Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Layer 1

• [eth1] Quick summary of Constantinople hard fork
  
• [maybe eth1, eth2] ELI5 storage rent
  
• [eth2] What’s New in Eth2 from Ben Edgington
  
• Latest Eth2 implementers call. Agenda to help follow along (plus brief notes in What’s New in eth2 above)
  
• [eth2] An updated Beacon chain mini-spec
  
• [eth2] Prysmatic dev update – sync’d with spec, 100% test coverage; Go BLS sigs ready
  
• [eth2] Lodestar Javascript client dev update
  
• [eth2] Cross-shard receipt and hibernation/waking anti-double-spending
  
• [eth2] Stan Kladko: Use validators BLS key pairs to keep transactions encrypted until included in chain
  
• [eth2[ Justin Drake: Eth2 consensus objects natively compatible with multiple hash functions
  
• [eth2] How Vitalik thinks about incentives for stakers to stay online
  
• [eth2] Staking reward spreadsheet by Eric Conner
  
• [eth2-> eth3] Beacon-chain friendly CBC Casper
  
• [eth3] Bitwise LMD GHOST
  

Layer 2

• Cryptoplayer.one – rock-paper-scissors (with a StarWars flavor) on Raiden, acted out by robots you can watch on Youtube. Try it out – it helps test Raiden.
  
• An overview of state channels projects
  
• Connext opensourced their generalized custodial hub. You can check out their hub, client, and contract code. Non-custodial hub coming in the next month.
  

Stuff for developers

• Austin Griffith: Burner Wallet v2.2, burner-to-burner encrypted messaging with Eth keys. Also solid ELI5 of Burner Wallet
  
• OpenZeppelin v2.1
  
• Truffle v5.0.1
  
• Paul Berg’s how to write upgradeable code with Truffle5 and ZeppelinOS2
  
• Intro to Mythril Classic and symbolic execution
  
• ConsenSys Diligence’s registry of code weakness and test cases
  
• SmartCheck security tool adds Vyper
  
• Minimal Solidity testing with Ganache and Jest
  
• Yondon Fu: How not to use ECDSA
  
• “stack too deep” error in Solidity
  
• Jez San on thinking about GDPR and blockchain
  
• Video example of queries to GraphQL api with 3box.js
  
• Monitoring events with Kauri’s Eventeum
  
• ConsenSysDesign’s rimble v0.2 adaptable components and design standards
  
• Gitcoin Grants an easy way to give recurring contributions to your favorite OSS projects and maintainers. Ben Edgington’s UX report
  

Ecosystem

• In case you haven’t noticed on Twitter, all the cool kids are getting an Eth dappnode from Ava.do [I don’t have one, but I want to be cool, so I’m probably going to get one]
  
• Bernhard Mueller’s hilarious tweetstorm satire of a maxi tweetstorm
  
• EthHub launches. Great documentation and FAQs for devs/users
  
• A note about Blockchains LLC from founder Jeffrey Berns
  
• imToken at 7.5m accumulated installed devices, 30% iOS, 70% Android
  
• To every Bitcoin maximalist who says you can’t run a full node, Afri very strongly disagrees.
  
• More Afri: on Jan 3, only 10.2% of nodes were Constantinople-ready. Update your clients!
  
• ConsenSys and AMD’s W3BCLOUD collaboration “to develop optimized solutions powered by AMD hardware” for enterprise and dapps (link opens PDF)
  

Enterprise

• John Wolpert on lessons learned in blockchain consulting
  
• Busting the myth of private blockchains
  
• Kaleido launches Marketplace for “blockchain at consortia scale”
  

Governance and Standards

• Core devs call. Agenda. Summary per Hudson, “Constantinople is on track. We are already starting to develop timelines for Istanbul. ProgPoW is going to happen barring any major issues.”
  
• Lane Rettig on transparency and the Devcon meetings on the PoW chain that caused a ruckus
  

Application layer (I decided no 2018 reviews; those could have been the whole newsletter)

• Many Augur markets ended on Dec 31, so there is a record 140 disputes in this week’s round. Also prediction markets to facilitate cross-chain swaps?
  
• Grid+ rolling out electricity to more in next couple months; had Samsung stop manufacturing a component of Lattice agent, so had to replace; still on track for Q2
  
• Air quality data streams from 10,210 locations in 68 countries on Streamr
  
• BloqPress – a web3 CMS
  
• Pando – decentralized VCS enabling contribution tracking, via the Aragon client
  
• DX.exchange – buy tokens representing Tesla, Apple and 8 more Nasdaq stocks where the stock is held in custody. Per Bloomberg, this goes live next week. To me, the interesting bit is that now those stacks can trade 24/7
  

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks

• Starkware’s Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny on Into the Ether
  
• Vitalik Buterin with Kartik Talwar at ETHSingapore
  
• Jutta Steiner on ZeroKnowledge
  

Tokens / Business / Regulation

• Livepeer network economics update. LPT continues to be an interesting experiment (and you probably have some from the MerkleMine airdrop)
  
• Cameroon separatists launch their own currency on Ethereum. Reading the article doesn’t give me great hope for its legitimacy, but it’s an interesting idea.
  
• Interesting funding model from Mintable: selling NFTs that let you use their app for free for life.
  
• Santiment built an Ethereum token market cap
  

General

• Elegy for a cypherpunk. Remembering Tim May. Nice work about the values from which our space springs.
  
• How much each year Ethereum is mentioned in Google Scholar articles
  
• IEEE: Ethereum plans to cut energy consumption by 99%
  
• Proof of existence timestamp chain on Substrate
  
• Chris Dixon: blockchains can wrest internet control from corporations
  

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

• Jan 10 – Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends
  
• Jan 10-Feb7 – 0x and Coinlist virtual hackathon
  
• Jan ~16 – Constantinople hard fork at block 7080000
  
• Jan 24 – Aragon vote, including on funding original AragonOne team
  
• Jan 29-30 – AraCon (Berlin)
  
• Jan 31 – GörliCon (Berlin)
  
• Feb 7-8 – Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)
  
• Feb 15-17 – ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal)
  
• Feb 23-25 – EthAustin (EthUniversal)
  
• 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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