News and Links
Protocol (with an assist from the Ethereum Research team)
- Shasper chain, v2.1
- Prysmatic’s biweekly update on transitioning to Eth 2.0 with separate Go codebase
- VDFs are not Proof of Work by Danny Ryan. Verifiable Delay Functions have some properties – requiring significant computation to calculate but relatively little computation to verify – that is suitable for strengthening RANDAO-based RNG. That sounds like proof of work, but Danny explains the difference between VDFs and PoW.
- STARKs, Part 3: Into the Weeds by Vitalik Buterin: In Vitalik’s STARKs series part 3, he introduced how to actually implement a STARK with vivid explication.
- Latest Casper standup call
- VB: Epoch-less Casper FFG liveness/safety argument
- Why Shasper makes more sense than the previous FFG, then sharding roadmap
- LearnPlasma is really coming together as a Plasma education resource
- A Plasma Cash primer from Simon de la Rouviere
- Jinglan Wang: what is Plasma? Plasma Cash?
- Raiden is live on Ropsten testnet and open to testing
Stuff for developers
- Benchmarking between Mythril, Manticore and Oyente from ConsenSys Diligence
- What FoMo3d’s real exit scam might look like, but you can hedge with Augur?
- Péter Szilágyi: How to PWN FoMo3D, a beginners guide
- Pipeline – video explaining PoC of visual IDE of already deployed functions
- Airswap tutorial on building with their API server
- Adding ENS into your dapp tutorial
- Tutorial to using Parity’s Secret Store multi-party key generation
- IDEO on dealing with gas in UX
- ethereum-to-graphql: autogenerate the schema and resolver
- EthQL alpha from PegaSys and Infura
- Aragon Package Manager – upgradeability for Aragon orgs
- Zeppelin: Exploring upgradeability governance in ZeppelinOS with a Gnosis MultiSig
- Apache Camel connector for Ethereum enterprise using web3j
- The new Infura dashboard – existing access tokens need to migrate to v3 authentication keys and endpoints
Release
- Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.12, better syncing and performance. Also has a new website.
- web3j v3.5
- web3.js 0.20.7 and web3.js 1.0.0-beta.35. breaking change on http provider
- EthereumJS VM v2.4.0 (and their monthly recap)
Live on mainnet
- iExec went live on mainnet to test rendering. 80% of jobs completed.
- Melonport is live on mainnet with somewhat constrained Paros release
- Gnosis DutchX contracts are live on mainnet in advance of their 100k competition to build on them
Ecosystem
- The new Gnosis Safe miltisig is live on Rinkeby
- Parity’s Thibaut Sardan: what is a light client and why should you care?
- Someone managed to briefly cause a kerfuffle with a 1337 Javascript popup in Etherscan using their Disqus comments.
- Nathan Sexer: State of stablecoins
- Metamask’s retrospective on getting removed from the Chrome store this week. Also how they’ll support more networks
- A reader friendly version of 100+ Eth dev interviews from EthPrize
Governance and Standards
- EIP1227 (remove difficulty bomb, revert to 5 ETH block reward) vs EIP1234 (delay difficulty bomb, reduce to 2 ETH block reward) vs EIP1240 (remove difficulty bomb, leave at 3 ETH block reward). Results in Afri’s poll mirror what I hear in the community.
- ERC1257: proof of payment standard
- ERC1238: non-transferrable token badges
- ERC1261: membership verification token
- Add bottom-up composables to ERC998
- ERC1263: NFT index
Project Updates
- As planned, Augur burned the escape hatch, so the code is now decentralized.
- Messari buys OnchainFX, lays out content strategy
- Status now displays at full resolution on tablets, and no more Mixpanel
- Maker to vote on increasing the Dai stability fee to 2.5%
Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks
- Dappcon videos are coming in
- Andy Tudhope talks about EthPrize’s dev interviews on Smartest Contract
- CoinTelegraph with some good print interviews: Jutta Steiner and Joe Lubin
- FunFair’s Jez San podcast interview
- Open Source Web3 Design call
- Jay Rush talking The Dao and how Quickblocks grew out of that from Gitcoin’s weekly stream
- Dan Boneh on the Bitcoin Podcast
- Ethan Buchman talks testnets on Zero Knowledge
- Dan Finlay on MetaMask and Mustekala on Smartest Contract
- Maker’s Rune Christensen print interview where he says they are developing their own language for better security
- Martin Becze on Epicenter
Tokens
- You now need Santiment tokens to access some of their market and data feeds.
- Text tutorial of how to claim your (free) Livepeer tokens.
- Incentivizing new users of TCRs through gamification
- Mike Maples: Slow money crypto
General
- Zilliqa releases its Scilla language “with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into Coq.” Also of interest, Etheremon is planning to have gameplay on Zilliqa but will use Ethereum as its store of value.
- First Polkadot parachain deployed in PoC2
- Raul Jordan with an intro to hashing algos
- NYTimes on art and blockchain
- Péter Szilágyi: TOR from within GO. I imagine many who read it will immediately start using the Brave browser’s private tabs with TOR
- Ethereum coming to Google Cloud
- John Backus with his lessons learned from p2p file sharing
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note:
- August 7 – Start of two month distributed hackathon from Giveth, Aragon, Swarm City and Chainshot
- 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)
- September 8 – Ethereum Industry Summit (Hong Kong)
- Oct 5-7 – TruffleCon in Portland
- Oct 5-7 – EthSanFrancisco hackathon
- Oct 11 – Crypto Economics Security Conf (Berkeley)
- Oct 22-24 – Web3Summit (Berlin)
- Oct 26-28 – Status hackathon (Prague)
- Oct 29 – Decentralized Insurance D1Conf (Prague)
- Oct 30 – Nov 2 – Devcon4 (Prague)
- Dec 7-9 – dGov distributed governance conf (Athens)
- December – EthSingapore hackathon
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