Ethereum News and Links
Protocol
- Sharding research: 1) Delayed state execution in practice, 2) State execution, scalability & price of DoS attacks, 3) Fork-free sharding and 4) A model for stage 4 “tightly coupled” sharding plus full Casper
- Vlad talk on Casper in Berlin. u/AtLeastSignificant’s accompanying notes
- Latest core dev call. EtherWorld’s notes from the call.
- Latest Casper standup
- Loom Network: Dappchains
- Grid+ Cryptobridge client video demo
- 3rd and 4th editions of Griff’s bridgechain interviews: TrueBit and Grid+
- Plasma implementer’s call #2. Also: Ethereum-plasma github
- Josh Stark on making sense of Ethereum layer 2 scalability. Also his Twitter tl;dr
Stuff for developers
- Debugging the memory leak in Tendermint
- How to initialize an array inside a struct
- Web3.swift for iOS Development from Mercury Protocol
- A honeypot for hackers
- 0x.js developer sandbox
- Repo of code bugs used in attacks
- Maurelian: An early look at Vyper. Also, Vyper is likely less gas optimized than Solidity
- Approaches to the Factory pattern in LLL
Releases
- Geth v1.8 – light client sync in under a minute!, better fast sync, internal state pruning, Puppeth, and much more
- Solidity v0.4.20 new optimization stages for intermediate language plus lots of features.
- Blk.io block explorer for Quorum and Ethereum
Governance and EIPs
- Yoichi Hirai resigned as an EIP editor after 3 months in the position. He opposed EIP867 and felt that he might have legal risk in Japan, even though the EIP was already dead in the water. If you read his post, he clearly wasn’t happy fulfilling the duties of the editor, so it seems like a win for all that he focuses on all of his other fantastic Ethereum work.
- Greg Colvin and Jamie Pitts propose a fellowship to work on EIPs. Governance in Ethereum is informal, but it generally works because people assume good faith and work toward consensus. And there’s always the exit option to fork. This Fellowship should be an interesting step.
- Relevant: Nate Rush and Sunny Aggarwal interview Vlad Zamfir and Arthur Breitman on governance. Here’s the reading list to prepare to watch.
- ERC875, non fungible token standard with cheap atomic swaps
- EIP877 separate transaction signer from deployer
MyCrypto.com forks from MyEtherWallet
- Taylor forked MEW and started MyCrypto. The entire team went with Taylor
- Kosala filed a lawsuit a few months ago. MEW LLC got dissolved in there somewhere.
- Taylor moved the MEW Twitter account. 4Chan invaded r/ethereum for a few days. Taylor/MC ultimately decided to start afresh with a new twitter account
- Go follow the new MyCrypto account
- Forks are painful, but I bet this ends up being good for all parties in the long run.
Ecosystem
- EthGlobal: Ethan Wilding, Liam Horne, and Kartik Talwar are reincarnating EthWaterloo to help organize hackathons around the world
- Mastering Ethereum, the Andreas Antonopoulos and Gavid Wood book, is now making progress and about 30% done
- Gitcoin: the state of open source today. some wins, some losses.
- A comparison of ERC20 and the newer proposed standards. Also, a guide to non-standard ERC20 functionality
- Space Decentral: a DAO to go to space
- Robby Greenfield on self-sovereign finance in developing countries
- an EIP to reduce block rewards to miners to 1 ETH
Project Updates
- AKASHA now in public beta
- All DGX 2.0 code is on Kovan testnet
- 0x Jan dev update
- Decentralizing Aragon’s development – split the Foundation from core devs and funding more teams
- Polkadot nearing PoC1
- On Rigoblock’s decentralized fund infrastructure
- Brave blocks Salon’s crypto mining malware
- Numerai increases payouts 5x
- Brave also launches a referral program. If for some reason you still don’t use Brave, you can download it on my referral link and I’ll get some BAT.
Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks
- RChain talks Casper on Epicenter
- Hugh Karp short talk on Nexus Mutual insurance in London
- Christoph Mussenbrock on Etherisc at ETHZurich
- Igor Lllic talk on blockchains in context
- Matt Suiche talk on Porosity decompiler
- Golem, Bnktothefuture, and Atlas Neue talks at EthLondon
- Erik Voorhees with Laura Shin. She’s also starting a shorter, more topical podcast series
- The Bitcoin Podcast talks to Taylor from MyCrypto about the MEW fork and to Jameson Lopp about building infrastructure for blockchain
Tokens
- Canadian Securities Exchange intends to build a trading and settlement platform on Ethereum for securities tokens
- Placeholder Capital investment thesis
- A tutorial on leveraging a long ETH position with Maker.
- Matt Lockyer: All cryptoassets are utilities
- Kyle Samani: New models for utility tokens
- Valuing Bitcoin and Ethereum with Metcalfe’s Law
- Primoz Kordez: Tokens targeted airdrops
General
- NYTimes: Universities are offering blockchain courses
- Coinbase Commerce: merchants accept crypto into their own wallet; already integrated with Shopify
- Status nominated for Innovation Award by UNESCO
- Zilliqa: a novel approach to sharding (disclaimer: I own some)
- Trusted IoT Alliance reference architecture
- SEC Commissioner Kara Stein mentions blockchains in a speech on how we can reimagine corporate governance
- WebAssembly core spec first working draft
- a16z’s crypto canon
- ConsenSys Academy releases Blockchain Basics book
Dates of note
Upcoming dates:
- February 16-18 – EthDenver
- Mar 8-10 – Ethereum Community Conference in Paris
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