A Look Back at Ethereum in 2018 — Part II
In the first part of this installment, A Look Back at Ethereum in 2018 — Part I, we discussed hype, regulation, government-backed crypto, enterprise solutions, Ethereum Foundation grants, identity, and more. We began that story in January 2018 and ended in June 2018. If you haven’t read it yet, we suggest you check it out first! In Part II, we pick up where we left off in July 2018 and end in December 2018. Hope you enjoy!
Introduction
If the beginning of 2018 in Ethereum felt like riding a euphoric wave on a magic carpet, the beginning of 2019 feels more like the morning after your twenty-first birthday. Many wonder how long this hangover will last, however, that assumes we correlate the success of Ethereum only on price. We should not ignore price as a metric altogether, but we need to be cognizant of the fact that it is only ONE irrational metric.
The second half of 2018 was filled with exciting technological developments for the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap. The roadmap itself is not classically defined, as Lane Rettig put it,
“There is no single Ethereum, there is no single roadmap, there is no single authority, it’s a community, it’s a family of technologies, and I do not believe that the future is just one chain to rule them all.”
Having said that, here is a look at what Ethereum 2.0 has in store for us:
- Phase 0: PoS beacon chain without shards
- Phase 1: Basic sharding without EVM
- Phase 2: EVM state transition function
- Phase 3: Light client state protocol
- Phase 4: Cross-shard transactions: see here and more.
- Phase 5: Tight coupling with main chain security: here and more.
- Phase 6: Super-quadratic or exponential sharding
There is a lot of impressively technical words spread across those six phases. It essentially boils down to a more scalable, efficient, and higher functioning blockchain.
To see how progress has been moving along in 2018, let’s get started with July.
July — 2018
July 09 — The Augur prediction market officially goes live on the Mainnet. Users can install a desktop client to interact with the smart contracts and begin making predictions or act as oracles using the REP token.
July 20 — Last call is pushed on the ERC777 as a backwards compatible token standard to ERC20. ERC777 was created by Jordi Baylina, Jacques Dafflon, and Thomas Shababi and allows for additional functionality for Ethereum based tokens such as the ability to have a function called within a transfer, also known as a ‘hook.’ Check out the code on Github here.
July 28 — Danny Ryan says that Shasper (Sharding + Casper) is almost ready. “The design is a full hybrid in that there will effectively be two chains, the beacon chain and the Proof of Work (PoW) chain.” The current amount of ETH to stake to become a validator on the Beacon chain is 32.
August — 2018
August 15 — Vitalik goes on a 70 tweet rampage about the history of Casper research and the debate between Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) and Correct By Construction (CBC).
August 16 — Loom Network unveils its private Alpha for Zombie Battleground. At the time this was announced to the public, “GameChain, the dedicated DAppChain that’s running Zombie Battleground, had already processed well over 60K+ blocks”.
August 30 — Maker DAO announces its plan for the Dai Savings Rate (DSR). The DSR will allow anyone with DAI to lock it up in a contract and earn additional DAI in the form of a savings rate. “For example: If the DSR is 2%, a user who locks 100 Dai into DSR mode, and keeps it locked for a full year, would earn two additional Dai which will automatically be added to their wallet when the Dai is unlocked. Anyone can “lock” their Dai into DSR mode using a simple UI.” This decentralized savings account has enormous implications. DAI could serve as the financial backbone for billions of people around the globe with no access to stable banking systems.
August 31 — The Ethereum Foundation makes a significant decision in regards to the upcoming Constantinople hard fork. The Ethereum Core Devs Meeting Constantinople Session #1 addresses the proposal known as EIP1234, which seeks to address the difficulty bomb and ETH issuance. The conclusion is to delay the difficulty bomb and reduce ETH from an issuance of 3 to 2 for block rewards.
