Ethereum biweekly: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, opinion and research articles
21st January — 4th February. Eth2 deposit contract formal verification completed. Nimbus gets $650,000 grant to take Ethereum mobile. Aztec launched. ENS registry upgrade. PoolTogether hit 1M DAI. 0x launched liquidity aggregator. Vitalik reviewed Gitcoin quadratic funding round 4
Ethereans, welcome to Paradigm’s January edition of Ethereum biweekly!
During these two weeks, Eth2 teams were working assiduously. Significant progress with development was made. Eth2 Implementers call took place. Eth2Stats is live and now has the Saphire and Lighthouse testnets. Lighthouse update #21 is now out: new fork choice algorithm, 10x faster and more stable syncing, 32x database storage reduction and much more in this update! Another large Eth2 update from the PryLabs team was published. The highlight? More than double the validators expected at mainnet launch already running in the testnet! The team also significantly improved the Eth2 testnet block sync time — going from 0.2 blocks per second to over 20 blocks per second in just two weeks! Furthermore, the Nimbus team has been awarded a follow-up grant from the Ethereum Foundation to continue work on the public multi-client ready testnest, prep for production use, and more engineers who can broaden the scope of work to key new areas. Geth v1.9.10 — light client checkpoint oracle, higher propagated transaction cap, bug fixes, Parity v2.7.1, Nethermind v1.5.8 released.
Runtime Verification has successfully completed a formal verification of the Eth2 deposit contract. This contract is responsible for handling the locking of ETH on the eth1 chain, and then minting of ETH on the eth2 chain to allow for staking.
Eth 2 is coming! Get ready to stake in 2020! Check out “Understanding the validator lifecycle” article by Jim McDonald, which examines the validator lifecycle in-depth, showing what happens in each state and transition, what triggers transitions, and how long each transition takes. “Staking On Ethereum 2.0 — What You Need To Know” interview featuring RocketPool explains everything you need to know about the coming changes and how you can stake ETH to earn rewards by securing the new ETH 2.0 blockchain. Check it out!
“Year in Ethereum 2019” by Josh Stark and Evan Van Ness is now out. Such a sapid reading! Check out Ethereum activity, decentralized finance metrics, and more facts and figures about happening on Ethereum in the latest ConsenSys “Ethereum by the Numbers — January 2020” publication. According to the latest ConsenSys statistics, there are 3,303 Dapps on Ethereum! Progress of the ecosystem does not stand still and these two weeks made a lot of essential news for all Ethereum lovers! Aragon 0.8.7 is now live on Ethereum mainnet. This release features an experimental version of Aragon Fundraising, which introduces a novel way to onboard members to Aragon organizations. Aragon Court’s pre-activation closes soon, ending Phase 1 of Aragon Network’s launch. On February 10th, Aragon Court will heartbeat for the very first time, starting term #1 of the first digital jurisdiction, starting Phase 2. 0x developers released liquidity aggregation tool for Ethereum-based exchange protocol. 0x API aggregates liquidity from 0xMesh, Kyber, Uniswap, Oasis, etc. Set Protocol launcheв social trading. Aztec launched private transactions with hidden amounts. It’s live on mainnet with an SDK. PoolTogether, the no-loss lottery on Ethereum, surpassed 2,000 users and 1,000,000 DAI this week. Congrats to the PoolTogether team! Gitcoin Grants Round 4 has seen 6473 contributions from 1315 unique community members, worth $144810 in just over 14 days. Gnosis team soon will be announcing the public release of a DEX they’ve been working on that: uses a multidimensional order book, offers batch auctions, makes setting limit orders simple. Prior to launch, the first bug bounty program for the protocol is live. For a hint of what’s to come with the new DEX, check out their recent blog post that reviews the progress in 2019, and looks ahead in 2020. Universal Login integrated Gnosis Safe and other upgraded in Beta 3 (beta program still accepting project applications). There is now over 10,000 ETH privatized on Tornado.cash. Moreover, Tornado.cash’s