Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Layer 1

• [eth1] state rent proposal 2
  
• [eth1] selfish mining in Ethereum academic paper. Per Casey Detrio, EIP100 changed the threshold to 27%. But since ETC doesn’t have EIP100, it’s just 5 or 10%.
  
• [eth2] a long AMA from the Eth2 research team
  
• [eth2] yeeth Eth2 client in Swift
  
• [eth2] What’s new in eth2 includes Ben’s take on future of the PoW chain
  
• [eth2] notes from last eth2 implementer call
  
• [eth2] Vitalik’s security design rationale
  
• [eth2] More Vitalik: Eth2 and Casper CBC video talk
  
• [eth2] Collin Myers takes a look at the proposed economics for validators
  

Layer 2

• Raiden on progress towards Ithaca release, which will include pathfinding and fee earning as well as monitoring. More from Loredana on building CryptoBotWars on Raiden
  
• Magmo update: about to release their paper on Nitro, their protocol for a virtual state channel network
  
• The case for Ethereum scaling through layer 2 solutions
  
• Optimistic off-chain data availability from Aragon
  
• Starkware on a layer 2 design fundamental: validity proofs vs fraud proofs. Also: its decentralized exchange using STARKs planned for testnet at end of q1.
  

Stuff for developers

• Solidity v0.5.3
  
• web3j v4.1.1
  
• Web3.js v1.0.0-beta.38
  
• Waffle v2 of its testing suite (uses ethers.js)
  
• Celer Network’s proto3 to solidity library generator for onchain/offchain, cross-language data structures. Celer’s SDK
  
• ERC20 meta transaction wrapper contract
  
• “dumb contracts” that store data in the event logs
  
• ETL pipline on AWS for security token analytics
  
• Interacting with Ethereum using web3.py and Jupyter notebooks
  
• Tutorial on using Embark
  
• Tutorial: using OpenLaw agreements with dapps
  
• OpenBazaar’s escrow framework
  
• Etherisc opensources the code for their Generic Insurance Framework
  
• Austin Griffith’s latest iteration of Burner Wallet sales
  
• Deploying a front end with IPFS and Piñata SDK
  
• Video tutorial of Slither static analyzer
  
• Overview of formal verification projects in Ethereum
  
• zkPoker with SNARks – explore iden3’s circom circuit
  

Ecosystem

• Lots of charts on the bomb historically and present
  
• Gnosis Safe is now available on iOS
  
• A big thing in the community was r/ethtrader’s DONUT tokens. Started by Reddit as “community points” to experiment in ethtrader upvotes, the donuts can be used to buy the banner, vote in polls, and get badges. So a Reddit <> Eth token bridge was created, and DONUT traded on Uniswap. But some people preferred donuts to be used for subreddit governance, so the experiment is currently paused. That’s my take, here’s Will Warren’s take.
  
• Decentralizing project management with the Ethereum Cat Herders
  
• ENS permanent registrar proposals
  

Client releases

• The Mantis client written in Scala now supports ETH and will stop supporting ETC

Enterprise

• Hyperledger Fabric founder John Wolpert on why Ethereum is winning in enterprise blockchain
  
• Levi’s jeans, Harvard SHINE and ConsenSys announce a workers well being pilot program at a factory in Mexico
  
• Tokenizing a roomba to charge it
  
• Correctness analysis of Istanbul BFT. Suggests it isn’t and can be improved.
  

Governance and Standards

• Notes from last all core devs call
  
• A postmortem on the Constantinople postponement
  
• SNT community voting dapp v0.1 – quadratic voting system
  
• EIP1712: disallow deployment of unused opcodes
  
• EIP1715: Generalized Version Bits Voting for Consensus Soft and Hard Forks
  
• ERC1723: Cryptography engine standard
  
• ERC1724: confidential token standard
  
• EIP1717: Defuse the bomb and lower mining reward to 1 ether
  

Application layer

• Augur leaderboard. And Crystalball.be stats. Augur v1.10 released
  
• Lots of action in Augur frontends: Veil buys Predictions.global, Guesser to launch Jan 29, and BlitzPredict.
  
• A fiat-backed Korean Won is live on AirSwap
  
• Adventureum – “a text-based, crowd-sourced, decentralised choose-your-own adventure game”
  
• PlasmaBears is live using LoomNetwork
  
• Kyber’s automated price reserve – a simpler though less flexible option for liquidity providers. Also, Kyber’s long-term objectives
  

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks

• Trail of Bits and ChainSecurity discuss 1283 on Hashing It Out
  
• Videos from Trail of Bits’ Empire Hacking
  
• Scott Lewis and Bryant Eisenbach give the case for Ethereum on a Bitcoin podcast
  
• Philipp Angele talk on Livepeer’s shared economies for video infrastructure
  
• Tarun Chitra on PoS statistical modeling on Zero Knowledge
  
• Gnosis’ Martin Köppelmann on Into the Ether
  
• Martin Köppelmann and Matan Field on Epicenter
  

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• If you don’t have a background in finance, MyCrypto’s learning about supplying and borrowing with Compound will be a good read.
  
• A nice look at the original NFT: CryptoPunk
  
• NFT License 2.0 to define what is permitted with NFT and associated art
  
• IDEO on what NFT collectibles should learn from legacy collectibles.
  
• Matthew Vernon is selling tokens representing 1 hour of design consulting
  
• Caitlin Long tweetstorm about Wyoming’s crypto-friendly legislation
  
• Crypto exchanges don’t need a money transmitter license in Pennsylvania
  

General

• Samsung to have key store in their Galaxy S10. Pictures show Eth confirmed.
  
• Zilliqa to launch its mainnet this week, much like Ethereum launched with Frontier
  
• NEAR’s private testnet launches at event in SF on the 29th
  
• Polkadot upgrades to PoC3 using GRANDPA consensus algo
  
• Looks like Protonmail wants to build on Ethereum
  
• Messari says Ripple drastically overstates their supply to prop up their market cap
  
• Sia’s David Vorick on proof of work attacks
  
• a zero knowledge and SNARKs primer
  
• Infoworld when the Mac launched 35 years ago: do we really need this?
  
• Have a co-branded credit card in the US? Amazon (or whoever) probably gets to see your transaction history, which means they’re probably selling it too.
  

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

• Jan 29-30 – AraCon (Berlin)
  
• Jan 30 – Feb 1 – Stanford Blockchain Conference
  
• Jan 31 – GörliCon (Berlin)
  
• Jan 31 – Maker to remove OasisDEX and Oasis.direct frontends
  
• Feb 2 – Eth2 workshop (Stanford)
  
• Feb 7-8 – Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)
  
• Feb 7 – 0x and Coinlist virtual hackathon ends
  
• Feb 14 – Eth Magicians (Denver)
  
• Feb 15-17 – ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal)
  
• Feb 27 – Constantinople (block 7280000)
  
• Mar 4 – Ethereum Magicians (Paris)
  
• Mar 5-7 – EthCC (Paris)
  
• Mar 8-10 – ETHParis (ETHGlobal)
  
• Mar 8-10 – EthUToronto
  
• Mar 22 – Zero Knowledge Summit 0x03 (Berlin)
  
• Mar 27 – Infura end of legacy key support
  
• April 8-14 – Edcon hackathon and conference (Sydney)
  
• Apr 19-21 – ETHCapetown (ETHGlobal)
  
• May 10-11 – Ethereal (NYC)
  
• May 17 – Deadline to accept proposals for Instanbul upgrade fork
  

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