Week in Ethereum News

Ethereum News and Links

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• ~150m USD value of Ether frozen in Parity multi-sig bug. Most of it from Parity, a decent chunk also from Iconomi.
• DevCon3: scalability looks closer than expected, which is important because some early projects (Maker, Augur, etc) are near to going live.
• Jeff Coleman and Liam Horne are working on a generalized state channels project called Counterfactual. This is an important layer of infrastructure and arguably as vital as anything announced during DevCon talks. Funded by Vitalik and L4, it was announced by Liam on Twitter a few hours before Devcon.

Parity multi-sig frozen

• Parity’s multi-sig had another bug that has led to 150m of frozen funds.  A bug made it possible to kill the contract which the multisig looked to through delegatecall.
• “I accidentally killed it.”  Looking through the attacker’s history, I’m skeptical of the noob cover story. There were definite attempts at theft.
• Victim list.  60% Polkadot, 23% Iconomi. Deep impact but relatively few affected.  Polkadot has already said that they don’t need the Ether to deliver on time.
• Lots of discussion threads on forking. Pro-fork. Anti-fork. Vitalik talking about forks in a Q&A a few months ago since he is refraining from commenting at the moment. My feeling is the same as last year: I’m not an Immutability Maximalist but any fork should include a haircut to protect against moral hazard.
• But all courses of action are relatively reasonable, so no need to get emotional. Let’s continue to assume good intentions by everyone involved.
• The Parity hack happened while Victor Maia was writing a diatribe on formal verification.  Great comment thread.
• YCombinator: Crypto evolution.  Forks are “A/B testing on steroids.“
• Blockchains: Coercion-free consensus systems from Nick Johnson.  If you don’t like the consensus, fork it!

Devcon3

• DevCon3 videos from the main hall. You might want to look at the agenda, because we don’t yet have individual videos, nor do we have videos of the breakout room talks.
• I’d recommend watching the afternoon of day 1 if you can only watch a few videos, because the focus was on the most pressing long-term issue: scalability.  Casper, zk-snarks, TrueBit, sharding.  The Raiden demo of a robot controlled by payment channel was very cool too.
• For daily recaps, I recommend David Burela: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4 or Brandon O’Brien: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4.  Or if you prefer audio: The Bitcoin Podcast did two recaps. Days 1 and 2.  Days 3 and 4.
• I couldn’t agree more with Livepeer’s Eric Tang: “Done with the hangout portion of devcon. Time to start watching talks! #8daysofdevcon.”
• The day before Devcon3 at the convention center, Etherisc put on the D1Conf on decentralized insurance. They underpromised and overdelivered a great conference.  It was also by far the best food I’ve ever had at a conference, though Devcon3 might’ve been the worst food.
  
• Notes on Nick Johnson’s ENS talk.  Integration to legacy domain names is exciting.
• DevCon3 security roundup

Protocol

• Vlad Zamfir’s Casper draft spec v0.1. Prototype codebase and paper.
• Better address checksums is coming.
• Vitalik: “Plasma is optimal for systems with larger sets of users and where having limited trust in some second-layer consensus mechanism is okay; state channels are best for repeated interaction between limited sets of parties.”

Stuff for developers

• Truffle v4.0 release – debugging, in-memory blockchain, etc
• Dapp Tools from Dapphubb. The tools they use for Maker.
• Livepeer on getting a protocol to the mainnet – planning for upgrades, forkability, parameter tuning, etc
• OpenBounty – $1m in bounties for development.
• Azrael – Ethereum events to Java backend from FundRequest using web3j
• Free 90 min video course on dapp dev for beginners
• Transmute framework – a centralized platform for dapp development
• EthAlarm – notifications of events triggered by Ethereum code
• ZoKrates – zk-SNARK toolbox from Jacob Eberhardt

Ecosystem

• Eth Gas Station metropolis release – view transaction pool filtered by account/nonce, plus better predictions. plus more transparency about how predictions are made.   When this gets released by API, it should help bring gas prices down even further.  By the way, it now costs $0.00006 to send a transaction if you’re willing to wait a minute.  Lower your gas price!
• A brief comparison of Name Bazaar vs. ENSListing
• Ready for the next conference? Blockchain for Social Impact is November 17th in NYC. Use NEWSLETTER for 20% off.
• Also, the second edition of Token Summit is December 5th in San Francisco.   Use discount code WENTS17 for 18% off.
• I’m still shilling for votes in CoinDesk’s Most Influential People in Blockchain. Vote for your favorite Ethereum people…and me?

