Week in Ethereum News

Ethereum News and Links

Top

• Latest Core Dev meeting video.  Agenda. Decisions per Hudson Jameson:
  • Splitting Metropolis into 2 hard forks.
  • Delaying EIP 86 until Metro HF 2.
  • Likely adding miner block reward deduction to Metro HF 1.
• Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is now the largest open source blockchain initiative
  
  • Rebooting the EEA Technical Steering Committee

Protocol

• Vitalik: The core principle of Casper incentivization.  Plus Reddit thread.
• Gavin Wood: “> 50% chance that a modest PoS solution is at least 12 months from release”
  • Gavin comment on PolkaDot development
    
• ConsenSys is funding research for a different approach to scalability

Stuff for developers

• How to develop on Ethereum in scala.js
• Building dapps on Ethereum tutorial, pt 4: decentralised hosting using Swarm
• Setting up a bug bounty contract with OpenZeppelin
• Vitalik now considers Serpent to be “outdated tech”

Releases

• Geth v1.6.7
• imToken v1.3
• WALLETH 0.17
• FirstBlood beta release to token sale participants

Ecosystem

• ETH Gas Station: helping users understand the time-cost tradeoff
• VentureBeat interviews FunFair’s Jez San
  • Their version of Roulette is live on Ropsten with Metamask
    
• Joe Lubin on ConsenSys and Mauritius
• the F*** token (bleeped so Google doesn’t get the wrong idea) raised 80k for a tipbot
• Jordan Leigh video on ERC-223
• Coindash had someone hijack their site and get $7m.  This is the same project that won the Ether.camp hackathon under rather controversial circumstances.
• Ujo and RAC – the future of licensing?
  • Buy the RAC album. Pretty much unanimously has good reviews.
    

Project Announcements & White papers

• Stox – building a prediction market using Bancor’s token.  A coin on a coin on a coin. White paper
• Everdant – a protocol for financing across the value chain for small farmers. white paper
• HelloGold – tokenized gold aimed at low-medium income people in Asia  White paper.

Project Updates

• Golem and Steamr to work together on shared parts of tech stack
• Aragon’s Community Governance model
• The first Melon manager competition
• How Melonport balances competing stakeholder interests

Interviews and Talks

• Linda Xie and Jordan Clifford from Coinbase on Software Engineering Daily
  • Plus SED episodes on anti-fraud and security at Coinbase
    
• Swap protocol on FutureTechPodcast

Token Sale Projects

• Mark D’Agostino:  Why Grid+ is built on the public Ethereum chain
• The Decentraland white paper and What would centralized VR look like?
  • Decentraland team
    
• 0x Development Roadmap
• Decentraland & district0x
• A prediction market project doing a token sale tried to get attention with crazy attacks on Augur and Gnosis, yet apparently just copied and pasted code.  
• Indorse: Real Identity and Real Value from professional social networking site

Token Sales

• Evolving the Cofound.it Priority Pass for the Musiconomi Crowdsale
• VC Albert Wenger says founders shouldn’t try to get the best terms in pre-sale rounds.
• One glaring problem with TenX tokens
• Blockchain… The End of All Corporate Business Models?
• RocketPool: Automated Sale Agents for token sales
• “U.S. ICOs shouldn’t be scared of the SEC”  Pretty much all of this is the diametric opposite of my view, and I’d wager lots of money that it was not written by a lawyer. Government is often slow to act, but a lack of current action does not indicate a lack of future action.

General

• Disrupting the trust business – The Economist
• The rumors are true: USV’s Joel Monegro and Chris Burniske are starting a crypto fund
• Mougayar: “The token itself is not your new business model. What the token enables for you and for your users is the key part to focus on”
• Podcast about ZCash’s “Ceremony”
• Dan Romero’s Digital Currency reading list
• CNBC: “This hot digital currency trend is minting millions, but US investors aren’t allowed to play”

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar:

Upcoming token sale start dates:

• July 20 – Propy
• July 24 – Everex
• July 24 – TribeToken
• July 31 – RexMLS
• August 1 – Harbour DAO
• August 8 – Decentraland
• August 8 – Indorse
• August 15 – Ox Protocol (mandatory registration Aug 9-12)
• August 15 – BitDice
• August 28 – HelloGold
• August 31 – Monetha
• September 5 – Viberate
• September 13 – Unikoin

Ongoing token sales:

• Fund Yourself Now
• Blocktix
• Macroverse
• NeverDie
• Dentacoin
• DAO.casino
• Suretly
• Dent
• district0x
• Delphi
• Agrello
• Coindash
• ACT
• MyBit

You can find this calendar updated daily-ish at TokenSaleCalendar.com

[I aim for a relatively comprehensive list of Ethereum sales, but make no warranty as to even whether they are legit; as such, I thus likewise warrant nothing about whether any will produce a satisfactory return. I have passed the CFA exams, but this is not investment advice. If you’re interested in what I do, you can find my somewhat out-of-date investing thesis and token sale appreciation strategies in previous newsletters.]

Listings: [first name] @ticketleap.com  or tweet @evan_van_ness. Please provide: 1) your URL, 2) sale date and 3) a brief description of how you are using Ethereum.

Newsletter housekeeping

Some time in early August, there will be an announcement that I’ve joined ConsenSys.  Here’s a logo to draw your eye in case you were going to skip over this section:

I’m very excited about this move and will have significantly more to say in the future.  The newsletters should become more regular again! In the meantime, I wanted to make it clear so that you can judge whether I favor ConsenSys projects.

My charge from Joe Lubin is pretty similar to what Status has told me: keep telling the truth and covering the space objectively, even if the truth hurts.

This section is (almost?) always the link for sharing

The best compliment you can give this is to share or upvote.

Follow me on Twitter? @evan_van_ness

This newsletter is supported by Status.im.  But in case you still want to send Ether (or tokens?):  0x96d4F0E75ae86e4c46cD8e9D4AE2F2309bD6Ec45