UI had a vulnerability. Check to see if you’re affected. Ethernal, a text-based MUD. die and you lose your items was introduced. The Augur v2 bug bounty program announced. Loom Network biweekly development update is out. Max Wolff announced Rho a spec for a float to fixed automated market maker swap protocol. Results of MetaMask’s generalized metatransaction standard hackathon were published. A new year, a new Making Maker. Get caught up on everything that happened in January with Maker, including a new educational blog series, the Ecosystem page launch, the booth at CES2020, and more! For OmiseGo's first AMA of the year the team invited their CTO, Kasima, and CEO, Vansa, to respond to community questions around the audits, business-adoption, and public release of the OMG Network. Check out the video in our report below. Storj announced their early access production release. SKALE Network explainer video is out. Get involved in the Decentraland 2020 Launch Collection Design Contest. Bitfly launched Eth2 Knowledge Base. Argent integrated the DSR. TokenSoft launched accounts for security tokens. Fuel’s testnet is in open beta, fraud proofs under 1M gas. CherryDai, Maple, Rocket were introduced. The blog post from Orchid on why they chose Ethereum over other blockchains was published. Ethereum.org gets a community page. And much more!
And worth mention, ENS registry getting an upgrade. This update fixes an unexploited bug in the ENS registry contract and adds new functionality to ENS including the ability to: configure the owner and resolver of a name in a single transaction, create a subdomain and set a resolver for it in a single transaction, and authorize contracts or other accounts to make changes to domains on their behalf, similar to ERC721’s ‘authorization’ functionality.
These weeks, plenty of research articles were published. Vitalik Buterin wrote on Eth2 phase 2 “Stateless EEs and delayed block inclusion”. Ryuya Nakamura presents Casper SFG — the Subjective Finality Gadget. A note on Ethereum 2.0 attestation aggregation strategies by Hsiao-Wei was published. Alex Vlasov has been thinking about time synchronisation and potential attack vectors. Jordi Baylina published Iden3 zk rollup slides. Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave, joined the Into the Ether podcast to talk about the recent launch of their new DeFi protocol. Camila Russo, Kain Warwick and Justin Leroux joined the podcast to walk through important DeFi topics. Brendan Eich, CEO and president of Brave, discussed his history in tech prior to crypto, including working at Netscape, how he created Javascript in 10 days and his short stint as CEO of Mozilla, what problems with ads that Brave is trying to solve, and why Brave needs the Basic Attention Token on Unchained podcast. David Hoffman, the COO at RealT, an Ethereum-based platform for tokenizing real property ownership in the United States featured Security Token Academy podcast. Tune it on!
And last, but not least, January 31st was the birthday of Vitalik Buterin! 26 candles for the Russian-Canadian programmer, creator of Ethereum! ◊
“Five years ago, the blockchain was just about bitcoin, but now it’s much bigger than just bitcoin. It’s split off into separate spaces that have a lot of different visions”.
- Vitalik Buterin
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #79 [2020–1–24]
- UNGAS
- EIP-2464 (eth/65)
- EIP-2348 (Validated EVM contracts)
- EIP-2456 (Time Based Upgrade Transitions)
- EIP-1962 (EC arithmetic and pairings with runtime definitions)
- EIP-1559 (Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain)
2. Testing updates
3. EIPIP (EIP Improvement Proposal) Meeting #1
5. Review previous decisions made and action items
- Call 78
6. Next call
The 1.x Files: The Stateless Ethereum Tech Tree. How all the research pieces fit together.
Eth2.0 Call #32 [2020/1/23]
- Testing and Release Updates
- Client Updates
- Research Updates
- Networking
- Spec discussion
End-to-End Formal Verification of Ethereum 2.0 Deposit Smart Contract: Runtime Verification have successfully completed a formal verification of the eth2 deposit contract. This contract is responsible for handling the locking of ETH on the eth1 chain, and then minting of ETH on the eth2 chain to allow for staking.
