crypto noobs to learn enough to earn high DeFi interest rates
• Maker and LoomNetwork creating bridges to take Dai to other chains
• Cryptoeconomics.study chapter 3
• If you didn’t want to spend ETH to get the 3 year anniversary NFT, Unlock now has a credit card onramp. I did another annotated edition which anyone who has the NFT can read.

The BitPay CEO tweeted that ETH was just an ETC testnet about 18 months ago, so it was a bit of a turnaround for him. Market reality, I suppose: he was clear that clients requested it, presumably because of stablecoins.

Thanks for reading these 4 annotated editions. They are likely to be the end, though you never know. I had planned to do a Unisocks style curve for these NFTs but ultimately it proved to be more work than was worthwhile. I thought it would’ve been a neat experiment in bifurcating any the value reading the annotations and the collectible value.

🎂 3 year anniversary 🎂

Just to repeat the advertisement immediately above: you can buy the limited edition NFT for 0.11 Eth which will unlock the annotated edition.

All proceeds will be back into Ethereum somehow, likely donated to a public good, at my discretion.

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

• Sep 24 – Eth2 staking pool Rocket Pool testnet beta starts
• Sep 27 – ErasureCon (password: information) (SF)
• Sep 28 – First ENS short name auctions end
• Sep 30 – Gitcoin CLR matching ends
• Oct 4 – Enterprise Ethereum in Banking Summit (Seoul)
• Oct 5-6 – Cryptoeconomics System Summit (Boston)
• Oct 7 – ENS workshop (Osaka)
• Oct 8-11 – Devcon (Osaka) and Devcon social events calendar
• Oct 19-20 – Crosslink (Taipei)
• Nov 1 – Ledger EU apply for 200k euro startup funding
• Nov 5-6 – Decentralized insurance D1Conf (Malta)
• Nov 8-10 – ETHWaterloo (applications open)
• Jan 1 – Augur v1 cutoff

If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys

This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.

I own 100% Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been me.

If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum,” then here’s a hint: don’t email me. Do put it on Reddit.

It’s amazing to me how many people email me when every issue has a link at the bottom saying not to email me to get in the newsletter.

If you’re unhappy with editorial decisions or anything that I have written in this issue, feel free to tweet at me.

This headline stays as long as so many people continue to link to old URL and not the right one: weekinethereumnews.com

Archive on the web if you’re linking to it: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-september-22-2019/

Follow me on Twitter, because most of what is linked here gets tweeted first: @evan_van_ness

Did you get forwarded this newsletter?  Sign up to receive the weekly email

Sep 15th issue

Eth1

• Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.28 – get synced in an hour with BeamSync
• EthereumJS VM v4.1, ready for the Istanbul upgrade
• ProgPoW hardware audit by Bob Rao after the Least Authority software audit released the previous week. Unclear what next steps are.

Eth2

• Interop week is over, but the results are spectacular: seven Eth2 clients talking to each other. This was the last major hurdle before clients focus on optimizations, auditing, and UX in preparation for launch.
• Nimbus has a mostly pre-interop client update: exit mechanics, better monitoring, and Nimplay – a nim DSL for Ethereum code.

It’s a relatively light issue for the layer1/layer2 infrastructure, and heavy on the apps/business/zk. It’s actually doing these annotations that made me realize how understated it originally was that 7 eth2 clients are talking to each other.

It’s still understated, what can I say? Formats have limitations.

It’s obviously huge that networking has happened for the Eth2 clients, and 7 of them talking to each other at that. Thanks to Joseph Delong whose idea it was to have an interop lockin, and I think also organized it while Joseph Lubin picked up the tab for it. Amusing Delong tweet:

My pre-#interop pep talk for @JonnyRhea: “You know if we don’t pull this off we’re fired, right?” *nervous laughter*

Stuff for developers

• Patterns to fight front-running
• Factory contracts improve security
• Airswap quickly found a vulnerability in deployed mainnet code, 10 addresses affected that need to revoke authorizations.
• VSCode plugin for Surya’s interactive call graphs
• Truffle v5.0.36 – better stack trace
• Drizzle v1.5 – new monorepo and Vue plugin
• Interact with mainnet contracts in Ganache
• How Melon set up a monitoring tool with The Graph
• Graphene v1 to use Intel SGX from Linux
• decentralized Solidity source code verification
• Dedicated IPFS networks
• POA Network’s TokenBridge adds arbitrary message relaying
• Loredana demo on dTyped Solidity
• Tranquility: what Ethworks wants and is planning for a new Eth language
• An update on Formality, it is now “usable… ish,” compiler planned by the end of the year.

