Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Protocol

• Latest core devs call. Lane’s notes.
• Latest Casper standup
• Jaynti Kanani: getting block times down in Plasma through propose and commit periodic checkpoints
• Kelvin Fichter: Proving UTXO Sum Validity for Mass Exits
• Vitalik Buterin: Network latency based “clocks” and their limits
• blob serialization code
• Github issue for using libp2p in the future, eg sharding
• Pisa: 3rd party agent to solve the monitoring problem for state channels. Academic paper from Patrick McCorry, Surya Bakshi, Iddo Bentov, Sarah Meiklejohn, and Andrew Miller

Stuff for developers

• Nick Johnson announces the first Solidity Gas Golfing Contest to write gas optimized code
• Register .test domain with ENS on Rinkeby
• Loom’s ZombieChain: An EOS-Like DPoS sidechain
• Solidity-cli: compile Solidity faster and easier
• uPort’s code to pay gas for users
• React starter kit integrated with Drizzle
• What it’s like to go from decentralized dev back to centralized development work
• Superblocks online IDE
• Truffle v4.1.11: upgrade to solc v0.4.24
• Connext v0.2 implements Perun’s virtual channel code
• the Aragon developer portal (and tutorial)
• Learning Solidity from a Java dev’s perspective

Ecosystem

• Dan Finlay: why build a new society on blockchain?
• Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin: Liberation Through Radical Decentralization
• uPort to rewrite some of its JavaScript libraries as php for a WordPress plugin
• Latest “Open Source Block Explorers” call
• Etherscan has a bunch of new tools: dex order book, dex tracker, gas tracker, Swarm search
• A beginner’s explanation of gas
• Ideo on designing for blockchain
• ECF: mapping out all the grants available in the greater Ethereum ecosystem
• EthPrize on the learnings from their developer interviews: better documentation, better debugger, getting data off the chain, error codes, tooling, etc. Great work by Robbie Bent, Sina Habibian, Andy Tudhope and Josh Stark.  
• An EthMemphis writeup.  FedEx is getting into our space.
• ENS dispute resolution: Forced bribes

Live on mainnet

• Dharma protocol is now live on mainnet. Borrow and lend ERC20 tokens, write a debt relayer, be an underwriter, build your own debt agreement, etc. Dharma launch promo vid.
• FunFair’s first fate channel on mainnet

Governance and Standards

• ERC721 is in “last call” so there’s a decent amount of discussion.
• EIP1108: “proposes a 10x reduction in the gas cost for the ECADD precompile, 20x for ECMUL, and a 14x reduction in the per-pairing cost of the pairing check precompile” due to faster implementation
• EIP1109: Remove call costs for precompiled contracts
• ERC1081: standard bounties (updated)
• ERC1115: decentralized user authentication standard
• ERC1111: introspective metadata definition disclosure
• ERC1102: opt-in web3 access
• EIP1098: Cross-client encrypt/decrypt
• Discussion on ERC712 using eth_signTypedData as a human readable standard

Project Updates

• Akasha update with their Colored Essence token model
• Mysterium updated roadmap
• Following a tuni from Fiji to Brooklyn with Viant’s supply chain tracker
• What’s next for Livepeer
• The crazy things people are building on Decentraland
• Pangea fractional tokenized real estate rebrands to Meridio
• Coinbase acquires Paradex.  GDAX rebrands as CoinbasePro
• Neufund’s registration is open
• Why and how Gnosis is addressing key management with Gnosis Safe
• Get your github login as a subdomain on <githubname>.gitcoin.eth.   Also, the bounties going up from the Ethereum Foundation’s grant.
• TheNextWeb Q&A with Golem’s Julian Zawistowski
• Kauri update on its documentation competition

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks 

• Lane Rettig and Alex Beregszaszi talk eWasm on Zero Knowledge
• Rob Habermeier presents Parity Substrate
• Kraken’s Jesse Powell with Laura Shin
• Jacob Eberhardt talk on his zkstark tooling ZoKrates
• Jarrad Hope on how Status is implementing a decentralized org
• Etherisc at NYC Ethereum
• NYC Blockchain week Ethereum panel with Joseph Poon, Kelvin Fichter, Jae Kwon, Vitalik Buterin and Karl Floersch
• Joseph Lubin on Crypto101
• Deconomy: Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir talks
• Video interview of Decentraland founders

Tokens 

• An overview of TCR design patterns
• Venture bonding: funding network effects on donations and bounties
• Jacob Horne on the playful future of NFTs
• Decentralizing the minting of NFTs
• New decentralized business models from Etherisc
• DaoX – an implementation of DAICO
• CFTC advisory for exchanges trading “virtual currency” derivatives.  This takes me back to the days of holding a series 3 license.
• NAASA announces “Operation Cryptosweep” of 32 enforcement actions against fraud plus the recent inquiries from the NY AG’s office (though he has now resigned in scandal).  I’ve never heard of any of those 32, but the WSJ reports they’re saying it is the “tip of the iceberg.” SEC Chairman Clayton’s statement applauding them.
• There’s also the WSJ report categorizing many ICOs as having red flags.

General

• Polkadot POC1. Still aiming for q3 2019 launch
• Parity discontinues its Parity ICO Passport Service (PICOPS) due to GDPR
• Seasteading floating islands and crypto is a libertarian fantasy
• Jump Trading’s crypto desk is their largest trading desk
• Steve Wozniak compares Ethereum to apple
• WSJ profiles crypto-friendly banks.  The WSJ also says Coinbase and IvyKoin met with regulators about bank licenses.  Just writing that gave me flashbacks to my days filling out banking regulatory applications to dozens of regulatory agencies.
• HTC building a blockchain phone called Exodus. [Reminder, media sites need the Brave browser. Here’s my referral code]
• Comparing enterprise blockchains: Ethereum v R3 v Hyperledger

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note:

• May 25 – 27 – EthBuenosAires hackathon
• May 28 – Zeppelin’s zepcon0 conference (Buenos Aires)
• June 1 – Blockchain for Social Impact Conference (Washington, DC)
• June 28 – BuildEth (San Francisco)
• June 30 – Solidity Gas Golfing challenge deadline
• July 14-15 – FEM governance meetings in Berlin
• September 7-9 – EthBerlin hackathon
• Oct 5-7 – TruffleCon in Portland
• Oct 30 – Nov 2 – Devcon4 (Prague)

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