Geth v1.9.10 — Light client checkpoint oracle, higher propagated transaction cap, bug fixes.
Parity v2.7.1 — no more dual-track releases, breaking database changes.
Nethermind v1.5.8 — Nethermind is constantly releasing improvements.
Multiaddr, ENR and enodes: Network addresses explainer.
Lighthouse client update. Big block processing and sync speedups. Fork choice algo optimized for CPU cycles.
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #43 — “Rapid Iteration”: Prysmatic client update. 10x sync speedup. Plus a script for faster setup of Prysmatic testnet:
Gossipsub benchmarks from Whiteblock.
Bitfly Launches Eth2 Knowledge Base: This new knowledge base currently includes a glossary of terms for eth2 — ever wondered what epoch, validator, attestations and all the other buzzwords mean? Simply go to the site to find all of the definitions!
Development tools
Solidity 0.6.x features: try/catch statement: The try/catch syntax introduced in 0.6.0 is arguably the biggest leap in error handling capabilities in Solidity, since reason strings for revert and require were released in v0.4.22. Both try and catch have been reserved keywords since v0.5.9 and now they can be used to handle failures in external function calls without rolling back the complete transaction (state changes in the called function are still rolled back, but the ones in the calling function are not).
The team moving one step away from the purist “all-or-nothing” approach in a transaction lifecycle, which falls short of practical behaviour they often want.
Better Solidity debugging: Console.log and stack traces.
Solidity v0.6.2 — CREATE2, interfaces inherit from inheritances.
Embark v5.1 — new libraries/interfaces config settings, getEVMversion for conditional tests, and a Nethermind plugin.
Subspace v1.2 — event/state tracking in React. adds httpProvider support.
ABDK’s online tools: key of an address, calculate address pre-deploy, RLP encoder/decoder, encode/decode raw signed/unsigned transactions.
Securify v2, free security scanner.
Auditing your code with Web3j and its EVM.
Sam Sun caught a vulnerability in Curve, which was solved by moving front end to a fixed version.
What are Burner Wallet Plugins? Customizing your popup event/economy.
How to run your own xDai chain with arbitrary message bridge:
Web3connect v1beta.26 — a single web3 provider for all wallets.
What does Truffle and WalletConnect mean?
A lightweight directory access protocol.
Using CREATE2 explainer.
Smart contracts on Austin Griffith’s eth.build:
AirScript v0.6 and genSTARK v0.7 AirScript compiles to AirAssembly, which genSTARK uses to create a STARK.
PleaseRelayMe — allows dapps to use rDai to fund a metatransaction relay hub. live on Kovan testnet.
Zinc: Rust-like language for zero knowlege proof circuits from Matter Labs.
Add editable user profiles with 3Box to your app in under 30 minutes.
Using the web3J Solidity debugger.
An intro to symbolic execution.
Using MythX’s symbolic analysis and fuzzing in Remix.
Q&A with Sam Sun on how he finds vulnerabilities.
Frontend security best practices.
Integrating MythX and CircleCI.
Start to finish OpenZeppelin CLI workflow.
Kauri links for learning Eth app development.
Node-gyp-cache — cache native dependencies.
web3connect v1.0.0-beta.29 — cache user’s last provider for auto-load.
web3JS v1.2.6 updated ENS registry address and revert reason strings.
New EthersJS version with updated ENS registry address
Governance and new standards proposals
EIP2315: JUMPSUB and RETSUB for simple EVM subroutines.
ERC2477: NFT metadata integrity.
EIP2489: Deprecate GAS opcode.
EIP2488: Deprecate CALLCODE opcode.
ERC2494: BabyJubjub.
ERC2502: µTopic Delegation.
The DigixDAO voted for dissolution. TheLAO wants a DigixLAO.
Social choice theory and voting on multiple outcomes.
