Week in Ethereum News August 1, 2017

Ethereum News and Links

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While doing an audit for Augur, the Zeppelin team found a “buffer overflow vulnerability in the Serpent compiler.” Here’s the Zeppelin description of how the bug affected the live Augur REP token. In total, Zeppelin found 8 critical security problems in the Serpent compiler. As a result, Augur is switching to Solidity and has successfully migrated their token.
- Now we know why Vitalik tweeted a few weeks ago that he considers Serpent to be outdated
- Per Vitalik, Viper development is picking up steam
- The kicker: ZeppelinOS: “an open-source, distributed platform of tools and services on top of the EVM to develop and manage smart contract applications securely.”

Protocol

Latest core dev call. Audio. Agenda. Hudson’s post-call notes – first fork will be Byzantium and second will be Constantinople
@cnLedger on Twitter quotes Vitalik on WeChat as saying they’re coding a test version with sharding in Python. Have a look: github.
KEVM: Formal semantics of the EVM using K
Vitalik on EOS and on the layers of DPOS subjectivity. We’re a long way (metaphorically speaking) from the time when Dan tried to start a rumor that Ethereum would partner with Bitshares, his project before his Steem project before the EOS project. That was less than 3 years ago. One project per year?
High Accessibility Blockchains through tokenized PoS communication channels
Solidity implementation of a Patricia-Tree to verify sidechain EVM transactions
“most contract coding errors that we see in practice have absolutely nothing to do with Turing completeness”

Stuff for developers

Porosity – Ethereum code decompiler “generates human-readable Solidity syntax smart contracts from any EVM bytecode” – is already bundled into Quorum. White paper. Github
Gnosis talks security procedures for their widely used multi-sig wallet
ZeppelinOS (as referenced above)
React component to ensure Web3 is available before your app renders
Boobies on the blockchain: storing images through input data served through Etherscan. See Reddit thread
Digix token vulnerability report

Releases

Ecosystem

Iconomi is open to the public for registrations
Alex Miller: the future might just be Ethereum and federated pegs. When I envision the future, this is absolutely one of the ways I imagine that “blockchain” ends up. I have my own related post coming on this, if I ever finish it.
Etherspinner: a fidget spinner whose “state is stored on the Ethereum blockchain and whose client code is hosted on IPFS. Users can spend Ethereum to spin the spinner clockwise or anticlockwise”
Bio of Aragon’s Luise Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo
This week the Ethereum genesis block had its second birthday.

Project Updates

The roadmap of Livepeer releases
Iconomi Q2 financial report – up a cool 400%, in part due to the Cofound.it spinoff
What Melonport learned from their first manager competition
Jez San interview on FunFair
Etherplay update – looking for 3rd party game devs, gas refactoring

Interviews and Talks

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance London meetup talks available – watch Jeremy Millar on the EEA’s history, Matthew Di Ferrante on ring signatures, and ING’s Cees van Wijk and Coen Ramaekers on their precomipled zk-snark contract
Oliver Nordbjerg – Aragon’s new engineer
Livepeer weekly update – cool demo
Simon de la Rouviere talks Curation Markets

Token Sale Projects

Decentraland Q&A with project lead Ari Meilich. Also check out their plans for their first metropolis: Genesis City
Can Grid+ be the onramp to web3 that AOL was for the internet?
On Instagram, Floyd Mayweather is promoting the Stox token sale
As part of District0x’s transparency policy, you can click to see their salaries.
How does Kyber manage reserves?

Token Sales

A snafu in the RexMLS sale burned 6700 ETH (~1.5m USD at current prices). The Rex team: “Through a combination of personal and business accounts, we have assembled 6,687 ETH” that will go into the contract.
Tim Draper’s open letter to the SEC in which he suggests grandfathering any tokens issued before the end of October 2017.

General

The WHG has returned all rescued ETH to its rightful owners. You can donate to them at whitehats.eth. They spent 20-30 Eth in gas on the rescue.
“Launching an ICO next week – e-mailed the SEC for guidance after the DAO news, and they called back.” I didn’t think there was anything interesting in this post, but I keep seeing people sharing it, so I’m including it.
Pantera’s Dan Morehead short video interview with Michael Green from Thiel Macro
Coinbase is treating Bitcoin Cash like it treated ETC: only start the work to make it available if BCC gets traction. Right now it’s trading much higher relative to Bitcoin than ETC is to Ethereum – will it hold?
Vitalik on Metcalfe’s Law as it applies to forking
Balaji: Quantifying decentralization

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar:

Upcoming token sale start dates:

August 2 – Stox
August 5 – Blocklancer
August 5 – Agora
August 7 – Filecoin
August 7 – Fluence
August 8 – Decentraland
August 8 – Indorse
August 9 – Lampix
August 10 – Propy
August 10 – ChronoLogic
August 13 – SmartRE
August 15 – Ox Protocol (mandatory registration Aug 9-12)
August 15 – BitDice
August 15 – Latium
August 20 – SlotnSlot
August 24 – Real Markets
August 28 – HelloGold
August 31 – Monetha
September 5 – Viberate
September 12 – Evermarkets
September 13 – Unikoin
September 13 – Eventchain
September 18 – Winding Tree

Ongoing token sales:

Want to be included? If you are building your project on Ethereum, email [firstname] @ticketleap.com or send @evan_van_ness a message with 1) your URL, 2) sale date and 3) a brief description of how you are using Ethereum. Listings are free. But please make sure to follow those instructions.

WARNING: list may include scams. Do your own research and due diligence before putting value at risk. Read disclaimer below.

[I aim for a relatively comprehensive list of Ethereum sales, but make no warranty as to even whether they are legit; as such, I thus likewise warrant nothing about whether any will produce a satisfactory return. I have passed the CFA exams , but this is not investment advice. If you’re interested in what I do, you can find my somewhat out-of-date investing thesis and token sale appreciation strategies in previous newsletters.]

Newsletter housekeeping

Some time in early August, there will be an announcement that I’ve joined ConsenSys. Here’s a logo to draw your eye in case you were going to skip over this section:

I’m very excited about this move and will have significantly more to say in the future. The newsletters should become more regular again! In the meantime, I wanted to make it clear so that you can judge whether I favor ConsenSys projects.

My charge from Joe Lubin is pretty similar to what Status has told me: keep telling the truth and covering the space objectively, even if the truth hurts.

I like to share it, share it. Sir Mix-A-Lot style

I measure the success of each issue by how much it gets upvoted and shared.

Follow me on Twitter? @evan_van_ness

This newsletter is supported by Status.im and ConsenSys. But in case you still want to send Ether (or tokens?): 0x96d4F0E75ae86e4c46cD8e9D4AE2F2309bD6Ec45