Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Protocol

• Latest core dev call.  Lane Rettig’s detailed notes.
• My tl;dr summary of ASIC discussion: the ASIC efficiency isn’t that great so it’s not an emergency, nor are we yet sure what would break the ASIC.  Casper FFG is undergoing formal verification and should be ready in ~3 months, but could be rushed to production if necessary.  It’s more or less ready to be implemented by clients.
• Hudson Jameson summarizes the facts as well as the arguments for and against forking for ASIC resistance
• Perun: virtual payment and state channel networks
• VB: A general framework of overhead and finality time in sharding, and a proposal
• More VB: A minimal sharding proposal for development now
• Justin Drake: Expanding on proposer/notary separation
• Justin Drake: serialisation scheme for blobs in collation bodies
• Offchain collation headers or off-chain intermediate blocks
• Hsiao-Wei Wang: Per period committee snapshot
• tl;dr on sharding this week: deprecated the previous phase 1 spec, research in a bit of flux, lots of new ideas.

Stuff for developers

• Bernhard Mueller’s Mythril writeup: smashing smart contracts for fun and profit
  
• A library for encoding CBOR data in Solidity from Nick Johnson.
• Implementing the EVM in Clojure
• Post a Gitcoin bounty in 90 seconds
• Video: deploy uPort IdentityManager code to Ganache
• web3 RPC API endpoints in Postman
• Academic paper: executable operational semantics of Solidity
  
• DSproxy: execute transactions and sequences of transactions by proxy
• Emacs in Solidity v0.1.9
• the mechanics of FunFair’s state channels
  

Launches

• Golem’s Brass beta is live on mainnet
• Digix is live – you can buy gold backed tokens on Ethereum

Ecosystem

• Swarm Orange Summit is May 7-11 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Talks due date: April 20.
• Dean Eigenmann: why 0x is not as trustless as it may seem.  The Reddit thread is also worthwhile.
• A walkthrough of Omaha Ethereum’s impressive Ethereum onboarding event
• Verifying the Gnosis multi-sig on Etherscan
• Dex order books listing from Etherscan
• A step-by-step guide on claiming your DNS domain on ENS

EIP/ERC/governance — this section by Nick Johnson.  Feedback on this section is welcome.  

• The first draft of EIP 969, proposing changes to ethash to break existing ASIC miners, was merged.
• The first draft of EIP 665, proposing addition of a new ECDSA signature verification builtin for Ed25519, was merged. Further updates are ongoing in PR 983.
• The first draft of EIP 820, which specifies a standard interface for a registry contract storing interface information for other contracts and accounts, was merged.
• The first draft of EIP 908, proposing an in-protocol mechanism to reward client implementers, was merged.
• The first draft of EIP 777, a proposed new token standard that utilises EIP 820 was (finally!) merged.
• EIP 191, specifying an introspection system used in ENS and other existing interfaces, was translated from an issue and merged as a draft.
• Some discussion on PR 961, proposing a URL standard for token information.
• More discussion and reviews on PR 712, specifying a standard way of encoding data for signing by dapps.
• Some discussion and updates on PR 902, proposing a registry system for approving token transfers for regulatory purposes.
• EIP 627, a specification for Whisper, was finally merged as a draft.
• Some discussion on Issue 838, proposing a way to structure error return data for use in Solidity and other compatible languages.
• More discussion on Issue 905, suggesting a new opcode to permit cheap cloning of an existing contract’s storage.
• Issue 981 opened, detailing a proposed standard for “barter tokens”.
• A lot of discussion on Issue 928, a proposed way of linking to avatar images for an account or contract.
• More discussion on the never-ending Issue 223, a new proposed token standard.
• Discussion on recurring subscription models, and interfaces for them, in Issue 948.
• Ongoing discussion of Issue 960, Vitalik’s proposed hardcap.
• Process update: The generated site now supports GitHub usernames.
• Process update: A bot now facilitates automatically merging updates to drafts if the PR is written by or approved by an author of the draft.

Project Updates

• Omise signs an agreement with major Korean bank Shinhan
• OmiseGo will use Dai and OMG as collateral for issuing Dai
• v0.0.2 of Paratti’s decentralized, embeddable video player and portal
• 10min video documenting what is Giveth
• How Civil makes money and aims to transform journalism
• FOAM: the importance of time sync across space
• Tor private tabs coming to Brave in a month?
• Chronicled: does proof of existence establish provenance?
• Variabl q1 dev update

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks 

• Transmute’s Orie Steele with Corey Petty and Collin Cusce.
• Chris Dixon on the Boost podcast.
• Taylor Monahan talks about the MEW to MyCrypto transition on Crypto101
• Jez San talk on FunFair’s state channel solution at EEA London
• Pelle Braendgaard on Uport and identity

Tokens 

• Improving user experience with continuous token models
• Brooklyn Project’s proposed taxonomy to provide a framework for token regulations
• Risk pool tokens in the Etherisc protocol
• Texas regulators “opened 32 investigations over a four-week period starting Dec. 18, 2017.”

General

• Gavin: “First external transaction validated/finalised on a @polkadotnetwork chain”
• Why you can’t trust private testnets of new projects: scaling geth to 1.5 million transactions per second.
• Traders tend to go where the volatility is, so the Soros family office is entering cryptoassets
• Coinbase Ventures seems like the natural result of positive cash flow, strong balance sheet, and a generous option exercise window
• Matthew Green’s illustrated primer on hash-based signatures
• Former Bitcoin core dev Mike Hearn’s AMA was pretty interesting
  
• Steven Sinofsky’s tweetstorm on how web3 resembles the early days of the web

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note:

• April 16 – DappDev in Kiev
• April 24 – Oslo Blockchain Day in Norway. 20% off with discount code EVAN
• April 25 – Virtue Poker sale
• April 27-29 – Hackital Eth hackathon in Washington, DC
• May 3-5 – Edcon in Toronto
• May 7-11 — Swarm Summit in Ljubljana
• May 10 – Fluidity Summit on finance (NYC)
• May 11-12 – Ethereal (NYC)
• May 15 – Kleros sale
• May 16-17 – Token Summit (NYC)
• May 17-19 – Melonport hackthon in Zug
• May 18-20 – EthMemphis hackathon
• May 25 – 28th – EthBuenosAires hackathon

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