What to expect when summoning a MolochDAO.
SignalDAO, a signalling DAO for Metacartel/MolochDAO using a Telegram bot doing web3 calls via Abridged SDK.
Follow the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
Year in Ethereum 2019 by Josh Stark and Evan Van Ness.
Joe Lubin: CBDCs and Supply Chain Defined Blockchain at Davos 2020.
Ethereum by the Numbers — January 2020: Check out Ethereum activity, decentralized finance metrics, and more facts and figures about happening on Ethereum.
Overview of January:
Just two days into the new year and decade, Ethereum started off with the Glacier Muir Hard Fork which delayed Ethereum’s “ice age”. Throughout January, decentralized finance has continued to thrive with Maker’s multi-collateral Dai surpassing the 100 million Dai threshold. Additionally, MakerDao’s Oasis platform now provides a Dai Savings Rate (DSR) of over 7% for users who save their Dai in the platform. Moving forward it will be interesting to see how users interact with Oasis and if the DSR grows in popularity. Moreover, popular no-loss gambling app Pool Together achieved it’s highest weekly payout to date of 700 Dai. On the developer side, Gitcoin conducted a widely successful pilot of quadratic voting which provided 200k in grants to two categories: Technology and Media. The fourth community funding round from Gitcoin had over 300 companies or open source projects apply for funding.
Network:
- 1 Hard Fork. Read about the Glacier Muir Hard Fork.
- 2. Eth2Stats. is live and now has the Saphire and Lighthouse testnets.
- 1. Explainer video released by SKALE.
- 100M. Dai crosses the 100 million mark in circulating supply
- 300k. Ethereum’s January mining supply vs. DeFi Demand
Dapps:
- 3,303. Dapps that are on Ethereum.
- 700 Dai. The weekly prize for PoolTogether.
- 5.2k. Dapp smart contracts being utilized.
- 1.8m+. Cryptokitties listed on OpenSea.
- 5.91ETH. The average price of Decentraland property listed on OpenSea.
- 5,663 IDs. Urbit ID’s available for purchase.
- 0.04 ETH. The average price of Gods Unchained cards on OpenSea
DeFi:
- 7.75%. The Dai Savings Rate on Maker’s Oasis app.
- 13100 ETH. Daily Volume of Kyber DEX.
- 1. Report about Decentralized Exchanges in 2019.
Read the rest of the blog post at ConsenSys.net.
Types of Ethereum Data Series: Ethereum Network Data: Learn about the types of Ethereum data and how to understand on-chain Ethereum metrics.
Scalability estimate: How many users can Waku and the Status app support? (Status’s Whisper alternative).
The Ethereum website team have put together a community a brand new community page where you’ll find links to a bunch of different communities within Ethereum. The team is also asking for input on its new designs for the website here.
Faster enterprise blockchain apps with PegaSys Orchestrate.
EEA Mainnet Working Group forms Task Force “EMINENT” (Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises).
Interpreting GDPR Through the Blockchain Lens: Blockchain researcher Christian Wirth shares his findings on the intersection of blockchain technology and the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.
Breaking Records via Tokenization, Round 2.
Rollup Roundup: Understanding Ethereum’s Emerging Layer 2.
Social Money — Tokenizing Your Time and Talents.
The Tales Told By Secondary Markets.
Examining Ethereum Under A Microscope.
Ethereum is Killing Bitcoin’s Payment Use Case.
DeFi Dive: Nexus Mutual — a people-powered alternative to insurance.
A Note On Nodes: Your Gateway To The Mempool.
What is TokenSets and How to Use it to Take Control of Your Crypto.
Projects updates
0x:
Access all DEX liquidity through 0x API: Easily integrate with 0x API to swap tokens at the best prices.
Last week, the team introduced 0x API. They designed the 0x API to make it easy for DeFi developers like you to tap into both off-chain and on-chain DEX liquidity in a fast, reliable, and easy to use way so you can focus on what matters: your product.
