Week in Ethereum News August 14, 2017

Ethereum News and Links

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Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon
- Scalability effort that will be worked on in parallel with PoS and sharding
- tl;dr from Matthew Di Ferrante or Plasma in 10 mins from Anthony Akentiev. Or a video read-along of the Plasma whitepaper with Jordan Leigh and Ameen Soleimani
- Peter Todd started attacking Vitalik on Twitter. The many Twitter threads make it hard to link to the original source, but Trustnodes had a decent summary, though somewhat Vitalik-friendly. There are plenty of brilliant people in the world, what might be most impressive about Vitalik is his maturity in dealing with trolls. Being a jerk is not tolerated in this community.
- Patricia Tree UI by Andreas Olofsson. Context from Christian Reitwiessner: “this is a way to implement the cross-chain verification mechanisms mentioned in the plasma paper.”
- Vlad Zamfir is nonplussed by Plasma
- Vitalik: “I personally have cut down evangelism precisely because I see that the main bottleneck is now not interest, but tech.”
Coinbase raises $100M Series D at a 1.6b valuation, led by IVP. Check out that hockey stick graph in the TechCrunch article. Volume on track in 2017 to be 10x the 2016 volume.
- Seems clear that Toshi is phase 3 of the Coinbase Master Plan, so with 100m they now have a similar warchest as Status (the sponsor of this newsletter, along with ConsenSys). That’s fantastic because both can do great work introducing people into the ecosystem.
- Russell Smith on the ease of building a testnet faucet on Toshi
- You can also now view your Coinbase balances on Fidelity

Protocol

Video of core dev meeting. Agenda.
- Metropolis HF1 (Byzantium) in late September, if not October
- If the hard fork is postponed too long, we should make sure miners know to raise the gaslimit
- New high for number of daily transactions, no backlog, median wait time just 2 blocks.
Q&A with Vitalik.
- ZKSnarks: “a couple more months” after Metropolis.
- Casper: “almost done a PoC implementation in python.”
- Sharding: “later than Casper, but sooner than we thought.”
Diving into the EVM, part 2
- Qtum developer on the faults and shortcomings of the EVM
Vitalik confirms that current plan is for ~1000 ETH to be necessary to stake

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.4.15
Christian Lundkvist: Safer simpler multisig
- Grid+: 2-of-3 blind multisig
Dividend payments based on MiniMeToken
Using Infura with web3j
- Scaling INFURA: Not All API Calls are Equal, especially getLogs
Costs of deployed Ethereum code

Ecosystem

Status v0.9.10 alpha release
- Status will have their first fireside chat on August 17th at 16:00 CEST
Trezor support now in Geth
MyEtherWallet is hiring JavaScript devs, hourly or fulltime
OmiseGo and Vitalik meet with Thailand’s Central Bank
Paul Vigna on the Ethereum NYC birthday bash (already behind WSJ paywall)
Colony open sources its employee-friendly option plan – 10 year window, cashless exercise, buyback program

Ethereum in the Enterprise

Microsoft announces the Coco framework for enterprise – using a trusted environment like Intel SGX or Windows VSM, you use Coco to hook up to your “distributed ledger technology.” Code to be open sourced next year.
The EEA Legal Working Group
Case study of using Microsoft tools and Truffle
How the Dubai government is pioneering blockchain with ConsenSys
ISDA: Legal aspects of smart contracts in derivatives

Project Announcements

Cent – Quora on Ethereum
MoonCatRescue – something like the next level of LarvaLabs’ CryptoPunk

Project Demos

Dharma P2P credit live on Kovan using MetaMask
Lendroid loans for ENS names, live on Kovan testnet
RougeProject CouponDemo, on testnet

Project Updates

Augur is 50% done migrating to Solidity
Introducing Iconomi’s first asset manager: Columbus Capital
How Melonport protects ecosystem participants
Cofound.it’s David Sabo talks building the network of hubs
Video of Agrello MVP release
KyberNetwork smart contract modules explained
LivePeer weekly update – protocol now supports payments
Etherisc discusses its first year since inception
uPort upgrading its code framework, part 1
BAT is building a network of geographical community leaders
How contributors can earn VariabL/StabL during alpha, and why they’re avoiding a token sale for now
Video on Golem and Streamr collaboration

Interviews and Talks

Videos of the ENS workshop talks. I couldn’t find a schedule, so I made own schedule so you can find which parts of the workshop you’d like to watch
- Dan Finlay: Future of ENS subdomain markets
Epicenter with Loi Luu of KyberNetwork and SmartPool
Videos from Blockstack Summit. My favorites: Naval Ravikant chat, Albert Wenger talk, Elizabeth Stark on Layer 2
Vitalik and Thomas Greco Q&A in Japan
Status Q&A with the developer of bchat, a bulletin board system live on Swarm. Very cool.
Alex Miller talks Grid+ at SF meetup

Token Sale Projects

Details on the Decentraland token launch
Neufund’s “ICO” is a call to commit capital to the Neufund platform in exchange for tokens
How the Digital Asset Power Play trading platform came together
You don’t need to do anything to receive OMG airdrop tokens
Cofound.it announces the next 4 Cofound.it sales: Musiconomi, Maecenas, X8 Currency, Digital Asset Power Play (reminder: I advise Cofound.it)

General

Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg: “[Crypto money is] becoming so strange and diverse that the actual practice of money is outracing anything found in economic theory or in the law.”
Filecoin raised almost $200m in an hour and then paused their sale for a day or so. It’s back open again, but so far has been very frontloaded.
Zeppelin’s Demian Brener: private silos to blockchain ledgers — a $2.5 trillion opportunity
Wired: Ethereum Is Coding’s New Wild West
Ryan Selkis on the onslaught of cryptofunds. I agree that I wouldn’t put money into many of the new funds. However, Ethereum and tokens are an emerging asset class that many money managers don’t understand so it’s tougher for them to do manager selection.
Laura Shin on how Bitcoin solved payment issues for a female Afghan entrepreneur.
Oregon finance prof Stephen McKeon on tokenizing traditional assets
Brian Kelly explains Ethereum on CNBC Fast Money
David Sacks: Cryptocurrency fulfills the original vision we tried to build at PayPal
“A Solution of the P versus NP problem.” Hmm.

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar:

Upcoming token sale start dates:

August 16 – Magos
August 17 – Decentraland
August 20 – SlotnSlot
August 20 – Umbrella Coin
August 23– FoodCoin
August 24 – REAL (Real Estate Asset Ledger)
August 25 – Avalon
August 28 – HelloGold
August 28 – ChronoLogic
August 28 – Grace
August 29 – Kickico
August 30 – LookRev
August 31 – Musiconomi (Cofound.it Priority Pass presale: Aug 29)
August 31 – Monetha
September 5 – Viberate
September 6 – Aventus
September 7 – Maecenas (Cofound.it Priority Pass presale: Sep 5)
September 11 – Enigma Catalyst
September 12 – Evermarkets
September 13 – Unikoin
September 13 – Eventchain
September 14 – X8 Currency (Cofound.it Priority Pass presale: Sep 12)
September 18 – Winding Tree
September 18 – Circles
September 21 – Digital Asset Power Play (Cofound.it Priority Passpresale: Sep 19)
October 1 – Hirematch
October 10 – Swap

Ongoing token sales:

Want to be included? If you are building your project on Ethereum, email weekinethereum @ gmail [period] com with 1) your URL, 2) sale date and 3) a brief but convincing description of how you are using Ethereum, preferably with a link to your Github repo. Listings are free. But please make sure to follow those instructions. If you don’t follow the instructions, you likely won’t get a response.

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.]

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