Always interesting to me how things come out in bunches. Like people who want to write a new language for Ethereum. Christian had an interesting POC to decentralize source code verification. Also the “interactive with mainnet contracts for testing using Ganache” is probably obvious but I didn’t know about it and I know I wasn’t the only one. Neat time saver.

Ecosystem

• A writeup of the ZeroPool zk anon multi-asset pool from EthBoston
• Perpetual Powers of Tau ceremony
• Swarm monthly update – now supports bandwidth incentivization
• 3Box Followers – an open web3 social graph
• An update on Universal Login with Avsa demo
• Gas limit is creeping up as a community campaign to convince miners to raise the limit appears to have succeeded. It’s got up to almost 8.4m but is at 8.2x as I type, but gas prices haven’t budged (no link)

The gas limit is a good example of why it’s a shame that “eth1x” got mislabeled and the sustainability idea just became “Eth1” improvements. Should we raise the gas limit? It’s clear many in the community think we should, including (it seems clear to me) Vitalik. I bet the Geth and Parity team disagree, though I didn’t hear them say so. Perhaps because they want to stay away from politics – especially the Parity team. Personally I’m ok with nudging it up a bit from 8m, but I think something like 8.5m is where I’d like to see it (no quantitive reasons, just risk-aversion but wanting low fees), but it seems like miners are likely to push it quite a bit higher than that. We’ll see, it is a debate that may not be finished.

Meanwhile zero knowledge stuff is always hot. I never am sure exactly how to categorize it and frankly it probably needs its own section. And I’m excited about 3Box Followers. And any potential key management solution is huge – this is how we grow web3 beyond being niche.

Enterprise

• Banco Santander with the first end-to-end on-chain $20m bond and John Whelan’s thoughts on the future of security tokens
• Joe Lubin joins Hyperledger governing board.
• Voting isn’t just a problem in onchain governance: low turnout leads to IBM holding a majority of Hyperledger’s technical steering committee
• Hyperledger Besu v1.2.3 (formerly known as Pantheon)

The $20m bond is a little exaggerated, but a little bit not. Big banking groups don’t tend to take risks. Other folks have done similar stuff, but Santander’s did the entire thing in crypto end-to-end (though both sides of the transaction, much like previous enterprise POCs). Congrats to John Whelan and team.

Meanwhile Hyperledger continues to move back closer to Ethereum, likely drawn by the fact that clients are realizing they should be building on Ethereum.

Standards and governance topics

• ERC2269: fiat representation standard
• ERC2270: generate Ethereum accounts from digital ID

Application layer

• Augur v1 cutoff changed to Jan 1, contingent on a progressively increased Initial Reporter stake
• Gnosis’ Sight prediction market is in beta
• Set launches a 12 day exponential moving average play
• Status v0.13.2 iOS hotfix ahead of a v1 release in q4. v1 is a breaking change that requires deleting the beta versions, so backup your key!
• Kyber adds a fiat onramp using Coindirect
• Completely decentralized marketplace using Turms Message Transport
• Avantgarde to take the lead developing Melon protocol in exchange for MLN
• An opus on Mattereum’s vision
• UMA’s synthetic token builder is live on Rinkeby testnet.
• Dai Savings Rate in multi-collateral Dai
• dydx adds a native ETH/DAI market
• Dai Stability Fee down to 12.5%
• A catalog of the many flavors of Dai. Like EthBoston’s SwanDAI – black swan exposure through synthetics using UMA
• Move your funds from Dharma v1 to v2
• Aragon v0.8 – improved setup flow, new design, email subscriptions for votes

Heckuva app layer section. Augur is doing v2 in January. Gnosis is launching a prediction market product. Maker is closer to MCD. Meanwhile synthetic forms of Dai are proliferating. Half this section was Dai, in some form or another. And Status is getting close to v1 – which I’m very excited about, because I really want a better messenger.