With a simple GET call, you can use 0x API to fetch the best price available in the DEX ecosystem for any token. Under the hood, they aggregate liquidity from 0x Mesh and other decentralized exchange networks like Kyber, Uniswap and Oasis, and use smart order routing to find the best prices for you — saving you time and connecting you to more liquidity than any single source can provide. As they build more bridge contracts and more liquidity becomes available, the 0x API automatically upgrades without any additional work on your end.
With 0x API you can:
- Get the best rate in the DEX ecosystem for your desired swap with a simple GET call.
- Easily execute a swap in your smart contracts with a transaction constructed on your behalf.
- Contribute to and access liquidity on the 0x Mesh network through a REST API endpoint.
- Abstract away protocol fees and complete transactions on behalf of your users.
- Reduce your product development and go to market time.
Leading open finance projects including Nuo, bZx (Fulcrum), Zerion, Topo Finance, DeFi Saver, and more have already begun integrating with 0x API. Join the growing number of projects building on 0x by getting started today at 0x.org/api!
Announcing 0xpo: Win a free ticket to our upcoming conference!
To engage with the builders, investors, and influencers in the ecosystem, the 0x Core Team will be hosting 0xpo, their inaugural conference in San Francisco.
The event will take place on February 7th, 2020 and is invite-only, as their venue’s capacity is limited. However, the team will be recording all of the presentations and posting them on 0x YouTube channel shortly after the event.
They confirmed an amazing speaker lineup, including leaders such as Balaji Srinivasan, Chris Burniske, Linda Xie, Joey Krug, Arianna Simpson, and more. For invitees, the team hopes you can join them for a day of networking and presentations about 0x vision of a tokenized world.
Check out our fantastic speaker lineup and agenda at 0xpo.com
0x Team Hackathon II: A recap of 0x’s internal hackathon — December 2019
0x internal hackathon was limited to 24 hours and the entire 0x Core Team was encouraged to participate. There were no specific guidelines or restrictions around what teams could build. In the last hackathon, projects ranged from smart contract implementations to an educational video. After all the projects were submitted, the 0x Core Team voted on winners in several categories:
- Best Technical Project: Awarded to the most impressive technical project.
- Best Non-technical Project: Awarded to the most impressive non-technical project.
- Most Ready to Launch: Awarded to the project that could potentially be shipped tomorrow.
- Most Liquid: Awarded to the project that has the highest potential to increase liquidity for 0x and the DEX space.
- Judges Choice: We were honored to have Jill Carson (Principal at Slow Ventures), Linda Xie (Co-founder & Managing Director of Scalar Capital), and Robert Leshner (CEO of Compound) join us as our judges. They reviewed all the projects and selected their favorite.
Discover Aragon Fundraising: Aragon Fundraising is a key pillar of Aragon Court — it allows people to get ANJ by continuously locking ANT. Thanks to the flexibility of aragonOS, Aragon Fundraising can be configured to accommodate different funding and governance mechanisms.
For example, in Aragon Court’s case, the locked ANT stays in the bonding curve, so ANT always backs ANJ. However, you could configure Aragon Fundraising so that the members of a decentralized organization can vote to withdraw some of the bonding curve’s assets to support the development of the project, reward contributions, pay salaries…
Aragon Fundraising enables myriads of use cases — from the native token of a crypto protocol such as Aragon Court, patronage, and donations to accountable fundraising or even continuous organizations.
The smart contracts behind Aragon Fundraising have been audited and already power Aragon Court. A frontend and template are also launching, which are experimental. Aragon Fundraising smart contracts are covered under the bug bounty program up to $250k.
You can now try Aragon Fundraising by creating a decentralized organization on Aragon and choosing the “Fundraising” template.
