Ethereum News and Links
Protocol
- Tradeoffs in account abstraction
- Dec 1st core dev call. Agenda.
- This week’s Casper standup call
- ERC20-K: Formal Executable Specification of ERC20
- Alexey Akhunov profiles the Geth client during cryptokitty peak mania.
- Vlad Zamfir: Against on-chain governance.
- I think everyone already assumed this would be the case, but Vitalik comes out in favor of a carbonvote as a necessary condition to unfreeze Parity multisig Ether.
- An ELI5 on Ethereum’s scaling projects from Dunning_Krugerrands
Stuff for developers
- Solidity v0.4.19 release. Fantastic to see how many contributors there were. It’d be great if more people were working on Solidity fulltime: send your CV to solidity-jobs@ethereum.org
- Plus more on the new Solidity ABI Encoder/Decoder and Optimizer
- A React HOC for Ethereum
- Solidity Eclipse IDE
- “countable, iterable and unordered set type for Solidity that stores unique items”
- An intro to Ethereum coding from Zeppelin
- Beautifying your tests with JavaScript
- Aragon and Placeholder are announcing a grants program to build Aragon and Ethereum public goods – infrastructure and dev tooling
- Python + Ethereum email list
- uPort hackathon on TopCoder
- Zeppelin’s Ethernaut game for security in solidity
CryptoKitty mania
- How does CryptoKitties work? And a walk through the codebase.
- CryptoKitties isn’t as decentralized as you think. But if there’s a conflict, “the community will just hard fork the kitties.”
- Jeff Wilcke agrees to buy a gen zero cat from Nick Johnson for ~90k to charity if a tweet got to 500 RTs, but someone nabbed it first
- Transactions hit 800k in a day. Metamask grew its user base by 35% in kitty mania week. Per EthGasStation, the current safe low is 55gwei. But just raising the gas limit isn’t really an option.
- Reminder: if your transaction is stuck in limbo, re-send it with the same nonce and a higher gas price based on Eth Gas Station.
- Can’t vouch for the veracity, but this claims CryptoKitties is almost 70% of total gas usage.
- Kitty explorer and kitty sales. We’re currently over 8m USD equivalent transacted, but it seems like Dec 4th was the peak with daily small declines afterward.
- Burnable payments to decompile the GeneScience bytecode.
Ecosystem
- Etherisc proposes insurable crypto wallet specification
- The mechanics of Zug’s uPort ID
- Cosmos’ Ethermint testnet is live
- Alex Miller: Building a Usable Multisig Wallet
- Chronicled is implementing zk-snarks for pharma provenance
- Token Curated Registries 1.1 – now with slashing
- Token curated governance with stake machines
- MicroRaiden’s main net bug bounty release
Project Updates
- Brave is giving away ~$5 in BAT tokens. Free “money” for Brave users to support publishers.
- Decentraland’s Terraform event starts Dec 15
- Status joins the EEA. We’re seeing them step up as leaders in order to achieve their goals. Status will also come pre-installed on the Finneyblockchain phone.
- Etherisc accepted into the UK’s FCA regulatory sandbox. Also: building protocols for decentralized insurance
- iExec is giving away 150k in grants to people who build on iExec.
- Colony’s reputation system
Project Announcements and Whitepapers
- Vynos inbrowser payment channel wallet from Spankchain and Machinomy
- Earn.com white paper
- Zipper blockchain phone
Interviews, Videos and Talks
- Joe Lubin’s CNBC hit. All substance, no hype. That’s the Ethereum spirit.
- Polychain’s Olaf predicts the Flippening in 2018. He gives great media interviews.
- I talk to Jack Spallone about what Ujo Music has been up to and where it’s going.
- Joe Lubin answers questions about ConsenSys on the Bridge BKpodcast.
- Brian Armstrong on Bloomberg TV
- Gavin: “The journey to web3” from Melon’s M-0 conf
Token Sales
- ConsenSys launched the Brooklyn Project to address issues around token sales.
- SEC cracked down on another ICO scam from a repeated scammer.
- Zenel Batagelj: Towards the next era – ICO 3.0
- Messari’s transparency goals
Token Sale Projects
- The lady doth protest too much: OpenBazaar is now doing an Ethereum token. Joking aside, welcome. Brian Hoffman is hilarious (how does that video have just 200 views?)
- Failed Venezuelan dictatorship thinks it can circumvent sanctions by selling a cryptoasset. If they sell any, then we are indeed in a bubble.
General
- Vitalik Buterin in Bloomberg’s 50 Most Influential People of 2017
- Mike Bloomberg actually (!) said this: “the Bloomberg system is a blockchain, instead of having the users control it, we control it.”
- Chris Padovano: Decentralized exchanges aren’t above the law
- Yahoo Finance integrated 100+ blockchain assets. Very random selection.
- Nathaniel Popper visits Coinbase and writes about it for the New York Times.
Dates of note
From Token Sale Calendar.
Upcoming token sale start dates:
- December 8 – SingularityNet
- December 10 – Gazecoin
- December 11 – Aurora DAO from IDEX
- December 23 – Rocketpool (proportional refund cap, started November 25h)
Ongoing token sales:
- Neufund ICBM
- Debitum
- Nous Platform
- Bloom
- Relest
- CanYa
- Realisto
- FundRequest
- Dopameme
- Gizer
- Aigang
- Hirematch
- ScriptDrop
- SeedsTokens
WARNING: list may include or even likely includes scams and quasi-scams. Do your own research and due diligence before putting value at risk
[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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