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• The Tether Flippening draws nigh: 300m USDT moved from Bitcoin to Ether
• Seychelles national stock exchange does an IPO of its equity using a security token. On Eth, of course.
• Sparkle, a “redistributive currency,” although paying 3% upfront means you need “about 3x your investment to be contributed before recouping your original contribution”
• Mougayar: Ethereum and the Chinese Bamboo Tree. It’s growing like crazy, just some people can’t see it yet.
• France and Germany joint statement saying they’ll block Facebook’s Libra
• OpenSea’s ERC1155 token marketplace is open

It’s easy to poohpooh the Tether Flippening, but it’s just one more series of events where value is moving away from Bitcoin. Eth price will follow…eventually. ETH needs to be valuable for the security of everything else. Meanwhile lots of experiments and tokens flourishing.

General

• ZCash/ECC’s Sean Bowe discovers HALO: zk proofs with no trusted setup
• StarkWare’s STARK-friendly hash challenges is live
• Matter Labs’ IACR paper: Transparent Polynomial Commitment Scheme with Polylogarithmic Communication Complexity
• Full documentary of Bounties Network’s Bounty for Basura (13m)
• Gemini now offers custody for funds and institutions
• For the 2nd straight week, I did an annotated version of the newsletter. Anyone who has bought the NFT can read it. Same link, you can still buy the NFT. (and you can also use Unlock’s WordPress plugin to easily sell your own) See immediately below:

Last annotation section: look at all these hackathons. I think we’re going to have 4 virtual hackathons (including Kyber-led coalition for the DeFi hackathon) right now. Meanwhile ZK stuff continues to take off. And Gemini gets into the custody game.

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

• Sep 16 – Tachyon accelerator application deadline
• Sep 16-30 Gitcoin CLR matching
• Sep 16-30 Decentraland GameJam hackathon
• Sep 16-27 Graph virtual hackathon
• Sep 23-Oct 6 – Road to Devcon virtual hackathon
• Sep 27 – ErasureCon (password: information) (SF)
• Oct 5-6 – Cryptoeconomics System Summit (Boston)
• Oct 7 – ENS workshop (Osaka)
• Oct 8-11 – Devcon (Osaka) and Devcon social events calendar
• Oct 19-20 – Crosslink (Taipei)
• Nov 5-6 – Decentralized insurance D1Conf (Malta)
• Nov 8-10 – ETHWaterloo
• Jan 1 – Augur v1 cutoff

If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys

This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.

I own 100% Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been me.

If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum,” then here’s a hint: don’t email me. Do put it on Reddit.

It’s amazing to me how many people email me when every issue has a link at the bottom saying not to email me to get in the newsletter.

If you’re unhappy with editorial decisions or anything that I have written in this issue, feel free to tweet at me.

This headline stays as long as so many people continue to link to old URL and not the right one: weekinethereumnews.com

Archive on the web if you’re linking to it: 

Follow me on Twitter, because most of what is linked here gets tweeted first: @evan_van_ness

Did you get forwarded this newsletter?  Sign up to receive the weekly email

Eth News and Links

Eth1

• Geth v1.9.3 – maintenance release with Istanbul upgrade finalized
• Least Authority’s ProgPow security audit, later discussed on core devs call. “We found no major issues and the design appears to function as intended.”
• First call for the finality gadget working group
• Latest core devs call. Live tweeted notes. Oct 2 testnet fork, mainnet in Nov. Lots of blake2b discussion. Next hard fork named “Berlin.”

ProgPoW is set to be in the hard fork after Istanbul, named “Berlin,” as the audit came back relatively clean. There’s another hardware audit coming soon.

The finality gadget working group call is worth listening to. I had it on background but will likely listen again. It’s a bit more complex than I originally assumed. Sounds like it will happen in time though.

Eth2

• A Casper FFG explainer. How it adapts PBFT
• It’s Eth2 networking lockin week
• Games for evaluating liveness in Casper CBC
• Bouncing attack analysis and prevention
• Lighthouse client update – interop with Nimbus, networking to official spec, 50ms slot times with 8 validators
• Prysmatic client update – like Lighthouse, prepping for Eth2 networking lockin

So Eth2 team implementers are up in the Canadian woods hanging out and getting clients to talk to each other. The Casper FFG explainer was really well done. Then there were some discussions of liveness and the decoy flipflop attack that Ryuya Nakamura came up with. As Ben Edgington says, “by no means fatal” but we may see the fork choice rule modified. Nakamura says “We modify [the fork choice rule] so that the start point only changes in the first k slots of every epoch.”

