Protocol Weekly is a newsletter to exclusively showcase the progress of Ethereum layer-2 protocols.
Welcome to another issue of Protocol Weekly! Firstly, we’d like to extend a warm welcome to Quantstamp! This week is going to be big for the broader community as we’ll be meeting each other at Ethereum San Francisco and San Francisco Blockchain Week! Also, I’m super hyped to announce the launch of the 8x Beta. Subscription payments are now live on the Kovan test net. Check out more details in our weekly update. We’re also looking to reach out to layer 1 projects. If you know any that are worth talking with please let us know!
From Dan Zhang (Communications):
- Our betanet protocol has been released on Ethereum mainnet. You can now submit audits to the Quantstamp protocol directly through a portal on our website. Completed audits generate a public audit report along with a unique hash that provides a publicly verifiable record of the audit.
- We recently signed an MOU with the Mythril team to focus on synergies between our protocol and the new Mythril Platform analysis engine. With a shared vision to enhance smart contract security, we’re excited to explore ways to work together
- Our VP of Strategy Olga Mack helped facilitate the passage of two new blockchain bills.
- We’re proud to be sponsoring the Crystal Center- an NUS think tank leading research in blockchain security.
- Team member Nadir Akhtar wrote a technical overview of the Quantstamp betanet protocol.
- Our Community Update is out. Check it out for more details of what we’ve been up to recently.
One thing we need help with:
We are now enlisting node operators for Betanet. We require the ability to provide high uptime, as well as a time commitment to do regular updates. If you’re interested, apply here and well contact you if you meet all the requirements.
From Brendan Forster (Head of Growth Operations):
- Continued work on Creditor-Driven Loans and generic decision engines. Stay tuned
- #DeFi Summit is happening on Thursday 4 Oct. Breakout discussions led by 0x, Dharma, Coinbase Wallet, MakerDAO, and many more! Space is limited to apply here
- Published our Wishlist for Hackathon Projects at ETHSanFrancisco. Two highlights: Margin Lending for Augur Prediction Markets, NFT-Collateralized Lending.
One thing we need help with:
We’re hiring blockchain engineers and full stack engineers. Check out our open positions here.
From Titus Capilnean (Director of Marketing):
- We’ve had a busy few weeks preparing for a big announcement: Identity.com has officially open sourced 5 smart contracts and 2 libraries. These developments are rooted in the belief that no one company should own identity, and we’re designing an ecosystem that others can integrate with and grow in. Read more on our blog.
- Vinny Lingham and Chris Smith, our VP of Business Development, have crisscrossed the country the past few weeks speaking at Consumer Identity World in Seattle, Tech Startup Fest: Blockchain at Google in Silicon Valley, and Concordia Annual Summit during U.N. General Assembly Week, among others.
- We’re thrilled to announce that Brave, a privacy-focused internet browser with 4 million monthly users, is now a Civic partner. Learn more here.
- A few members of our team recently returned from three days at Rebooting Web of Trust (RWOT) in Toronto where we announced our first steps toward open sourcing Identity.com and made a commitment to contribute to the community through W3C, Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), RWOT, Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), and other groups. We also demo-ed the Identity.com marketplace for the first time here to great interest from the audience. Needless to say, it was a productive session!
- October is going to be an incredibly busy month as well with Money 2020 coming up. We’ll have exciting new updates to share with you soon.
One thing we need help with:
The identity.com ecosystem will flourish with input from the community. We welcome feedback and contributions on the Identity.com Github page.
From Shane Hong (Marketing):
- Kyber welcomed Midas Protocol as our 10th reserve on our on-chain liquidity protocol, providing liquidity for the Midas (MAS) token.
- Some of our recently integrated projects are: Peepeth, ETHIS, Etheremon, Secrypto, KCash, Midas Protocol Wallet, Weswap and bZx.
- To reward our wonderful community, Kyber organized the Kyberra Retweet Campaign, where we gave out Kyberra Mons (worth 0.3 ETH) to 50 winners.
- Unitimes, the global Fintech knowledge interaction platform based in China, hosted an AMA for Kyber on Wechat with over 600 participants. Loi explained to the Chinese community how Kyber’s protocol is enabling decentralized payments and allowing any token to be usable anywhere.
- From October 5th, Kyber will be participating in San Francisco Blockchain Week, including the ETHSanFrancisco hackathon. We will have a booth there and will be organizing interesting bounties to encourage developers to use our on-chain liquidity protocol. More information coming soon!
From Hunter Hillman (Head of Growth):
- We’re sponsoring ETHSanFrancisco, and we’ve put together a list of ideas for hackers who want to build on Connext. We’ll also be running a workshop and a booth!
- Our ongoing focus is the launch of our local and testnet hubs, which will launch just before ETHSF! You can follow our progress in our community chat or our Reddit.
One thing we need help with:
ETHSF hackers should start thinking about projects (we have some ideas) and join our Discord to keep up with our progress.
From Jay Kurahashi-Sofue (Marketing):
- Last Wednesday, Richard Slenker and Rob Paone, from our business development team, went to the University of Pennsylvania to speak to members of Penn Blockchain
about the pros, cons, and future of tokenized securities. - Last Thursday, we announced our partnership with Meridio, a platform that creates
blockchain based shares of fractional real estate ownership. - Our beta is registration will be open leading up to the official launch date. Please register
for the waitlist here .
