Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Protocol

• VB: A general theory of what quadratically sharded validation *is*
  
• Justin Drake: Application-layer account abstraction
• VB: A recap of where we’re at on account abstraction
• JD: Safe notary pool size
• Jannik Luhn: Torus-shaped sharding network
• Prsymatic’s second bi-weekly sharding update: focusing on the Torus-shape paradigm and libp2p for networking as well as local shard state storage.

Stuff for developers

• Solidity v0.4.22: dynamic returns, error messages for revert and require, safer constructors, ABI encoding utils, etc
• New Etherscan feature: contract event log filter
• Tutorial: create a “shark of the pool” dapp with React
• web3.swift v0.1 if you like making native iOS apps
• Typescript, Solstice, Webpack dapp template
• Save your users from paying gas for transactions
• Software licences as non-fungible tokens
• Richard Moore: Code example to verify message strings in Solidity
• Andrew Miller’s minimalist duplex payment channel
• Schedule ERC20 token transfers with Ethereum Alarm Clock (on Kovan testnet for now)
• ConsenSys Academy registrations are now open for the 2018 developer program
• What things you should put on Gitcoin
• Zeppelin: Upgradeability using unstructured storage
• Flint: a new statically-typed language aimed at code security. Under development.

Releases

• Parity v1.10.1 — warp to a specific minimum block number
• Geth v1.8.4 — 40% faster blocks!
• Akasha v0.7 — now a web app using MetaMask
• Status v0.9.17 — improved whisper so that battery and data usage are down by an order of magnitude

Ecosystem

• Alex Van de Sande looks at what would happen to dapps in the event of a fork
• Etherchain has some coinvotes going on about ASICs and hard cap, but the most votes are on EIP999 to unfreeze the Parity multi-sig fund
• Richard Burton: we need better ways to get data out of Ethereum
• Managing Identity with a UI for ERC 725
• MyCrypto beta is ready for public use. Plus, securely sign transactions offline with MyCrypto beta and Parity Signer
• How to renew or release your ENS name. If a year is up, you can release and get your deposit back. To keep your name, you don’t have to do anything.

EIP/ERC/governance — thanks to Nick Johnson for assistance

• EIP999 — state modification to unfreeze the Parity multisig. Main discussion thread. (new)
  
• Discussion continues on EIP960 — hard cap of Ether supply. Vlad also wrote a response, which Vitalik responded to. And Vlad’s counter response (updated)
• ERC994 — delegated NFTs for “registration of land and physical property” (new)
• ERC995 — an ERC20 extension to allow execution of calls inside transfer and approvals based on ERC827 (new)
• ERC998 — “Composable Non-Fungible Token Standard” (new)
• ERC1001 — a private key URI standard (new)
• ERC1003 — ERC20 extension “for tokens with method that allows safely pass and handle tokens into smart contracts” (new)
• Discussion on ERC930’s standard for eternal storage (updated)
• (heated) discussion onERC792’s arbitration standard (updated)

Project Updates

• Colony Q2 Update
• Golem’s next steps post-mainnet release
• Insights from the Balanc3 Beta
• FunFair announces its first partnership with an outside game developer
• Melonport’s phase 3 – governance, price feeds, etc
• RexMLS is changing its name to Imbrex
• April Raiden dev update
• Bounties for social impact
• Kauri launching on Rinkeby in May with a competition for technical content
• Loom is now planning to implement Plasma for its Dappchains
• Cofound.it’s 2018 roadmap to becoming a platform
• Barrons and Marketwatch to become BAT verified publishers and Brave users will get access to their premium content.

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks

• Jon Choi talks Ethereum grants and ecosystem on Zero Knowledge
• Fabian Vogelsteller on Hashing It Out
• Nick Johnson on the Fireside Crypto podcast
• Carolyn Reckhow on the Bitcoin Podcast
• Aaron Wright talks OpenLaw on Blockchain Guy podcast
• My podcast interviews with the five initial Ethereum Community Fund grantees: Prysmatic Labs, EthPrize, Reality Check, Swingby, XLNT

Tokens

• This week, Savedroid pretended to pull an exit scam to “teach us a lesson.” Or something. I’m not going to link to their PR stunt.
• a16z/USV lead group to ask SEC for a safe harbor exemption.
• ConcourseQ’s token curated feed got its first revenue
• Now that tax season is over, everyone thinks it is time to get long. Here’s Pantera’s rationale.
• Buy Virtue Poker’s tokens, play in the World Series Of Poker
• Of course Cambridge Analytica was planning an “ICO”

General

• Kent Barton argues that we should avoid crypto tribalism.
• Coinbase bought Earn.com to make Balaji Srinivasan the CTO and also bought Cipher to work on Toshi
• FastCompany on Circles universal basic income
• MIT Tech Review looks at the Jordan refugee camp using Parity
• Energy Web Foundation using Parity for private, permissioned and WebAssembly
• Even Ethereum’s competitors in the enterprise space are starting to realize that public chains are inevitable

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note:

• 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) — use discount code EtherealFriendsNFam until May 1
• May 15 – Kleros sale
• May 16-17 – Token Summit (NYC)
• May 17-19 – Melonport hackthon in Zug
• May 18-20 – EthMemphis hackathon
• May 25-27 – EthBuenosAires hackathon (register by April 21)
• June 1 – Blockchain for Social Impact Conference (Washington, DC)

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Joseph Lubin, Amber Baldet, Aya Miyaguchi, Michael Casey, Yorke Rhodes, Sheila Warren, etc kick off Blockchain Week at Ethereal Summit. You can get tickets at EtherealSummit.com with discount code “EtherealFriendsNFam” for $500 off cover price.

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