The client updates were basically just “interop to get ready for interop lockin”

Layer 2

• Vitalik: layer 1 techniques on layer 2
• A gentle guide to the OVM, and where CEL is building.
• Latest Plasma implementer call
• IACR paper on lightweight watchtowers

Vitalik has more writing on how he thinks layer2 is ultimately where innovation will flourish. Meanwhile some OVM stuff, which is picking up steam.

Stuff for developers

• Eth2 developer experience survey
• Write your first zk snark using Iden3’s circom and snarkjs libraries
• babyJubJub in Rust
• Groth16 verifier
• Zac Williamson video on PLONK, Aztec’s new snark construction
• Remix IDE v0.8.6
• web3Connect v1.0.0-beta.20 – 92% smaller bundle size, some breaking changes
• Chainshot’s intro to ethers.js tutorial
• filestorage.js for storage on SKALE sidechains
• First time Eth developing on Windows guide
• Build a text notification app with IPFS, Twilio and Eth address for authentication
• Runtime Verification announces work on bounded model checker, a symbolic execution tool as a component of K’s Haskell backend.
• Stop using Solidity’s transfer. Christian Reitwießner’s response: “We have not yet reached a conclusion on that”

As always, a grab bag. lots of snarky stuff. there’s a devex for eth2 survey, as well as Steve Marx’s imperative to stop using Solidity transfer in the face of potentially changing opcode pricing.

Ecosystem

• Mixers and beyond: Semaphore and the MicroMix eth and token mixer (live on Kovan testnet). An outline on making a private DAO with Semaphore
• State of mixers – a report on the tradeoffs and progresses of mixers in our ecosystem
• Mixicles – Juels, Breidenbach, et al paper with Chainlink. Input payments and decide payouts based on oracle results. two or more parties and yield payouts that are conditioned on oracle reports.
• A coin mixer built on Enigma
• Evolution of Dharma – engaging chronicle of how Dharma has navigated the idea maze
• EthBoston submissions and winners. Also two great videos from EthBoston to watch: Albert Ni’s “Ethereum from multiple perspectives” and Raul Jordan’s “Paving the path for the future of Ethereum”

It’s mixer week! Honestly privacy improvements have been long promised on Ethereum, and yet never happened. We put the precompiles in the Byzantium fork 2 years ago and then….just never materialized. Fortunately some folks – Barry, Harry, Jordi, as well as some others – picked up zk stuff.

Such is life in decentralization. Things which would have at least been planned and had action taken…didn’t. Amusing given that Ethereum is a platform to help solve coordination problems. Lots of things happening now as Trent’s report delineates, hopefully we get a couple good solutions with different tradeoffs, but not so bad that the anonymity set gets diluted.

Standards and governance topics

• The LAO: an LLC+TheDAO mashup to be a US-compliant DAO for profit. Ross Campbell’s code for how TheLAO extends Moloch
• Since everyone is launching a DAO: how to launch a (moloch fork) DAO
• ERC2258: Custodial ownership standard

Decent amount of pushback on Twitter about TheLAO. Not shocking, but most people just didn’t like the idea of a legal wrapper. I hope they audit the heck out of those contracts.

Application layer

• Maker’s oracles v2. Also Dai Stability Fee now at 14.5%
• DeFi Saver: automatic CDP liquidation protection
• pooltogether v2 is live
• PoolDai also live: donate the interest from your cDai to a good cause
• With any DeFi product, you should be aware of what risks you’re taking. Ameen writes up the risks to using Compound. Compound CEO Leshner’s response.
• More money markets: Outlet, a wallet aiming to abstract away using the protocols using Plaid as the fiat onramp
• Podcrypt: podcast discovery webapp with recurring Eth donations
• Majority Report: cataloging Augur’s decisions by REP holders, ie LexisNexis/WestLaw for Augur.
• A text based RPG/MUD
• Decentraland gets first casino
• Austin Griffith’s latest DAOG version: Three Queens
• Guesser markets are competitive for NFL games
• SingularDTV’s SNGLS DAO to incentivize content curation
• Gitcoin hits 2m GMV

It’s funny how some weeks there isn’t much in this section, and then other weeks it just overflows. Ebb and flow of the ecosystem, I suppose. Poople ship things to demo at events, etc etc. Or maybe my cutoff level changes weekly?

