Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Protocol

• Ben Edgington’s slides on the path to Ethereum 2.0
  
• TechCrunch Karl, Vitalik, and Justin scalability panel, where Justin estimated timeline at Casper in 2019, sharding in 2020.
  
• Justin Drake’s latest sharding slides
  
• Prymsatic’s sharding implementation update.
  
• Also, Prysmatic’s Beacon Chain design doc, and their sync call
  
• Four different beacon chain implementations: Go, Javascript, Rust, Python
  
• draft of OMG Plasma’s Simple Fast Withdrawals
  
• OmiseGo splits Plasma repos: MVP as a learning tool and a repo aimed at deployment
  
• Wolk’s Plasma Cash implementation
  
• Latest Casper standup
  
• Latest core dev call.  Lane’s amazing notes.  ewasm testnet before Devcon.  Pegasys announced that by Devcon it would release its mainnet client written in Java.
  
• It appears that next hard fork will include 145, 1052, 1014 EIPs and aiming for before Devcon
  
• Vlad’s cryptoeconomic design infographic
  
• Lane Rettig: Why you should become a core developer
  

Stuff for developers

• Zero knowledge identity and signaling on top of Miximus, from BarryWhitehat
  
• Ganache v1.2.1 bug fix for this week’s v1.2 – intial acct balance, acct unlocking, etc
  
• web3 webpacked
  
• basic syntax mode in emacs for Vyper
  
• List of dapp upgradeability solutions
  
• Notes from taking ConsenSys Academy’s dev course
  
• Node wrapper for MakerDAO
  
• An unaudited implementation of Nick Johnson’s Offchain Auction idea for token sales
  
• Loom Network tutorial on using their dappchain block explorer
  
• Quorum devs want to know what questions you have for them
  
• SolidStamp report on security auditors
  
• Signup to be a Connext Hub in their payment channel pilot program
  
• Building an Eth account scraper with QuickBlocks (now open source!)
  
• Decentralize wallet.ethereum.org using IPFS with Dappnode
  

Release

• Geth v1.8.12 – add Swarm PoC3 plus performance and bug fixes

Live on mainnet

• Augur is live.  Over 100k open interest, total volume heading towards a million. Definitely some bugs being worked through which lead to Augur App v1.0.2.  Very cool to see people building stuff on top like predictions.global

Ecosystem

• Gitcoin put up a nice time to confirmation gas history chart. My 1 gwei transaction finally went through after 12 days, so perhaps the offending exchange has decided to stop incentivizing spamming the chain and the gas crisis is over?
  
• Vitalik’s slides on transaction fee economics
  
• Poor Bancor key management leads to loss of 25k ETH (~12m usd)
  
• Parimutuel Eth betting on the World Cup final
  
• Sergey Brin is mining Ethereum with his son
  
• Trusted 3rd parties are security holes: hacked Hola Chrome extension logged MyEtherWallet activity
  
• MyCrypto v1.2 release with hardware wallet support and no more private keys option on the web
  
• web3 design collaboration call
  
• Jérôme de Tychey’s Ethereum and scalability overview slides
  

Governance and Standards

• EIP1193: Ethereum provider API
  
• EIP1121: Add chain id to EIP55 mixed-case checksum address encoding
  
• EIP1218: extend BLOCKHASH opcode so blocks are aware of block hashes much older than current hash. alternative to EIP210
  
• ERC1201: 2 tier token structure for NFT ownership and rental
  
• ERC1202: Voting standard
  
• ERC1200: token upgradeability standard
  
• ERC1214: another token upgradeability standard
  
• ERC1203: multi-class token standard
  
• ERC1207: DAuth Access Delegation standard
  
• ERC1211: Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST) interface
  
• Comparison of top-down and bottom-up composables
  
• Matt Lockyer’s argument against onchain token standards
  
• Ryan Zurrer argues for EIP999, or something like it
  
• Aragon: On signaling and social pressure.  Pick a group of stakeholders, make a DAO with them, hold vote.  
  
• MakerDAO Governance Risk framework
  
• Aragon discussion thread on Phil Daian’s Dark DAO’s post
  

Project Updates

• Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation in Gitcoin.  $150k in lifetime work done.
  
• OmiseGo monthly update
  
• Rocketpool to do a beta test on their own PoA testnet
  
• Brave passes 3.1m MAUs, 80% mobile.  Mobile is a no-brainer, but as of late desktop is also nearing no-brainer territory.  And they’ve left anti-blockchain Mailchimp, hurray!  
  
