Week in Ethereum News September 26, 2017

Ethereum News and Links

Byzantium hard fork scheduled for October 17 on block 4,370,000. Listen to the latest dev call. Agenda. Hudson’s notes and recap of the call
On Sep 22, Raiden announced a token sale and got lots of pushback. The pushback seemed largely a result of surprise in the community due to expectations from previous Raiden comments that monetization would be through Raidex. Yet the pushback reminded me of how people in the community told Gnosis that no one would buy their tokens due to the Dutch auction structure – and then sold out at an absurdly high valuation.
- To correct a common community misconception that has sprung up from Vitalik announcing he’d donate to second layer solutions, here’s more Vitalik, “I think some misinterpreted my remarks as me on my financial high horse accusing cash-strapped Raiden devs of greed. Not my intenti[o]n at all.”
- Today: the Raiden Network Token Model. tl;dr: native token for channel monitoring service, light node, pathfinding, etc.
Interactive Coin Offerings paper by Jason Teutsch and Vitalik Buterin.
- Here’s the announcement post and here’s the explanation post.

Protocol

Stuff for developers

Announcing the winners of the first Underhanded Solidity Coding Contest. 1st Martin Swende, 2nd Richard Moore, 3rd João Carvalho, honorable mention Doug Hoyte
- Christian Reitweissner on lessons learned to improve Solidity security
- Phil Daian’s entry using C3 linearization inheritance
Writing Truffle tests with async/await
Make your own Truffle box
Remix IDE update
iExec SDK tutorial

Ecosystem

LocalEthereum.com opens October 21
There’s been lots of strange happenings in CoinDash’s history.
MyEtherWallet: Stop getting phished
Firefly’s update on $5 DIY HW Wallet
uPort improves privacy: only public keys in IPFS and stateless JS challenge/response
Gnosis: The Power of Prediction Markets. Reminds me of my post almost exactly two years ago: “Augur: Uber for knowledge”
Spearheaded by Aragon, 10 projects are switching from Slack to Rocket Chat
Linda Xie: Women in crypto. Also Q&A with Linda about her new fund with Jordan Clifford
Coinbase announces Ethereum & Litecoin vaults.
- Coinbase also announced phone support and some safeguards against phone porting

Project Announcements

Kudos Project: a protocol to better evaluate and compensate service providers for sharing economy marketplaces. Whitepaper. [Disclosure: I’m an advisor.]
Balanc3: Quickbooks for Token Launches
GitCoin: incentivize open source software with tokens. Blog post announcement
Project Onyx: test driven software dev incentivization
dYdX: derivatives on 0x. Very cool.

Project Updates

Basic Attention Token Mercury release on Oct 6. I’m looking forward to earning BAT from my websites
0x has the first relayer live: Kin Alpha
- “The 0x ecosystem” from Will Warren. Impressive to see how many projects are building on 0x.
How Bounties Network wants to improve free lance job sites
Omise confirms it will process payments for McDonald’s Thailand website and mobile app
OpenLaw: using Ethereum code to decentralize the deal
Vinay Gupta slides on using arbitration clauses to enable token sales
Cofound.it takes steps to crowdsource the evaluation process and announces Seed sales.

Interviews and Talks

Vitalik Buterin, Karl Floersch and Thomas Greco at Seoul Ethereum meetup
Joey Krug podcast talking angel investing
PokerStrategy.com Q&A with Ryan from VirtuePoker
Azure’s Matt Kerner talks Coco Framework on Epicenter
Brendan Eich talks BAT on Wharton Business Radio
Golem and Streamr video interview
Vitalik video Q&A on early Ethereum, etc
Peter Czaban on Polkadot at NYC Ethereum
Episode 3 of my new podcast is with Cofound.it’s Jan Isakovic

Token Sales

Chris Burniske on Crypto asset valuations
YCombinator looking seriously at selling a token?
WSJ reporting on how token sales are changing the game in capital formation
SEC creates Cyber Unit aimed at 6 things, one is “violations involving distributed ledger technology and initial coin offerings”

Token Sale Projects

AirSwap token sale details
AMA with RNDR
TechCrunch: Ripio Credit Network aims to attack bank loan fees in emerging markets
Pedro Anderson pitches WindingTree at a conference
Diego Espinosa: Tokens as wire cutter to the commons
Founder of Mastercoin pushing UpToken for crypto ATMs

General

Mike Novogratz video interview talking Ethereum and ConsenSys. Bloomberg article on Novogratz’s new $500m crypto fund.
Ethereum yellow paper in Chinese
Nick Johnson on IOTA. Plus Vitalik chimes in.
Andreas Brekken – of the critical Storj and OpenBazaar reviews – buys back into Ethereum because of zk-SNARKs
Fortune: Mediledger – consortia of big pharmaceutical companies built a supply chain project using Quorum and Chronicled
There was a pretty misleading post about “68% of transaction value controlled by one system.” But maybe it’s worth reading so you know what some people are yammering about.
Excellent WSJ profile of Balaji Srinivasan
USV’S Albert Wenger is right. “By all means [in crypto]: let’s do more, rather than less.“
Tim Swanson on 8 things crypto bulls don’t tell you. Always useful to read a counterperspective. Very much agreed with some points; others I found quite overblown.

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar:

Upcoming token sale start dates:

September 28 – Doc.ai
September 29 – Snip
September 29 – Customization Basic Income
September 29 – Assertive Reality
September 29 – CarTaxi
October 1 – Hirematch
October 1 – Synapse
October 1 – Sparc
October 1 – DFS
October 1 – Etherparty
October 2 – RefToken
October 2 – Rhea
October 2 – Ethino
October 3 – Enjin (ongoing pre-sale)
October 3 – Snov
October 3 – Sense Token
October 3 – Self Pay
October 4 – RNDR
October 5 – Air Token
October 5 – Crypto.Tickets
October 9 – WandX
October 9 – Sharpe Capital
October 10 – Swap
October 10 – Gizer
October 10 – Notary Platform
October 13 – Request Network
October 15 – Paypie
October 16 – SpankChain
October 16 – Horizon State
October 17 – Ripio Credit Network
October 18 – Kudos Project
October 19 – Privatix
October 28 – Gatcoin
October 30 – Grid+
October 31 – Gazecoin
November 1 – Winding Tree
November 1 – ScriptDrop
November 1 – RockChain
November 1 – Debitum
Novemer 6 – Media Sifter

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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