Lots of stuff on Compound as it is increasingly a standard primitive. I thought Ameen’s article was a bit harsh. For example, “bank run risk” is…poor nomenclature. In a bank run, you don’t ever get your money back. In Compound, you just have to wait some (probably short) period of time. Also, if utilization is at 100% and you can’t withdraw, then that means interest is at the top of the range – currently something like 19%. To be fair, if that is true, then it’s also likely a good time to sell your Dai for Eth. Still, inflammatory naming. As for the rest, Compound is working on it, and so far it seems like they’ve done an amazing job at making the right tradeoffs to get traction.

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• Joel Monegro: Ethereum and the 77 dwarfs. Nobody in blockchain ever got fired for choosing to build on Ethereum.
• Information asymmetry in crypto. web3 moves fast, some aren’t keeping up.
• Mougayar’s PIB framework for comparing crypto tokens
• Paxos launches a gold-backed token that takes a fee at the contract layer on transfer. It’ll be interesting to see if this gets wrapped
• Dan Robinson’s yTokens idea, collateralized fixed-term lending. Zero coupon bonds for a yield curve.

So in the same week that two USV partners took shots at ETH – one of the shots was just rehashed Bitcoin maxi nonsense – Placeholder’s Joel Monegro wrote about how ETH was going to last. Interestingly while I’ve never seen it written publicly, Brad Burnham (one of the original 2 USV founders) now spends most of his time at Placeholder, from what I hear.

Information asymmetry is a real thing. My experience is that most crypto fund managers don’t know very much about Ethereum or keep up with its ecosystem.

yTokens is a pretty cool idea. But will someone build it? The best part is that it could be used as an interest rate oracle. And in fact, that’s ultimately likely to be the best solution to oracles: liquid markets on-chain. Let’s start building them now.

General

• “ETH goes where no Bitcoin has gone before” – William Shatner
• 80k Hours Podcast talks to Vitalik for a few hours (with transcript!). Lots of “what are blockchains good for” conversation.
• China’s digital currency, in the works for 5 years, will be somewhat similar to Libra
• LedgerLive finally supports ERC20 tokens
• Eric Wall says no to Hedera/Hashgraph/whatever it’s called. Followup.
• I think I missed this back then: in June, Jeffrey Berns closed the deal to buy Kirkwood Bank of Nevada. So we should get another crypto-friendly bank, as promised at Devcon.

The Shatner tweet was cool but didn’t seem to take off. I think I RTd when it was over a day old and it had just 20 RTs. Odd given how the Eth community made such a huge deal when he first started saying things about Ethereum. He seems to really be into tech.

re: Hedera. For something that got so much money put into it, I hear so little about it, aside from funds trying to sell their SAFTs.

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

• Sep 9-Oct 21 – Kyber DeFi virtual hackathon
• Sep 10-11 – DeFi Summit (London)
• Sep 15 – Augur v1 cutoff
• Sep 15 – Ethereal Tel Aviv
• Sep 16 – Tachyon accelerator application deadline
• Sep 15-16- StarkWare sessions (Tel Aviv)
• Sep 27 – ErasureCon (password: information) (SF)
• Oct 7 – ENS workshop (Osaka)
• Oct 8-11 – DeVcon (Osaka) and Devcon social events calendar
• Oct 19-20 – Crosslink (Taipei)
• Nov 5-6 Decentralized insurance D1Conf (Malta)
• Nov 8-10 – ETHWaterloo

If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys

This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.

I own 100% Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been me.

If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum,” then here’s a hint: don’t email me. Do put it on Reddit. It’s amazing to me how many people email me when every issue has a link at the bottom saying not to email me to get in the newsletter.

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September 1 edition

Eth News and Links

Re-org: I’ve felt for awhile that the previous arrangement “layer 1” was short changing Eth1 – epsecially when it comes to fork-related EIPs – so I decided to change it up now that we’re in the 4th year of this weekly newsletter. I’m testing the new categories, happy to hear feedback.