Project Updates

• Status announces NFC Hardwallet and new COO
• AdToken roadmap
• Why Decentraland uses A-Frame
• SingularDTV launches Tokit

Project Announcements and Whitepapers

• Nexus Mutual insurance. Impressive presentation at D1Conf.
• Perun Network – system of state channels

Interviews, Videos and Talks

• Playlist of EtherealSF talks
• Joseph Poon on Plasma and the relationship between public and private chains
• Vinay Gupta video interview with Bloomberg BNA
• Bitcoin Podcast talks to IDEX’s Alex Wearn
• Rhys Lindmark talks to Raine Revere
• Omar Bham’s series of video interviews. I asked him to put the ocean behind me if you’re curious what the view looked like from the Cancun convention center
• Fabian Vogelsteller talk on his Identity EIP at Ethereum London

Token Sales

• Dutch auctions seem to be working pretty well, eg Raiden and Polkadot.
• RocketPool is doing a proportional refund cap.
• Experiments are good: Cofound.it is doing a “Playoffs” event on November 30 for their Seed program projects.
• The SEC warns celebs on social media shilling.

Token Sale Projects

• Grid+ rollout plan
• Breaking Up the “Central Banks” of Online Poker using Ethereum on Virtue Poker
• YouNow to become public benefit corporation to align with token holders
• OmegaOne on why it needs a large balance sheet

General

• Coinbase is getting 100k new accounts daily.
• GDAX Digital Asset Framework for evaluating adding things.  Seems some tokens are coming soon.
• r/Ethtrader went over 100k subscribers.
• Segwit2x blinked and suspended their fork for now.
• CME is doing Bitcoin futures. I’d say that means Ethereum futures are coming.
• Joe Lubin on BigTech adoption of blockchains.
• We warned them this would happen: Tezos hit with class action lawsuit.
• The Tapscotts got caught listing advisors in their marketing docs who they hadn’t even spoken to, so the fund has gotten called off.
• Matthew De Silva sits down with Vitalik Buterin at Devcon and gets some personal details out of him.

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar:

[Truncated list this week as I don’t have the post-Devcon energy to wade through all the junk.]  

Upcoming token sale start dates:

• November 9 – Stayawhile
• November 10 – WhenHub (pre-sale ongoing)
• November 10 – Gizer
• November 13 – Trippki
• November 14 – Bloom
• November 14 – Auctus
• November 14 – SimpleToken (pre-sale underway)
• November 14 – LevelNet
• November 15 – Kudos Project
• November 15 –  Hirematch
• November 15 – Aigang
• November 15 – Realisto
• November 15 – Guts (pre-sale underway)
• November 16– TokenBox
• November 17 – Blockchain for Social Impact conference in NYC.  20% discount using NEWSLETTER
• November 20 – PROPS by YouNow
• November 20 – FundRequest
• November 21 – Dopameme
• November 25 – Rocketpool
• November 25 – Relest
• November 27 – Jibrel Network
• November 28 – Gazecoin
• November 30 – Debitum
• November 30 – Nous Platform
• December 1 – Bounty0x
• December 5 – Token Summit conference in SF. Use discount code WENTS17 for 18% off
  

Ongoing token sales:

• Grid+
• Mercury Protocol
• Snov
• SpankChain
• ScriptDrop
• RockChain
• PayFair
• SeedsTokens
• Sense Token
• Leverj
• Gatcoin
• Privatix
• Duber
• Crypto.Tickets
• Customization Basic Income
• Matryx

WARNING: list may include or even likely includes scams and quasi-scams.  Do your own research and due diligence before putting value at risk.  Read disclaimer below.

Want to be included?  If you are building your project on Ethereum, email weekinethereum @ gmail [period] com with 1) your URL, 2) sale date and 3) a brief but convincing description of how you are using Ethereum, preferably with a link to your Github repo.  Listings are free.  But please make sure to follow those instructions.  If you don’t follow the instructions, you likely won’t get a response.

[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.]

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