News and Links
Constantinople is coming. [Also, this is the January 11, 2019 issue but I can’t fix the title without breaking links]
- Upgrade your clients ASAP! EF FAQ and blog post. From MyCrypto, what users need to know about the Constantinople fork
Layer 1
- [eth1] Rinkeby testnet forked successfully. Update your clients ASAP!
- [eth2] What’s New in Eth2
- [eth2] Latest Eth2 implementer call notes
- [eth2] Validator economics of Eth2. Also a thorough Eth staking ROI spreadsheet model
- [eth2] Discussion about storage rent “eviction archive” nodes and incentives
- web3foundation, Status and Validity Labs update and call for participants on private, decentralized messaging, a la Whisper
Layer 2
- Live on Rinkeby testnet: Plasma Ignis – often called “roll up” – 500 transactions per second using SNARKs for compression (not privacy), no delay to exit, less liveness requirements, multi-operator. Check out the live demo.
- Georgios Konstantopoulos: A Deep Dive on RSA Accumulators
- Canto: proposed new subprotocol to allow sidechain-like subnets
- Fae: a subnet by putting Fae’s binary transactions in the data field
- A RaidenNetwork deep dive explainer
- Can watchtowers and monitoring services scale?
- Counterfactual dev update: full end to end implementation of Counterfactual with demos and dev environment will be live on Ropsten in next 2 weeks
Stuff for developers
- Embark v4.0.0-beta.0
- Ganache v2.0.0-beta.2
- ZeppelinOS v2.1
- Updated EthereumJS readthedocs
- Solidity CTF: mirror madness from authio
- Solstice: 15 analyzer Solidity security tool
- EVM code fuzzing using input prediction
- Compound’s self-liquidation bug
- Gas Stations Network, an incentivized meta transaction relay network, live on Ropsten
- Understanding Rust lifetimes
- How to quickly deploy to Görli cross-client testnet
- Maker CDP leverager in one call
- Codefund2.0 – sustainability for open source project advertising without 3rd party trackers
- RSA accumulator in Vyper
- Analyzing 1.2m mainnet contracts in 20 seconds using Eveem and BigQuery
- 0x Market Maker program. 15k to run a market making bot on a 0x relayer
- POANet: Honey Badger BFT and Threshold Cryptography
Ecosystem
- Afri’s Eth node configuration modes cheat sheet. A great accompaniment to Afri’s did Ethereum reach 1 tb yet? The answer is obviously no, state plus chaindata is about 150 GB.
- MyEtherWallet v5 is in beta and MEWConnect on Android
- Ethereum Foundation major grant to Parity: $5m for ewasm, light wallet, and Eth2
Enterprise
- What enterprises need to know about AWS’s Blockchain as a Service
- 2019 is the year of enterprise tokens?
Governance and Standards
- Notes from latest core devs call, includes ProgPoW section. On that topic, IfDefElse put out a ProgPoW FAQ including responses from AMD and Nvidia. Also check understanding ProgPoW from a few months ago
- Martin Köppelmann on the governance protocol of DXdao
- Pando Network: DAOs and the future of content
- EIP1682: storage rent
- EIP1681: temporal replay protection
- ERC1683: URLs with asset and onboarding functionality
- ERC1690: Mortability standard
- ERC820 Pseudo-introspection Registry Contract is final
- ERC1155 multi-token standard to last call
Application layer
- Demo testing on Kovan testnet of the Digix governance platform
- Brave at 5.5m MAUs, up 5x in 2018. It also got much more stable over the year, and being able to use a private tab with TOR on desktop makes it a must (mobile has been a must for a long time). Here’s my referral code if you haven’t switched yet.
- I saw some warnings about tokenized US equity DX.exchange that was in the last newsletter. I have no idea if they are legit or if the warnings are in bad faith but the reason that Szabo’s “trusted third parties are security holes” gets repeated frequently is because it is true. If you choose any cryptoasset that depends on custody of a third party, caveat emptor.
- Origin now has editable listings and multiple item support
- Nevada counties are storing birth and marriage certificates on Ethereum
- Scout unveils its customizable token/protocol explorers for apps, live on Aragon and Livepeer
- Veil prediction markets platform built on 0x and Augur launches Jan 15 on mainnet. Fantastic to see the app layer stack coming together. Not open to the USA because…federal government.
- Gnosis on the problem of front running in dexes
- Status releases desktop alpha, v0.9
Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks
- Joseph Lubin on Epicenter. Some good early Eth history here.
- Curation Markets community call
- Ryan Sean Adams on the case for Ether as money on POV Crypto
- Nice Decrypt Media profile of Lane Rettig
- Q&A with Mariano Conti, head of Maker Oracles
- Andrew Keys on the American Banker podcast
- Austin Griffith 2018 lessons learned talk at Ethereum Boulder
- Starkware’s Eli Ben-Sasson and Alessandro Chiesa on Zero Knowledge
- Nick Johnson talks ENS and ProgPoW on Into the Ether
Tokens / Business / Regulation
- Paul Kohlhaas: bonding curve design parameters
- Ryan Zurrer: Network keepers, v2
- Zastrin to sell a tradeable NFT as a license to use its blockchain dev courses.
- Sharespost says it did its first compliant security token trade of BCAP (Blockchain Capital). Link opens PDF
- Actus Financial Protocol announces standard for tokenizing all financial instruments.
- Missing DeFi piece: longer-term interest generating assets
- Gemini’s rules for the revolution on working with regulators.
- Blockchain Association proposes the Hinman Standard for cryptoassets
- Blockchains LLC releases its 300 page Blockchain Through a Legal Lens
- China released restrictive blockchain rules including censorship and KYC
- Why Ether is Valuable
General
- ETC got 51% attacked. Coinbase was first to announce it, though it appears the target was the gate.io exchange. Amusingly, the price hardly suffered. The amazing thing is that a widely known and relatively easily exploited attack vector like this didn’t happen during bull market when this attack could have been an order of magnitude more profitable.
- Michael del Castillo tracks the supply chain of an entire dinner using blockchain products like Viant
- Julien Thevenard argues Ethereum is on par or safer than Bitcoin in terms of proof of work.
- Coindesk video interview of the creator of HODL. He isn’t at all convinced by Bitcoin’s new “store of value” meme. Very entertaining use of 8 minutes.
- That very odd Bitcoin nonce pattern. Phil Daian says it is caused by AntMiners
- Researchers brute force attack private keys of poorly implemented ECDSA nonce generation.
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
- Jan 14 – Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends
- Jan 10-Feb7 – 0x and Coinlist virtual hackathon
- Jan ~16 – Constantinople hard fork at block 7080000
- Jan 24 – List of things for Aragon vote, including on funding original AragonOne team
- Jan 25 – Graph Day (San Francisco)
- Jan 29-30 – AraCon (Berlin)
- Jan 31 – GörliCon (Berlin)
- Feb 7-8 – Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)
- Feb 15-17 – ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal)
- Mar 4 – Ethereum Magicians (Paris)
- Mar 5-7 – EthCC (Paris)
- Mar 8-10 – ETHParis (ETHGlobal)
- Mar 27 – Infura end of legacy key support (Jan 23 begins Project ID prioritization)
- April 8-14 – Edcon hackathon and conference (Sydney)
- Apr 19-21 – ETHCapetown (ETHGlobal)
- May 10-11 – Ethereal (NYC)
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