The Ethereum Report #2
Price Action
The market continues a slow downtrend this week, with the overall market cap losing 1.7%. HOT saw the biggest increase within the top 100 with a 65.7% increase, while WAX saw the biggest drop while maintaining a top 100 spot with a 19.5% drop.
Major ETH News
Binance announced that they are now opening OTC trading for crypto-to-crypto transactions. Being the largest crypto exchange, this opens up many opportunities for various institutions and large investors to make significant purchases.
In other news, Wyoming has passed legislation that classifies cryptocurrencies into various asset classes. This bill hopes to attract new businesses to establish themselves within Wyoming and is a major step towards taking cryptocurrencies out of their current grey area in the financial world.
Events
The Aragon Conference will be held from January 29th to 30th in Berlin. This event focuses on building organizations and governance of the future. Feel free to check out more information on this event here.
Development News
New Date Set for Constantinople: In a core developer meeting held on January 18, it was announced that the new date for Constantinople will be February 27. While some developers thought that this could be done sooner, the final decision was to set a more conservative time frame.
A few people have said that this will occur at block 7.28 million, but this has not yet been confirmed. If you’re interested in learning what devs discussed at the meeting, here’s a link to the full livestream replay.
ETC Adds New Dev Team: The recent 51% attack on Ethereum Classic (ETC) once again showed the security vulnerabilities of major blockchain projects. Last week ETC announced it has added at least 6 new developers. This includes Constantine Kryvomaz, Michael Collison, Mike Lubinets, Shane Jonas, Stevan Lohja, and Zachary Belford.
ETC Labs Core will tackle a number of projects in 2019. Protocol development will include ETH Compatibility ECIP-1045 (Byz + Const HF) in Q1 2019 will propose a subset of Byzantine and Constantinople upgrades. Other protocol goals are Classic Geth (Q1-Q2 2019) and Multi-Geth (Q1-Q4 2019). There will also be work done on EVM, data analytics, dapp creation, a docs site, and dev tutorials and guides.
Prysmatic Labs Releases Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap: In Development Update #20, Prysmatic Labs announced a lot of information about its current progress on Ethereum 2.0 and future development goals.
The report includes a summary that covers everything, from joining the validator pool to proposing and attesting to new Ethereum 2.0 blocks. This update also features sections on “Merged Code, Pull Requests, and Issues” as well as “Upcoming Work”.
Developer Spotlight: Raul Jordan
Since we’re highlighting the development progress of Prysmatic Labs, it’s only fitting that we put this week’s spotlight on the project team lead: Raul Jordan.
According to his bio, Jordan studied Computer Science at Harvard. He also started a company called Kynplex that made it easy for anyone to stay updated on the latest scientific trends.
In 2016, Jordan received the Thiel Fellowship: a $100k grant that allowed him to take 2 years off school. This is when Jordan became interested in Ethereum. Since founding Prysmatic Labs, the team has been working on Prysm, a sharding client designed for Serenity (Ethereum 2.0) implementation. In 2018 alone, Prysmatic Labs received over $900,000 in donations and grants.
Jordan regularly tweets and retweets about topics like Prysmatic Labs development updates, open-source communities, and remote work culture.
Dapp of the Week: My Crypto Heroes
Over the last couple of months, My Crypto Heroes (MCH) has accumulated a massive following. As of January 22, it currently ranks as the top gaming dapp on SpiderStore. 7-day totals from January 15–22 are as follows: 837 users, 5.4k transactions, and a transaction volume of 181.6 ETH. As of January 22, the MCH has over 21,000 total users across desktop and mobile apps (available on iOS and Android).
The game features a variety of components like heroes, team, quest, battle, and art edit. What also makes MCH different from many gaming dapps is that it can be played without having to pay gas fees. From January 11 to 18, MCH collaborated with Etheremon (listed on Ethex) to offer five different types of mons in adventure nodes.
