A Look Back at Ethereum in 2018 — Part I
At the end of December 2017, Vitalik Buterin sent out a foreboding tweet.
This call to action to achieve something more meaningful than gaining wealth is the core mission statement for the Ethereum Foundation (EF). Those on the ground level, the #buidlers, as they’ve come to be known, aim to decouple price talk from everyday discussion.
The metric for success should be: How many of the unbanked have been banked? How much has critical infrastructure been streamlined? How many people shackled by corrupt governments have been liberated through decentralized applications and access to stable cryptocurrency?
Answering these questions in meaningful and practical ways is why many of us are here and will continue to be here until the final whistle blows.
To date, the answers to these questions remain unsatisfactory. How many unbanked have been banked you ask? Not many. However, work towards that goal continues at an inspirational rate. It would be easy to miss this important and often overlooked detail, especially when the price is an attractive metric to judge progress. For many, Ethereum being down 95% from its all-time high equals Ethereum gasping for its last breath.
The real story is just as decoupled from price as the attitude the EF has towards it. The number of developers, researchers, projects, investors, regulators, governments, corporations, and foundations actively building on Ethereum has grown exponentially over the past year. Growth is happening, and it is happening at a rate that has us more enthusiastic than we have ever been. Regarding the amount of development and research happening in this space right now, we are in the midst of the blockchain equivalent of a Cambrian explosion.
Let’s not sugar coat it. Retraction is also happening; however, it is the kind of withdrawal necessary to sustain a healthy ecosystem. Even amidst the news of layoffs in the crypto community, a rallying cry of support has arisen.
The ICO craze of 2017 was a wake-up call. The Ethereum community came face-to-face with the hard reality that you can build revolutionary technology centered on egalitarian principles, but once the masses join the system, it quickly degenerates into a reflection of society at large.
Here’s the good news; the hype has faded, along with the funds of the ‘get-rich-quick’ hopefuls who entered on the false narrative that Ethereum was ready to deliver on its promises. It wasn’t. It still isn’t. Those duped by projects that sold the moon, yet failed to deliver even a moon pebble (in terms of real application or technology), have learned a valuable lesson and will not be fooled again.
By necessity, technical progress will facilitate the next wave of adoption. In other words, it will be built on show, not tell.
The Ethereum Foundation is acutely aware of Ethereum’s shortcomings and is actively addressing them through the creation of Ethereum 2.0, the next evolution for the public blockchain. In 2018 alone, the EF has put more than $11 million to 52 projects building Ethereum 2.0.
What follows is a look back at Ethereum in the first half of 2018. It’s a picture of the progress we work towards as a community; a snapshot that is tangible, actionable, and real. No more speculation, it’s time for action.
January — 2018
Exuberance peaks to new heights coming off December’s rally. Price discussion is unavoidable as, just five days into the new year, Ether breaks $1000.00 for the first time.
On January 2, the Ethereum Foundation quietly announces plans for their Scalability Research and Development Subsidy Programs, which makes sense for a blockchain that was put in a chokehold by digital cats just a month prior.
These subsidy programs are part of a “multi-pronged strategy toward Ethereum scalability” which focuses on sharding and second layer solutions, like Plasma. The program solicits applications from individuals, academia, teams, organizations etc., to allow qualified entities access to funds. The amount to be awarded will range from 50k to 1 million USD.
Meanwhile, on January 4, total transactions soar to 1.4 million, and Uber drivers gossip about their favorite coins and clamor to get in on the latest ICOs. The mainstream press publishes sensationalist headlines about how blockchain will change the world.
February 2018
Regulators and politicians in the United States begin to pay close attention to the blossoming cryptocurrency industry. On February 6, the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs holds a committee hearing titled “Virtual Currencies: The Oversight Role of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.” Chairman of the SEC, Jay Clayton, and Chairman of the CFTC, Christopher Giancarlo, answer questions from Senators grappling with the implications of new and potentially disruptive technology. However, this hearing finalized relatively little concrete decisions or action items.
Speaking of commodities, in February the Venezuelan commodity backed cryptocurrency, the Petro begins its presale on Ethereum. This is the first nation state-backed cryptocurrency, supported by dictator Nicolas Maduro, and is designed to circumvent sanctions by the U.S. and E.U. The Petro exhibits that centralized governments can leverage blockchain technology just as easily as libertarian cypherpunks.
March 2018
Ethereum is a blockchain that stores smart contracts, account balances, and associated metadata. However, storage is piling up and the notion of charging rent for smart contracts is somewhat contentious, albeit necessary to move past the current subsidy charged to the protocol layer.
At a workshop in Taiwan, Raul Jordan, Vitalik Buterin, Vlad Zamfir, and Philip Daian discuss how to address storage on Ethereum and Daian is very vocal about the need to charge rent in Ethereum.
More news in March comes when the Ethereum Foundation announces the first wave of beneficiaries for Ethereum grants. The largest is a $1.5 million grant to L4 Research for state channels research.
Status begins its work on Nimbus, a sharding client written in the programming language, Nim, that runs on mobile and embedded devices. Nimbus aims to reach a wider audience, “be an alternative to Geth and Parity's a full Ethereum node, (and) also include features that can make it run as a light node — a node that doesn’t need to download the full blockchain — or even a stateless node — a node that doesn’t need to download state at all to be able to verify it.”
Finally, the governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, signs a bill that recognizes smart contracts and blockchain data as legally admissible under Tennessee law.
April 2018
We would be remiss if we didn’t take the opportunity to point out that on April 24, our very own adChain Publisher Registry went live as the first Token-Curated Registry deployed on the Ethereum Mainnet. To learn more about our dapp visit the MetaX website!
Amazon also gets involved in April with the announcement of AWS Blockchain templates for Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, in which a ready-made private blockchain can deploy inside an AWS environment.
May 2018
Can you say Casper FFG anyone? On May 8, the code for the Proof-of-Stake implementation for the first version of Ethereum 2.0 is released on Github. According to Danny Ryan, “v0.1.0 marks us more clearly tagging releases to help clients and external auditors more easily track the contract and changes.”
Later this month, Celer Network releases an MVP of their state channel full-stack solution, in which all transactions occur off-chain with guaranteed properties to ensure security and finality. State channels become instrumental for dapps looking to ease user experience, achieve scale, and reduce gas costs.
June 2018
uPort, founded in 2016, is one of the earliest and most important Ethereum based projects out there. Why? One word, identity. Or rather, lack thereof. On Ethereum your identity is a string of characters (a public key), but that changes with uPort’s ability to connect your real-world self to your blockchain self. With this, owning your data no longer becomes a rallying cry, it becomes a reality.
uPort reaches a major milestone when the crypto friendly Canton of Zug, Switzerland launches a voting pilot for its citizens where people register their identities on uPort to participate in a government-orchestrated vote.
June 14, SEC Director, William Hinman, states, “Putting aside the fundraising that accompanied the creation of Ether, based on my understanding of the present state of Ether, the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions”. This offers the first glimpse of validation in the argument that Ether is not a security.
That’s all for Part 1. We will be releasing Part 2 next week. Thanks for reading!