September — 2018
September 3 — Vitalik tweets that all blockchains suck. The impetus for the tweet came from an article titled, The collapse of Ether by Jeremy Rubin in which he argues gas should be payable by tokens rather than ether, otherwise known as economic abstraction. Vitalik makes no qualms about agreeing with his detractor. The plan to move Ethereum from POW to POS, however, is the deciding factor to mitigate this from happening.
September 17 — Maker DAO announces that the code for multi-collateral DAI is ready! It is also the first time a significant dapp has undergone formal verification. Multi-collateral DAI allows Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs) to collateralize with tokens and digital assets other than Ether. This opens the Maker DAO system up to a much broader audience of participants and will enable greater adoption.
October — 2018
October 3 — Prysmatic Labs releases its v0.0.0 Validator + Beacon chain demo for its Shasper project. If you want to run the demo release, you can do so here. “You’ll be able to spin up a beacon node, connect 1 or more validator clients, and start getting assigned to shards where you will then create beacon blocks or vote on beacon blocks through structures called “attestations.”
October 6 — Vitalik announces Ethereum 2.0 research has “congealed” and what is left now is essentially a “development slog.” “Speaking in an interview at ETHSanFrancisco, part of the ETHGlobal events, Vitalik Buterin said there is no significant unsolved theoretical problem left for Ethereum 2.0.”
October 15 — In the 4th wave of the Ethereum Foundation scalability research and subsidy program, the Status Nimbus team is granted 500k for their efforts on Nimbus. Also, 20 different individuals and teams working on Ethereum 2.0 receive 2.6 million dollars. Notable recipients are Connext, Prototypal, Finality Labs, and Flintstones.
October 24 — The MetaX team releases the adChain Publisher Index. The adChain Index empowers media buyers to construct a list of adChain-certified domains by filtering which categories they wish to serve on.
October 30 — Devcon 4 officially kicks off in Prague. To see the takeaways from the MetaX team about their experience at Devcon check out this blog post.
November — 2018
November 1 — MetaMask takes its plans to go mobile, public.
November 3 — OmiseGo and Hoard release, “the first live proof of concept (PoC) built on OmiseGO’s internal OMG testnet.” A game called Plasma Dog showcases the first implementation of Plasma.
November 13 — Maecenas announces its plan to tokenize a Picasso painting on their platform. Token holders will be able to vote on when the painting is shown and where. This is a radical experiment in the digitization and tokenization of ownership over physical assets represented on the Ethereum blockchain.
November 14 — uPort launches decentralized identity-based bike sharing service in Zug, Switzerland with AirBie.
December — 2018
December 3 — MasterCard and Microsoft join forces to leverage decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and bring more data ownership to end users. “Mastercard and Microsoft aim to give people a secure, instant way to verify their digital identity with whomever they want, whenever they want.” The framework for DIDs is part of Microsoft’s decentralized identity spoke led by Daniel Buchner.
December 4 — The Aztec protocol uses Zero Knowledge Aztec notes to obfuscate the amount of DAI sent in a transaction on Ethereum. “It is a working demonstration that is live on the Ethereum mainnet today, and that AZTEC zero-knowledge note is a real note that encrypts real DAI.”
December 7 — The Ethereum core devs decide to implement the Constantinople hard fork on January 16, 2019, at block number 7,080,000. With the Constantinople hard fork comes a block reward reduction from 3 Eth to 2 and a delay of the difficulty bomb.
Conclusion
As you can see 2018 has been a busy year. This is by no means an attempt at an all-encompassing blog post. To include everything that took place in 2018 in the Ethereum community would be nearly impossible given the sheer number of teams and projects working diligently every day. However, we do hope this provides a snapshot of how Ethereum is shaping up and what to look forward to in the new year.
We began this article with a quote from Lane Rettig, and now close with one.
Referring to the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, he states, “I’m going to make a bold claim: there are no insurmountable challenges left. What’s left is implementation details, parameterization, testing, and shipping the code. It’s just a matter of time before Ethereum scales.”