• Opera announces built-in web3 crypto wallet, but all their blog posts have been down for … days.  
  
• Grid+ alpha to go live soon with three groups: electricity-only, electricity with Grid+ agent, and just agent.  First 2 are Texas-only, but third group is for US residents to test the agent as a hardware wallet.
  
• Mysterium has launched on testnet for 3rd party vpn nodes.  How to host a VPN node
  
• Smart GPU miners may make lots of money transcode mining with Livepeer
  
• Kyber Network on its goal of making tokens liquid and useful
  
• Golem on running arbitrary payloads in SGX enclaves
  

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks 

• All the interviews at TechCrunch Zug.  Lots of good stuff there
  
• Connext’s Arjun Bhuptani on Inchained
  
• Patrick McCorry talks Pisa
  
• OSCoin on Zero Knowledge
  
• Coda talks zk-starks for scalability on Epicenter
  
• FOAM on Hashing It Out
  
• Conor Svensson Qcon talk on Ethereum in the enterprise
  
• Demian Brener talks Zeppelin with Laura Shin
  
• Trail of Bits’ Dan Guido Ethereum Security talk
  
• Julian Zawistowski talks Golem with Adam Draper
  
• Nick D’Andrea talks Truffle on Smartest Contract
  
• Joe Lubin “Power of Ethereum” keynote at Rise in HK.   More Joe on Blockchain and Us podcast, which I love because there’s a transcript.
  

Tokens 

• Interesting look at the token models of Asian exchanges
  
• Melon floats token swaps and mergers with projects using their platform
  
• Kyle Samani’s web3 stack reprises Stephan Tual’s web3 stack graphic
  
• Big Tech will drive web3 adoption.  Interesting ideas, but I bet Clay Christensen would disagree.
  
• Could tokenized ownership for renters solve the principal-agent problem the way stock options (theoretically) incentivize employees?
  
• Delegating votes to overcome TCR vote-splitting problem
  
• Panvala is a TCR for code security from ConsenSys Diligence, with the twist of a token capacitor to reward participants at decaying rate.  Sale in a few months. Interesting experiment.
  
• Equity or equity-replicating tokens given to early adopters is a trend we’re starting to see and will likely see more of.  Two I find interesting are Dapped for dapp discovery and Open Bundle for journalism from some of my old co-workers at Ticketleap.  They also wrote: When protocols replace companies
  
• Crypto Against Humanity as test case for curation markets
  
• Simon de la Rouviere: Incentivized forking
  
• On Single Bonding Curves for Continuous Token Models
  

General

• Parity: what is Substrate?
  
• Zilliqa testnet v2
  
• Coinbase is adding Cardano, Basic Attention Token, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x
  
• Guide to network attacks on blockchains
  
• I enjoy scifi blockchain fiction
  
• Universal basic income through video games?
  
• LedgerLive – desktop companion app for Linux, Mac and Windows
  
• Luxarity working with ConsenSys to track physical and monetary donations, then sell the physical donations at retail, and track social impact disbursements.  Also from ConsenSys asia tour: Caifeng gene data exchange with Kaleido
  
• World Economic Forum: 4 ways blockchain will transform the mining industry through an Open Minerals and ConsenSys venture
  
• Zcon0 wrapup and links to talks
  

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note:

• July 12-18 – IC3 Eth Bootcamp (Ithaca, NY)
  
• July 14-15 – Ethereum Magicians governance talks in Berlin
  
• July 19-20 – DappCon (Berlin)
  
• July 22-24 — Japan tourism hackathon (Tokyo)
  
• July 24-26 – NIFTY hackathon and NFT conference (Hong Kong)
  
• July 25 – Maecenas auction of Andy Warhol piece
  
• August 10-12 – EthIndia hackathon (Bangalore)
  
• August 10-12 – ENS workshop and hackathon (London)
  
• August 22 – Maker DAO ‘Foundation Proposal’ vote
  
• August 24-26 – Loom hackathon (Oslo, Norway)
  
• September 6 – Security unconference (Berlin)
  
• September 7-9 – EthBerlin hackathon
  
• September 7-9 – WyoHackathon (Wyoming)
  
• Oct 5-7 – TruffleCon in Portland
  
• Oct 5-7 – EthSanFrancisco hackathon
  
• Oct 22-24 – Web3Summit (Berlin)
  
• Oct 30 – Nov 2 – Devcon4 (Prague)
  
• Dec 7-9 – dGov distributed governance conf (Athens)
  
• December – EthSingapore hackathon
  

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