One thing we need help with:
We’re always open to and seeking incredible talent in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space to join the AirSwap team! If you’re interested in what our team is working on at AirSwap, please submit a general application in the “Careers” section here.
From Aaron Mayer(Community):
- We launched episode #1 of our new podcast, Decentralize This! Featuring Joey Krug of Pantera and Augur. Listen here:
https://blog.enigma.co/launching-decentralize-this-episode-1-joey-krug-6bc6bb30d89a - We published an important post about nodes, how staking will work on the Enigma Network, and more: https://blog.enigma.co/secret-nodes-exploring-staking-stakeholders-and-eng-d69a68e3d0fd
From Janine Videva (Head of Marketing):
- Beta version of the Liquidity Tips bot has been updated, an improved onboarding process, the ability to tip non registered users and the addition of a notification of success. Liquidity tips is an inline tipping bot which runs on Telegram and is integrated with the Liquidity wallet.
- A payment request feature has been added to the wallet app. The feature will be tried and tested in a real world use case by a pizzeria in Lucerne and will enable the set up of POS in restaurant and b2c businesses.
- Developments on Liquidity’s SDK include full wallet management, invoice generation, hub checks to ensure it is not cheating and the facilitation of seamless off-chain transactions. SDK allows Liquidity enabled Dapps, our first SDK will be launched during ETH San Francisco.
From Jess Houlgrave (Co-Founder & COO):
- We are hard at work making sure non-crypto users can easily use the Codex Viewer via our simple OAuth login system. Right now you can still use the Codex Viewer with your metamask login. If you haven’t tried it yet — try documenting an artwork or collectible item you own here.
- We are also wrapping up work on our API so we can begin integrating the registry into Liveauctioneers and AuctionMobility. This will allow thousands of collectors will start claiming their Codex Record at the point of purchase.
- We recently announced a partnership with Bankex for the fractionalization of art ownership — there are several more partnership updates coming soon.
One thing we need help with:
Join our community on Telegram and Twitter to stay up to date!
From Siddhartha Jain (VP — Marketing & Operations):
- WalletConnect v6 is integrated with the Matic Wallet (iOS and Android). This will help users connect browser-based Dapps to their mobile wallets securely with end-to-end encryption.
- Using Tendermint as a consensus on the validator layer, we have made Tendermint compatible with ethereum, validators selected on main chain would have accounts on the Tendermint chain and will sign send checkpoints to main chain after achieving successful consensus. Slashing on missing a voting cycle and on irrational behaviour is also being done on this chain.One thing we need help with:
We would love to connect with projects and teams who are looking for scaling solutions and would want to explore building on Matic Network. Please get in touch by sending a mail to us at info@matic.network and let’s explore how we can work together!
From Rodrigo Coelho (Community Lead):
- We are sponsoring ETHSanFrancisco and will have bounties for #buidling on The Graph. Stay tuned to our Twitter for updates. Hope to see you there!
We have been making improvements to the developer experience, focusing on stabilization and reliability. Here are the latest features:
- Block and Event Stream: This feature plays a crucial role in helping The Graph reliably fetch data from Ethereum and make it available to subgraph mappings, without skipping a beat, or block rather.
- Explicit imports & AssemblyScript packages: Until recently, subgraph mappings were compiled by injecting a set of global APIs such as store and Entity into the mapping sources prior to passing them on to the AssemblyScript compiler. We have now switched to using explicit imports, allowing developers to choose which APIs they would like to use.
- Store.get(): Previously, it was only possible to push entity updates to the store using store.set() and store.remove(). In order to load existing entities and change them in mappings, we have added store.get(‘EntityType’, ‘id’).
- Other improvements: We’ve added other enhancements and fixes for error handling. Check out the full update on our most recent Development Update.
One thing we need help with:
Would you like to get involved in developing The Graph? We’ve begun identifying easy starting points for new contributors: good first issues in Graph Node, good first issues in Graph CLI. We will add more soon.
If you’re excited about The Graph and would like to explore a position on the team, take a look at our careers page.
From Kevin Lu (Product):
- Updated our website’s theme and content to accommodate the launch of our beta and developer friendly sections. Our website exhibits a new colour-way and design, we have also removed our future iterations for now and simplified our landing page to highlight our three main value propositions: direct debit, zero volatility and execution.
- We are excited to showcase two live products on the Kovan testnet: 8x Pay & Manage. Use 8x Pay to enable users to pay with 8x or create a plan, view your subscriptions and cancel any that you don’t want to subscribe to anymore through the Manage portal!
- We’re excited to announce a significant update to our whitepaper that explains the claiming problem, our solution, our mathematical model for staking and the economics of the system.
(Revised version to be released soon) - 8x Protocol will be at ETH SF and SF Blockchain Week! If you’re going to be around, message us on Telegram — come along and say hi!
One thing we need help with:
Looking for businesses and services to integrate our MVP when it is released, if you or anyone you know would be interested please contact us (even if you are not a business/service and would love to contribute or experience the consumer end please get in touch) at hello@8xprotocol.com
Participating Projects:
Quantstamp, Dharma Protocol, Civic, Kyber Network, Connext Network, AirSwap, Enigma, Liquidity Network, Codex Protocol, Matic Network, The Graph, 8x Protocol.
Updates Not Included This Week:
Origin Protocol, Set Protocol, Loopring, Abacus Protocol.
Know a protocol that should be part of this list? Drop us an email at hello@8xprotocol.com.
4/10/2018