Eth1

• There’s an ongoing debate as to how much Eth1 should make breaking changes. In this instance, it’s about opcode repricing which might break code deployed on the chain, even though it is a bad practice to rely on static gas pricing. Sorpaas says no breaking changes please, though that’s the diametric opposite of the original sustainability movement which got mislabeled “eth1x.” It’s not an easy debate in a decentralized ecosystem, though we have repriced opcodes before, because that’s necessary to avoid DoS attacks.
• Swende’s 1884 (opcode repricing) security considerations
• ChainSecurity’s Hubert Ritzdorf analysis of deployed code potentially affected by EIP1884
• Swende 2046 benchmarking in Geth. 2046 reduces cost of calls to precompiles
• an EVM backend for LLVM from ETC Labs Core
• evmone: fast EVM implementation in c++
• Péter Szilágyi: “we have an experimental Geth full node weighing 139GB on #Ethereum mainnet: 94GB on HDD and 45GB on SSD. It’s in sync”
• Parity v2.6.2-beta and v2.5.7-stable to fix a DoS attack of publicly exposed RPCs. Kudos to Amberdata for reporting.

Here’s some context for the whole breaking changes debate. At Devcon4 in Prague, a series of informal meetings occurred where Péter Szilágyi made the case that we needed to make plans on what to do about the exploding state size. This is an issue because people are now taking advantage of the incentives to delete old state by using things like GasToken which put things in the state at really low gas prices and then delete them thus saving gas costs for their users. However, this got mislabeled as “eth1x” and now that’s become a catch-all term for “Eth1” or “any pet project I want to add to the current Eth chain.” Originally however the entire debate was how many breaking changes (ie, state rent) will be necessary to get the Eth1 chain alive to be transported into Eth2 as an execution environment. This is not an easy debate because some changes may affect certain apps more than others, meanwhile everyone has their own opinion about how important sustainability is and which changes are most important for sustainability.

Eth2

• Latest What’s New in Eth2
• Latest Eth2 implementers call. Mamy and Ben both took notes.
• Nimbus client update – working on launch mechanics and interoperability.
• Lodestar client update – BLS optimization, disc v5, and Eric Tu wrote the fastest JavaScript SHA256 implementation
• Spec v0.8.3 came out a week ago. updates to tests and networking.
• phase 1 spec has Sep 30th target date for completeness
• Some privacy proposals: Privacy-Preserving Casper FFG using Traceable Ring Signatures and ZKP to remove the mapping ip address / wallet’s public key of a validator
• EF released a list of Eth2 grants, focused on client teams and interop/networking, as well as some R&D for light clients and also for phase1 proof of custody. There are also 3 open bounties: phase 0 consensus bugs, Legendre PRF, and STARK friendly hash
• Danny Ryan talks Eth2 on Into the Ether
• Rocketpool’s second beta to test out decentralized Eth2 staking pools
• Vitalik’s list of things that will change for app devs in Eth2. This is not short-term planning but things to keep in mind for the future.

By now, it’s probably fairly obvious what’s going on in eth2: getting networking (also called “client interoperability” or just “interop”) nailed down. There’s an Eth2 retreat next week where eth2 implementers will lock themselves in a cabin deep in the Canadian woods and not emerge until clients are seamlessly talking to each other. Other than that, we’re very clearly moving towards the testing/auditing stage of phase 0, with the phase 1 spec getting completed (though not frozen) at the end of the month.

Layer 2

• FunFair founder Jeremy Longley with a detailed walkthrough of their state channel architecture and code
• “A unified state channel specification for Ethereum” to lay “the foundation for a fully interoperable ecosystem” so that building on channels is as easy as possible for app devs
• AdEx: How we built the largest payment channel network on Ethereum. 9 million transactions with only 13k USD onchain because they trigger a payment via channel for every ad impression. 10 cents in gas paid for millions of unidirectional, one-to-many payments. A good example of programmatic micropayments made possible by state channels.
• Raiden light client v0.1
• Vitalik: the dawn of hybrid layer 2
• Optimistic rollup. Bonds/challenges to ensure valid transactions, instead of zk proofs, but easier to generalize for all applications and not just payments.

