Week in Ethereum News October 4, 2017

Ethereum News and Links

Project Transparency: “voluntary initiative aims to encourage disclosure of wallets controlled by a project and provide a voluntary explanation of any expenditure greater than 0.5%” Participant list so far: Aragon, Cofound.it, District0x, Encrypgen, Etherisc, Hcash, Iconomi, Indorse, Lykke, Santiment, Dappbase, GATCOIN, Iconiq Lab, Virgil Capital, Musiconomi and Maecenas. This exercise in industry self-regulation is being led by Santiment. Hopefully more projects join.

Protocol

Casper finality gadget with one message type, and simpler fork choice rule
- ELI5 the finality gadget by Nate Rush
Light client protocol v2
Vitalik: “Plasma trades off in a different direction: if there is an attack, then it will take O(N / C) time for everyone to withdraw back to the root chain, so the higher the scaling the more an attacker can cause delays”
Vitalik: “quadratic sharding is largely figured out at least theoretically”
How does Ethereum work anyway? by Preethi Kasireddy was fantastic If you want to brush up on the basics of Ethereum. Or send to your friends.

Stuff for developers

Want to beta test a new built-in formal system for Solidity?
Piper Merriam is dropping python2 support
Viper online compiler
web3.js + truffle + react + parity boilerplate
Chainsaw – log extraction and decoding with periodic polling from Spankchain
Security for beginners: Reviewing Ethereum Smart Contracts
The code injection attack on EtherDelta

Releases

Geth v1.7.1 – now with Snappy compression
Mist v0.9.1 – security fix and light client integration

Ecosystem

Tug of War – EtherPlay’s new game that comes out of the Status hackathon. Demo video.
The moderators of r/Ethtrader subreddit are thinking about tokenizing it. I’ve been thinking about tokenizing Week in Ethereum
Why build wills and conveyances on Ethereum?
SmartBillions put up 1500 ETH (~450k USD) to prove their code was safe. It got hacked. Pretty amusing to read the top comments on their announcement thread.
Nice PR stunt: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington bought a condo in Ukraine using Propy and paying with Ether.
ConsenSys and TopCoder partner to train more Ethereum developers
Toshi on the public chain is now available on iOs
Ethereal Summit in San Francisco on October 27. Use discount code WeekInETH for $100 off
Fred Ehrsam: Why Decentralized Exchange Protocols Matter
- IDEX is live.

Project Announcements

LinkExchange – AdSense for tokens. powered by UserFeeds
Paradex – a decentralized exchange on 0x from Ron Bernstein’s Augment Partners
Decentralized Derivatives – compliant p2p swaps by ex-CFTC employee. github.
ScriptDrop – incentivized adherence to prescripion drugs. white paper.
Catallax Trust – lockup your crypto and pay it out in fiat denominated terms. white paper.
Simple Token – easy issuance of tokens. white paper.
Keep – off-chain container for private data. white paper.

Project Updates

Video demo of Althea incentivized mesh networking
Omise gets a strategic investment from Krungsri, part of Mitsubishi – an EEA member.
Balanc3: Business processes of the future
Variabl’s tradeoffs between serverless decentralization and UX for centralization
Chinese government partnership with FirstBlood for their China University Esports League
Digiday: How Brendan Eich Plans to Flip the Online Ad Model and Fix the Web
Colony publishes their white paper and postpones token sale until network is live, planned for Q2 2018
Alpha release of Dether on Kovan testnet
NuCypher key management system development roadmap
Decentraland is starting the process of buying land in its virtual world

Interviews and Talks

Chris Dixon and Fred Ehrsam talk tokenization on a16z podcast
MrYukonC talks to EthFinex
Arthur Falls talks to Nick Dodson of GovernX (formerly Boardroom)
Amanda Gutterman talks to Laura Shin
Maksim from Santiment talks to Finance Magnates podcast
Griff Green podcast interview
GitToken presentation to Seattle Ethereum meetup
Interview with Sergey Nazarov from ChainLink/SmartContract
Jordan Leigh breaks down what’s in the Byzantium hard fork

Token Sales

SAFT now has a whitepaper and a website.
Parity starts a KYC service for Ethereum addresses.
A walkthrough of Jason Teutsch and Vitalik Buterin’s Interactive Coin Offering paper
Bloomberg: Hedge Funds Flip ICOs, Leaving Other Investors Holding the Bag. There’s at least a soupçon of truth here, but the article was exaggerated for clickbait. Also, in part, pre-sales are becoming increasingly prevalent because of government regulatory bodies.
Translation of Korean statement on ICOs and token sales. Seems like regulatory agencies around the world are trying to “pump the brakes,” where they signal that they’re watching and wiling to go after bad behavior but not actually “banning” improved capital formation enabled by technology.
SEC charges a couple of connected sales with fraud. Well…they did look like fraud. Good on them.
Teemu Paivinen: Thin protocols. A worthy counterpoint to Fat Protocols. It’s not really what I mean when I say I’m a fat protocols skeptic though.

Token Sale Projects

VirtuePoker presentation to NYC Ethereum meetup
AirSwap Roadmap
Invoicing & Reputation on Request Network
Week in celeb token shilling: DJ Khaled
Wu-Tang rapper Ghostface Killah in Crypto Rules Everything Around Me Capital.
How Leverj “centralizes speed-critical functions and decentralizes safety-critical functions”
Mercury Protocol’s token sale details
More on Cofound.it Seed matching projects to appropriate funding for their stage and how projects get picked.

General

NYTimes Nathaniel Popper: Understanding Ethereum, Bitcoin’s Virtual Cousin
One of Trump’s cybersecurity aides publicly said that they’re considering using a cryptographic system to replace the Social Security number.
John Wolpert, one of Hyperledger’s leaders, has joined ConsenSys
IMF head Christine Lagarde: digital assets could be the future
Japanese conglomerate KDDI (#141 on the Forbes 2000) joins the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
WSJ reports that GoldmanSachs is exploring a digital asset trading desk.

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar:

Upcoming token sale start dates:

October 5 – RNDR
October 5 – Crypto.Tickets
October 6 – VuePay
October 10 – AirSwap
October 10 – Air Token (registration Oct 5 -7)
October 10 – Notary Platform
October 11 – Duber
October 11 – Fintrux
October 13 – Streamr (registration Oct 6-9)
October 13 – Request Network
October 15 – Paypie
October 16 – Raiden Network
October 16 – Horizon State
October 16 – Sense Token
October 17 – Ripio Credit Network
October 18 – Leverj
October 19 – Privatix
October 20 – Gizer (SaftLaunch presale already open)
October 20 – WandX
October 21 – Synapse
October 24 – SpankChain
October 24 – TokenBox
October 25 – Mercury Protocol (registration opens Oct 10)
October 28 – Gatcoin
October 30 – Grid+
October 30 – Snov
October 30 – Stayawhile
October 30 – Swarm Market
November 1 – Kudos Project
November 1 – Winding Tree
November 1 – ScriptDrop
November 1 – RockChain
November 1 – Debitum
November 1 – PayFair
November 1 – LevelNet
November 3 – Dmarket
Novemer 6 – Media Sifter
November 13 – Sharpe Capital
November 13 – Gazecoin
November 20 – FundRequest

Ongoing token sales:

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.

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

[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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