Eth News and Links
Eth2
- A tactical shift for eth2: less shards (64?) but faster cross-shard comms and 8x higher throughput per shard
- Lighthouse client update – it’s still networking season
- Some excellent phase0 slides from Devcon
- This was the week that Vitalik decided to write up ideas that you likely already knew if you read this newsletter, but apparently Coindesk reporters do not. To wit:
- The eth1 to eth2 transition plan
- Formalizing eth2’s approach toward finalization of invalid shard blocks
- Sharding does not break defi composability. .
- A design pattern for partially sharding apps.
- Beacon chain saved contracts. Expensive, but possible.
- Why a 2way bridge is hard between eth1 and eth2, but options for how it can be done
Layer 2
- Plasma Group and Uniswap ran an Optimistic Rollup demo at Devcon, which enables hundreds of transactions per second
- Celer releases the specification of its state channels
- Cross zk-Rollup transfer protocol
Stuff for developers
- Metamask: web3 plugins. Verified scripts loaded over ENS, IPFS, or Swarm. The new “focus [is] on implementing APIs that enable second-order innovation, like the APIs above”
- ZoKrates v0.5. Structs, arrays, and JSON-ABI
- OpenZKP: 0x opensources a STARK implementation in Rust
- Azure’s latest Eth dev kit for VS code natively supports OpenZeppelin and Infura
- a writeup of Solidity Visual Auditor for VS code
- Checking custom correctness properties using MythX
- Kovan testnet successfully hardforked into Istanbul
- Source code of the Eveem decompiler
- Phil Daian’s Complete Knowledge proofs to fight bribery
- Mutant testing tool to find out how good your test suite really is
- Lexon demo of natural language Eth code
- Live Eth data with BigQuery and Pub/sub. How to query ENS and Ox events
- Subspace event tracking and autosyncing. Saves state to local db so app syncs from the last known point
- Remix IDE on desktop
Ecosystem
- Live video feeds from Devcon. You’ll likely need the agenda to find the talks you want to see.
- EthDNS: ENS + IPFS everywhere and its DNS over https service
- Unstoppable Domains built its .crypto domains on ETH
- Ethereum on ARM. New images for NanoPC-T4, Rockpro64 & Raspberry Pi. Run a full node with Geth/Parity/Trinity. Plus: Status.im, Raiden, IPFS, Swarm and Vipnode. Or an eth2 testnet with Prysmatic.
- Kobi Gurkan found a bug in the snark implementation of the MIMC hash function in circomlib. Thus, Tornado.cash had to hack itself, but everything is fine. They migrated everything to a new contract and updated the UI. Privacy was never lost.
Enterprise
- An interview with EY’s Paul Brody about Nightfall
- EEA’s updated client spec and trusted compute spec, plus trusted reward tokens for consortia
- EU Blockchain Observatory legal and regulatory report
- Fatburger to use Cadence for a $30m bond offering with the tokens issued on Ethereum mainnet
Standards and governance topics
- Interesting Decrypt report on Orochi, a Moloch fork, solving coordination problems in event planning
Application layer
- Multi-collateral Dai scheduled to launch on November 18th
- Compound’s plans for MCD. Users are responsible for migrating their Dai.
- Compound is moving all their administrative functions to a 2 day time delay
- Crop insurance product in Kenya for farmers using the Etherisc protocol. Going live next year.
- SetProtocol’s Rebalancing Dashboard so you can participate in rebalancing events
- Vulcan Swap – decentralized dollar cost averaging, live on Rinkeby testnet
- Alethio’s DeFi/dex data viz for the week before devcon
- Brave is at 8 million monthly active users
- Augur will ship v2 in q1 with Dai integration and cheap order creation in 0x, as well as both trading and betting UIs
- the Sacramento Kings NBA franchise launching a tokenized blockchain reward program for predicting things in their game
Tokens / Business / Regulation
- “It is my view as Chairman of the CFTC that ether is a commodity”
- SEC gets an injunction to stop the Telegram sale, and also seeks to make Telegram give all ~$2b back
- Stripe, ebay, Visa, and Mastercard join Paypal in quitting Libra
- Democratizing real estate ownership through tokenization
- On Oct 21st, NBA star Spencer Dinwiddie still planning to tokenize a part of his contract in the face of NBA resistance
General
- Ethereum.org now available in 11 languages
- New (beta) version of MyCrypto with multi-account management and new UX
- Hasu, Prestwich, Curtis: a model for Bitcoin (in?)security under declining block rewards
- NuCypher launches a public testnet
- Aethereum – a hard spoon from Ava, ie Eth state imported into an Ava chain.
- UNICEF will now receive, hold, and spend ETH/BTC out of a dedicated UNICEF Crypto Fund
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
- Oct 19-20 – Crosslink (Taipei)
- Oct 26 – Zero Knowledge Summit (SF)
- Oct 28-Nov 1 – SF Blockchain Week
- Nov 1 – Ledger EU apply for 200k euro startup funding
- Nov 5-6 – Decentralized insurance D1Conf (Malta)
- Nov 8-10 – ETHWaterloo
- Jan 1 – Augur v1 cutoff
- Feb 9-15 – EthLagos
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