Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Layer 1 – Eth PoW

• Lane’s notes on the Ethereum 1.0 improvements call – the nomenclature Eth1.x is deprecated
  
• Péter Szilágyi: chain pruning for long term 1.0 viability
  
• ewasm proposal for Eth 1.0
  
• A rough proposal for storage management fees. Discussion at FEM and two at Ethresearch: one and two
  

Layer 1 – Eth2

• What’s New in Eth2
  
• Eth2 implementers call. in lieu of notes, agenda
  
• Prysmatic’s biweekly update – explanations of both new cross-shard approach and STARK-friendly hash functions, refactoring to single state, BLS implementation and much more
  
• Lighthouse fortnightly update: Alex Stokes joins, spec updates, etc
  
• Encumberments: instant cross-shard payments over slow cross-shard
  
• VB: A minimal state execution proposal
  
• A Tale of Two Ethers explainer.
  
• Notes from Eth 2.0 Q&A in Prague
  
• An ELI5 on how Eth2 landed on 32 ETH to be a validator
  

Layer 2

• Latest state channel call. Penultimate state channels call
  
• Raiden v0.18
  
• Plasma Prime PoC client
  
• A sketch for a STARK-based accumulator. Or Vitalik’s ELI5 on Reddit
  
• OmiseGo Plasma update
  

Stuff for developers

• PubSub pattern using Solidity 0.5.0
  
• Use Whisper in Embark tutorial
  
• Quick Formality update from Victor Maia. [Formality is kin to Haskell.]
  
• Compound releases documentation for devs to earn interest on eth/tokens
  
• Comparing GUN, OrbitDB and Scuttlebutt
  
• AragonOS 4: refining our framework for production
  
• Import Ethereum state to use on local chain
  
• Elixir implementation of Ethereum’s RLP encoding
  
• Ahken: Eth aware automatic IPFS pinning PoC
  
• Writing a Truebit task in Rust
  
• Octopus security analysis tool for wasm, EVM and some centralized chains
  
• Native Meta Transactions: signed message recovery integrated in contracts
  
• Remix 0.7.5 released with solidity 0.5 support, plus some cool plugins
  

Ecosystem

• Chart over time of Eth locked up in DeFi (note: Maker off by default)
  
• MyCrypto is doing an Advent-style calendar of security tips with prizes
  
• How to easily import your Medium articles into Kauri
  
• Interview with Shawn Wilkinson on Storj’s current approach to decentralized storage
  
• Joe Lubin’s tweetstorm overview of the Ethereum ecosystem
  

Two great client releases. Update now

• Geth v1.8.19 trie read cache for 15% faster full-sync speed and 30% faster in-sync processing and Swarm v0.3.7. Also, Swarm’s Kubernetes setup is now open source
  
• Parity Ethereum v2.2.2 beta – lower the uncle rate allowing higher gas limit. warp sync reuses local info to reduce required data to sync. and 2.1.7 stable
  
• Parity CTO Fredrik Harrysson interviews Geth lead dev Péter Szilágyi for Zero Knowledge
  

Live on mainnet

• Gnosis Safe is on mainnet – Android app (download link. iOS coming soon). Big step forward in UX and multi-sig availability, though obviously you should wait for it to be battle tested before committing large sums. (RuntimeVerification’s formal verification is in process)
  
• Mintable: easily mint and manage your ERC721 nfty tokens
  
• Ethertify: certification platform for IP rights and document signing
  
• Aztec: working zero knowledge proof for confidential transactions on mainnet. Send Maker’s Dai to a contract, then withdraw to another address. The addresses are public, but the amounts are not. Roadmap includes: anonymous voting for governence mechanics, anonymous identity schemes and zero knowledge exchange
  

Enterprise

• Amazon announces QLDB (one party owns the chain/database) and Managed Blockchain (multiple nodes) for Ethereum and Fabric
  
• At same event, Kaleido announced consortium plans
  
• Trends in enterprise blockchain
  
• Excel to blockchain with web3j
  

Governance and Standards

• Polkadot: never fork again
  
• Giveth’s Unicorn DAC non-hierarchical governance experiment
  
• ERC1630: hashed time-lock standard
  

Application layer

• Ocean Protocol’s v0.2 Trilobite testnet release – data access control, secure compute via fitchain
  
• Capbridge and ConsenSys working on a Singaporean security token exchange
  
• Management and performance fees in a Melon fund
  
• A look under the hood of Mysterium’s decentralized VPN
  
• Streamr open sources their front end, Solidity code and event watcher
  
• upbloc: curated periodic publishing platform, live on Ropsten
  
• FedEx to work with XYO to build out proof of location
  
• More on Etherisc, Aon and Oxfam’s crop insurance for Sri Lankan rice farmers
  

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks

• Justin Drake on Epicenter
  
• Luke Mulks AMA on Brave Ads and he tells us about all the ways we’re being tracked
  
• Pokt Network’s Michael O’Rourke & Luis C. de Leon on Hashing It Out
  
• Hudson Jameson on the inaugural edition of Eric Conner’s podcast
  

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• Sina Habibian: tokenizing real estate
  
• Harbor’s security token platform launched with 20m equity in South Carolina student housing
  
• A CFTC primer on “smart contracts”
  
• Chris Burniske reports that SEC Chair Clayton confirmed that ETH and BTC are not securities, but refused to comment about Ripple.
  
• SEC announced settlements with Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled for touting shady sales and not disclosing it
  
• US Treasury sanctions 2 Bitcoin addresses associated with ransomware in Iran
  

General

• NEAR Protocol open sources its client; uses Typescript for its smart contracts. IDE live. (headsup: I’m an investor)
  
• Zilliqa’s v3 testnet is live in advance of targeted Jan 31 mainnet launch. (As said before, I own some)
  
• Trail of Bits: 10 Rules for Hardware Wallets
  
• Buterin/Weyl: Central planning as overfitting
  
• Jerome de Tychey’s recap and lessons learned of last year’s EthCC has me pumped for 2019.
  
• Holocracy founder on crypto network organization
  
• University of Basel gives Vitalik Buterin an honorary doctorate
  
• Scuttlebutt’s Dominic Tarr statement on a hack that happened because he transferred control of a widely-used module to an attacker who inserted code to steal crypto. Always check your dependencies.
  
• The hack above highlighted lack of incentive for open source maintainers, which is part of what Gitcoin highlights in their roadmap for financial open source sustainability. A different approach: the ZeppelinOS ecosystem of secure code
  

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note:

• Dec 7-9 – ETHSingapore hackathon (ETHGlobal)
  
• Dec 9 – Neufund equity token offering(closes after a week)
  
• Jan 10 – Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends
  
• Jan 29-30 – AraCon (Berlin)
  
• Feb 7-8 – Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)
  
• Feb 15-17 – ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal)
  
• Feb 23-25 – EthAustin hackathon (EthUniversal)
  
• Mar 5-7 – EthCC (Paris)
  
• Mar 27 – Infura end of legacy key support (Jan 23 begins Project ID prioritization)
  

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