Week in Ethereum News

News and Quick Links

Headlines

• Tyler Smith talks to Arthur Falls about what they are doing with Ethereum at BHP Billiton. They’re using private chains for now, but leaving open the possibility of moving to the Ethereum mainchain.  The prototype is running in production, parallel with existing processes.  From BHP’s perspective, may the best tech solution win.  Tyler has also thought up some amazing ways BHP could use blockchains in their business.
  • Hard to understate the importance of this: in production at a huge non-financial company, with the possibility of re-imagining many of their business processes if the initial project succeeds.
    
  • Full disclosure: I tried to get this interview, but Arthur Falls beat me to it. Very interesting conversation.
    
• DoS Attacks continue. Though these have some annoying real consequences, the attacker is paying into the ecosystem to submit bug reports.

Tech

• Slides from all DevCon2 talks.
  • Why DevCon2 videos are taking so long.
    
• “2,600 lines of solidity later” Piper Merriam releases the next version of his Ethereum alarm clock.
• Vitalik: Let’s run on-chain decentralized exchanges the way we run prediction markets
  • Credits ideas from Nick Johnson’s decentralized exchange post from this week.
    
• The Resurrection of LLL.  For those who dislike Solidity or Serpent…
• YouTube tutorial series for beginners on building Ethereum dapps.
• GethDroid: Android light client library teaser.
• Chain Forking and Dynamic Analysis.
• A working group to “build fully decentralized development tools as alternatives to GitHub, Gitter, Slack, etc”
• Geth 1.4.14: What else should we rewrite to fight the DoS attacks. And 1.4.13

Ecosystem

• Akasha launch in October.
• Digix has not yet spent ANY of the millions they raised in their crowdsale.  That Ether has only appreciated.
• Thomson Reuters’s BlockOne ID service to let dapps verify that users accept terms and conditions is going live on the test net.
• Decentralized derivatives project Velocity’s video demo of a collar option running on the testnet.
• Eth developer Alex Leverington joins Golem.
• A practical post on not getting phished from MyEtherWallet developer.
• Video demo of Santander/ether.camp ETHcash.
• I mentioned Infura last issue but forgot the link. To recap: Infura is Ethereum/IPFS nodes as a service to make it easier for dapp developers to deploy code without worrying about getting and keeping a node running.
• Ethslurp finds the Easter Egg in Piper’s Devcon2 token
• Start accepting Eth right away in a digital products online storefront.
• Lessons learned on the FlightDelay app.  These small steps on insurance-like dapps are a great way to learn and experiment in order to build bigger finance dapps.

Media

• Fortune’s 40 under 40 feature on Vitalik.  Pretty good take on the Ethereum scene.
• Wall Street Journal reports on DevCon2 and International Blockchain Week.
• Reuters: Banks adopting blockchain ‘dramatically faster’ than expected: IBM
• Microsoft and Bank of America are working together on a private Ethereum chain project.

Dates of note

• 10/4 – Augur REP begins trading
• 11/14 – SEC has a fintech/blockchain meeting
• November TBA – .ETH name system goes live

Irrational Exuberance – Crowdsale edition

Wanna get rich without really working?  Just come up with a big idea, write a white paper, and announce a crowdsale to build the platform.

Has a speculative bubble formed?

Nick Tomaino reacts to the FirstBlood and Iconomi crowdsales: Irrational Appcoin Exuberance.  He wrote this before Singular sold out in 15 minutes.

He concludes with “there needs to be some standards around launching an ICO and investing in ICOs in the space.”

Ciaran Murray throws out some proposed standards:

1. General token sale embargo until app is live/in production.
2. ETH dev funds locked in a multisig account controlled by investors.
3. Dev tokens locked in a multisig account controlled by investors.
4. Governance standards to protect minority investors and align voting incentives for the good of the protocol.

What can we do?

As a community, we need to establish a better set of norms for ICOs that align the incentives of founders and funders, as well as make sure that no project failures materially affect Ethereum.  

I am going to assemble a working group to try to address this problem. We might fail for a plethora of reasons, but as a community we need to do a better job at finding sustainable norms for ICOs. If you’re interested, send an email to weekinethereum@gmail.com

In the meantime, Reddit user /u/uapan has two solid ICO analyses that may help push norms in the right direction:

• Kibo – tough to get excited about a project with so little transparency
• SingularDTV – solid writeup; he’s much more bullish than I. My analysis is closer to this Reddit comment. [But what do they care when they sold out in 15 minutes?]

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