I found the AdEx post interesting, because it shows 1) how channels can scale “nearly infinitely” in some cases, 2) because machines talking to each other always struck me as an obvious channels use case.

The FunFair post is also the first step to them opensourcing their state channels, and presumably dovetails with them wanting to participate in the unified spec that the other state channel projects announced. This is a big deal because it was possible that there would be multiple base layers in the state channel stack.

Meanwhile, the rollup posts: this follows Vitalik’s widely misquoted “more and more pessimistic about off-chain-data L2s over time.” This was Vitalik saying that it’s harder to imagine Plasma designs successfully implemented for more than just payments/exchanges. Instead, to do apps on Plasma, it’s moved towards rollup, hence Plasma Group’s “optimistic rollup.” As Georgios summarizes, “zk-rollup guarantees valid state transition with a [zero knowledge proof]. Optimistic rollup uses challenges to cancel invalid state transitions.”

Stuff for developers

• Building holographic consensus on Aragon tutorial
• Airscript v0.5.4 – performance speedups for STARKs, approaching single thread limits
• Noble BLS12-381 pairing-friendly curve
• Truffle v5.0.34 now supports Node12
• Rapid dapp prototyping with Austin Griffith
• first Postgres extension to run WebAssembly
• EthFS, a Unix-like filesystem, check it out on testnet
• Making a Remix plugin tutorial
• Build a smart fridge with Streamr, RuuviTags, Node-RED, IBM Cloud Watson Studio tutorial
• Getting started with IPFS in Ethereum Grid
• web3.js vs ethers.js
• A code walkthrough of MolochDAO v2
• You can now view and export Etherscan’s verified source codes with a license
• Vyper v0.1 beta12. Also: a Kauri collection of articles on getting started with Vyper

As always, the stuff for devs is a grab bag, but highlights all the full extent to which Ethereum leads in developer attention and tooling. The zero knowledge stuff is obviously the future.

Ecosystem

• How to participate in the ENS shortname auction. Starts Sep 1
• Anonymous login using SNARKs/Semaphore
• Videos from the Swarm Summit
• AZTEC’s Ignition Ceremony starts in October, you can apply now to be part of it. This multi-party computation ceremony will likely get used in many future zk implementations.

Another grab bag. ENS shortname auction is on right now, and hopefully will help ENS be sustainable. Meanwhile zk stuff is hot, and AZTEC’s ceremony is an opportunity to be part of a setup that will likely get used quite a bit. You only need 1 honest person (out of ~200), so if you’re honest, you can assure that the trusted setup is legit.

Enterprise

• Pantheon becomes Hyperledger Besu – the first public chain client in Hyperledger. “Besu” is Japanese for base.
• Pantheon v1.2.2
• EEA telecom use cases report (PDF)
• Oxfam, Sempo and ConsenSys in Vanuatu for direct transfers of humanitarian aid to citizens, rather than indirectly through leaky governments

Honestly it’s hard to underestimate how important it is that Pantheon got unanimously accepted to Hyperledger. There was some late arguments to keep it out by purveyors of non-Eth private chains, but as Ben Edgington says, “the future of Enterprise Blockchain lies inevitably on the #Ethereum public Mainnet. Bringing the client fka Pantheon into the Hyperledger family is a huge step towards this”

Governance and Standards

• EIP2253: Add wallet_getAddressBook JSON-RPC method
• EIP2256: Add wallet_getOwnedTokens JSON-RPC method
• EIP2250: Gas Price Range
• EIPxxxx: Web3 Login Permissions. And MetaMask’s intro to web3 permissions
• ENS Login: open standard for wallet integration
• Mike Goldin on the state of DAOs in the TCR call
• SelloutDAO: sell your vote in any MolochDAO fork
• A proposal failed that would have given back some of the DigixDAO’s ETH, and there were lots of unhappy people

Lots of wallet standardization stuff this week. Obviously it’s one of those things that people talk about how we need standardization, and apparently last week in Berlin some folks decided to act on it.

Live on mainnet

• Erasure Protocol live on mainnet with ErasureBay. “Open marketplace for information,” publish, create reputation, profit. Get griefed if wrong.
• Official Star Trek collectible ships for sale live on mainnet. These collectible tokens will later be playable in Lucid Sight’s game

Official Star Trek collectibles on mainnet! If this were 2017, the price of Eth would probably double. But this is 2019, so instead the price of Eth went down.

