Week in Ethereum News September 19, 2017

Ethereum News and Links

Toshi (formerly known as Token) is now live on main net. As early technology, Ethereum needs to progress in scalability, privacy and usability. Ethereum needs apps like Toshi, Status, Leth, imToken, etc to make Ethereum usable by non-nerds. You can message me @EvanVanNess and make sure to rate Toshi’s Week In Ethereum app.
MicroRaiden: “off-the-shelf micropayment solution.“ Live on Kovan, main net “very soon.”
Fizzy: Largest insurance company in the world copies Etherisc’s flight delay insurance, currently live for flights between Paris and the US. (Oracle problems?)
Cosmos published Shanghai Accord – Ethereum Scaling Agreement, which is mostly Vitalik expressing support for Cosmos building things that make Ethereum more scalable by moving stuff to another chain through interoperability
- Vitalik: “This is the real “ethereum scaling roadmap” – it’s a combination of continued improvements to increase the scalability of the base chain, together with the ability for anyone to make their own system that hooks into ethereum that provides its own scalability as well as possibly other properties that the base chain does not.“

Protocol

Alex Van de Sande explains what’s in the Byzantium hard fork
Ropsten testnet successfully hardforked to Byzantium. I’ve seen talk about whether people will keep the old chain alive – but the old chain will be in ice age, so you’d actually have to hard fork the old chain in order to keep it alive. Seems tough from a marketing standpoint.
Bug bounty doubled for issues relating to the upcoming Byzantium fork
Byzantium releases: Geth v1.7 and Parity v1.7.2 release
Token Contracts on Plasma or: a Tale about Local and Global Invariants
Diving into the EVM, pt 4: Deciphering a method call
Zero-knowledge proofs, Zcash, and Ethereum
- ZCash’s “groundbreaking performance improvements” for zk-SNARKs
- Christian Reitwießner: testnet just verified a zcash transaction

Stuff for developers

Implementing the EVM in Clojure
Building a table of token holders using Quickbooks
How to read Ethereum contract storage
Maurelian: The use of revert(), assert(), and require() in Solidity, and the new REVERT opcode in the EVM

Ecosystem

Ethereum authenticated VPN service
Matrix & Riot for Crypto-Communities
- How MetaCert is working to make Slack usable by crypto projects again
Orinoco: Understanding ERC-20 token contracts
China: it seems as if blockchain crackdown is more serious than expected. Exchanges are closing and perhaps exchange operators have been told to stay in China?
Explaining Raiden without using the bar tab analogy
Oraclize and Eidoo are semi-merging
ConsenSys is hosting the first global MBA Blockchain Venture Competition
Mike Goldin: Token Curated Registries
Vitalik: A Prehistory of the Ethereum Protocol

Project Announcements

Props Project by the YouNow team. Video announcement. Whitepaper
EthRPS: play rock-paper-scissors for money
Leverj: futures exchange with margin, supported by ConsenSys
FansUnited: sports betting
GitToken: earn tokens for your pull requests
Ocean: Trent McConaghy’s decentralized data marketplace protocol

Project Updates

Augur’s Solidity migration is complete
The 0cean’s “high performance funnel” order book
ICONOMI September AMA
More on Legacy’s vision of transfering your memories and belongings after death
Secure & fair shuffling of the deck on Virtue Poker
The Brave browser now blocks backgroun coin mining scripts
Decentraland’s first LAND sale
- Decentraland community whitelist is ongoing

Interviews and Talks

Gavin speaks: Interview with Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood
More Parity: Jutta Steiner on Governing the Future podcast
Q&A with Luis Cuende of Aragon
Status Q&A with Stani Kulechov from ETHLend
William Mougayar talk at ICO Summit
Brendan Eich podcast interview with Aaron Watson
Cofound.it’s Daniel Zakrisson and David Szabo on trends at ICO Summit
Doug Petkanics from LivePeer is my guest for episode #2 for An Ethereum Podcast. We get deep into the magic of decentralized video.
San Fran Ethereum meetup: Jun from OMG, Vitalik, and Joseph Poon. Also, Sergey Nazarov on ChainLink
Silicon Valley meetup: Vitalik Buterin, Balaji Srinivasan, Joseph Poon, and Dan Boneh
Naval interviews Vitalik at TechCrunch Disrupt. Vitalik is optimistic we can scale to Visa-like levels in a few years.

Token Sales

Grid+: The P2P grid we want, and why we need a blockchain
Seems like Etherisc wins at every blockchain startup competition
Livepeer for beginners
This week in undisclosed celebrity ICO shilling: Jamie Foxx
Request Network token sale details. Yellow paper.

General

Someone wrote comedic fiction about being the hacker of the Parity multi-sig wallet
People keep sharing this image of JPMorgan being one of the biggest buyers of Bitcoin after Jamie Dimon’s fraud comments. But most likely this is just JPMorgan’s brokerage activity, not them trading their own account.
Trusted IoT Alliance: “set the standard for an open source blockchain protocol to support IoT”
EY rigged their coffee maker with a Raspberry Pi to accept payment using LETH
People widely shared a TechCrunch article due to headline of “SEC show support for ICOs” but it was just a weakly supported opinion piece

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar: (didn’t have time for comprehensive update for the newsletter before I had to get on my flight, please click the link for an updated list of sales)

Upcoming token sale start dates:

September 21 – Digital Asset Power Play (Cofound.it Priority Pass presale: Sep 19)
September 21 – Opakeco
September 25 – EthLend
September 25 – Jibrel Network
September 28 – Doc.ai
September 29 – Snip
September 29 – Customizable Basic Income
September 29 – Assistive Reality
October 1 – Hirematch
October 1 – Etherparty (pre-sale ongoing)
October 2 – Rhea
October 2 – WandX
October 2 – Horizon State
October 3 – Enjin (ongoing pre-sale)
October 3 – Snov
October 10 – Swap
October 10 – Notary Platform
October 15 – Paypie
October 30 – Grid+
November 1 – Winding Tree
November 1 – ScriptDrop

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.]

Every week I still get emails saying, “you joined ConsenSys?” So this section stays.

I’ve joined ConsenSys. Here’s a logo to draw your eye in case you were going to skip over this section:

My charge from Joe Lubin is pretty similar to what Status has told me: keep telling the truth and covering the space as objectively as I can.

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This newsletter is supported by Status.im and ConsenSys (have you seen that we’re hiring?). But in case you still want to send Ether or tokens: 0x96d4F0E75ae86e4c46cD8e9D4AE2F2309bD6Ec45