It will be very interesting to see what happens with Erasure Protocol. It could be huge, but you could also see it getting little traction. It’s a big idea.

Application layer

• Dharma v2 in beta, built on Compound for fixed rates with fiat on/offramps
• PoolTogether v2: auto re-entry, interest is immediate, can join or leave pool at any time
• You can play the Prisoner’s Dilemma onchain (caveat emptor)
• LSDai: tokenized interest rate swaps
• TokenSet’s 50 day moving average automated trading strategy. I think these are super cool and bought a few.
• Torque: indefinite, fixed rate loans borrowed from bZx’s Fulcrum lending pools. “Torque did not require substantial smart contract development — the tools were already there”

This was DeFi week for app layer. What’s interesting is how Maker and Compound have become the fundamental base of the DeFi stack. Dharma has pivoted to building on Compound instead of competing. PoolTogether and LSDai are also built on Compound. As Compound CEO Robert Leshner notes below, there are lots of devs building on Compound.

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• Synthetix: we were “dead wrong” in trying to develop on centralized chains like EOS because Eth network effects are real. As Robert Leshner notes, “there are now more developers building on Compound Finance than there are developers building on either EOS or Tron.”
• Another Flippening: Tether active addresses is multiples higher on Eth than on BTC
• NFTs are the “hello world!” of the internet of property

Speaking of network effects, the whole post from Synthetix is fire. They tried to build on EOS and found it wasn’t possible and wasn’t worth it anyway. Sure, if you have a centralized chain it’s easy to fake users, but the tooling for those chains is rough. I’ve found that even the app devs willing to consider building on other chains often find that it’s still not worth it, even if the other chains fully fund them to do so.

General

• Three DeFi newsletters worth tracking: Ryan Sean Adams’ Bankless, Camila Russo’s The Defiant, and Nodar Janashia’s DeFi tutorials. Moar competition.
• ETH DKG: distributed key generation from onchain code
• Vitalik: quadratic voting with sortition

Very interesting to me that all those newsletters are on Substack. Early on it was an email platform, but I think it has transformed into a blogging platform hooked up to email. They hustle.

Vitalik’s quadratic voting in a sample is interesting. Obviously it’s still very tough to implement effectively without an identity layer though.

Well that’s it for my annotation. I hope it was worth the donation to the Ethereum ecosystem. Thank you for reading and helping celebrate Week in Ethereum News’ 3rd anniversary. I’ll decide how to donate the proceeds from this annotated edition over the next few weeks. I’ll likely announce it, as the amounts are likely symbolic more than anything. Or perhaps I’ll give it all to one recipient.

🎂 3 year anniversary edition🎂

Thanks again! I’m super grateful that you decided to buy this NFT.

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

• Sep 1 – ENS 3-6 character auction starts
• Sep 2-16 – Decentraland SDK virtual hackathon (250k USD in prizes. There’s a referral code on that link that gets both you and me something extra)
• Sep 3 – Deadline to apply for EU Horizon Prize. 1m € each to 5 “Blockchains for Social Good” projects
• Sep 6-8 – ETHBoston
• Sep 10-11 – DeFi Summit (London)
• Sep 15 – Augur v1 cutoff
• Sep 15 – Ethereal Tel Aviv
• Sep 16 – Tachyon accelerator application deadline
• Sep 15-16- StarkWare sessions (Tel Aviv)
• Sep 22 – IDEO virtual hackathon ends
• Sep 27 – ErasureCon (password: information) (SF)
• Oct 7 – ENS workshop (Osaka)
• Oct 8-11 – DeVcon (Osaka) and Devcon social events calendar
• Oct 19-20 – Crosslink (Taipei)
• Nov 8-10 – ETHWaterloo

If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys

This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.

I own 100% Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been me.

If you’re unhappy with editorial decisions or anything that I have written in this issue, feel free to tweet at me.

This headline stays as long as so many people continue to link to old URL and not the right one: weekinethereumnews.com 

Archive on the web if you’re linking to it: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-september-1-2019/

Follow me on Twitter, because most of what is linked here gets tweeted first: @evan_van_ness

If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum?”

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