Read intro to Aragon Fundraising | Read documentation for Aragon Fundraising
Augur v2 Bug Bounty Program: The Forecast Foundation is excited to announce the launch of the public Augur v2 bug bounty program. Security is the number one priority in the Augur contracts, and now they’re seeking help from the community in finding bugs and vulnerabilities prior to deployment.
Augur Weekly — Expert Political Trader Shares His Iowa Predictions & 538 vs. Markets: A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.
Around the Ecosystem:
- Augur v2 Bug Bounty Program. The Forecast Foundation is seeking the community’s help in finding bugs and vulnerabilities prior to deployment. Critical bugs pay $25k.
- Augur’s Flippening. Ben Davidow of The Augur Edge details the effects of liquidity at both extremes, its exponential nature, and how it relates to Augur v2.
- Sports Betting Markets & Crypto Market Thoughts w/ Pantera CIO Joey Krug.
Launching Aztec: privacy on Ethereum has arrived. On February 2nd, the Aztec team launched its privacy network on Ethereum! You can incorporate zkDai into your dApp today using their SDK.
Over the coming six weeks the team will release other zk Tokens onto the network, and in two months’ time they will remove restrictions so you can make completely private custom assets from scratch.
Aztec has deployed the two core components of its technology today:
- Aztec Crypto Engine (ACE) — Aztec smart contract validator on Ethereum mainnet, checking the correctness of every private transaction
- Privacy SDK — abstracts away the complexities of Aztec’s cryptography, so developers can integrate privacy into their dapps with ease
Brave 1.0 Performance: Methodology and Results.
Google and IAB’s inadequate proposals to reform RTB.
Coinbase Custody Officially Launches Internationally: Coinbase Custody will now offer its institutional-grade crypto asset storage to clients through Europe via a regional base of operations in Dublin, Ireland.
Welcome Surojit Chatterjee, Coinbase’s Chief Product Officer.
Avatar Wearables Design Contest: Your outfit design could be made virtual by the Decentraland Art Team.
Back to the polls. Two new Agora votes!: Decide on crucial Marketplace and LAND weight issues.
Decentraland Public Launch. On 20.02.2020 fully decentralized shared virtual world becomes a reality. Decentraland, the first-ever blockchain-based virtual world, is going live to the public.
The launch includes the establishment of the Decentraland DAO, full decentralization of the world’s infrastructure (communications between users and the serving of content), and, most importantly, public access to the very best the Metaverse has to offer. From now on, no single agent will have the power to modify the rules of the software, curate LAND content, modify the economics of MANA, upgrade the LAND smart contract unilaterally, or prevent others from accessing the world, among other decentralization features.
The team is celebrating the Public Launch with a gigantic ‘in-world’ Treasure Hunt.
It’s a four day event where you will explore their first metropolis, Genesis City, to find collectible NFTs and tokens from a host of cool crypto partners.
While it’s the culmination of over two years of development, testing and amazing contributions from the dedicated community, the Public Launch is also the beginning of an exciting new era for Decentraland.
Stay tuned for more announcements and information. And if you haven’t done so already, remember to create your Decentraland Avatar.
The District Weekly — February 1st: News and updates from the district0x Network.
The District Weekly — January 25th.
district0x Dev Update — January 21st, 2020: Development progress and product changes from district0x.
Gitcoin Grants Round 4 Results:
As a reminder on the structure, there were two pools of funding to allocate in Gitcoin Grants Round 4 using the Liberal Radicalism mechanism.
- The Media Pool ($75,000). Supports media, community, and marketing projects
- The Technology Pool ($125,000). Supports Ethereum infrastructure projects spanning ETH 2.0, decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto wallets, UX.
With $200,000 for grabs, here’s what happened in just over two weeks, from January 6th, 2020 to January 21st, 2020.
- $143,642 in funds were committed by the Ethereum Community. This, plus the $200,000 in matching funds results in $343,642 to Ethereum projects for this CLR round.
- 5,936 contributions were made to 230 open source Ethereum projects
- 1,115 unique Ethereum community members participated in the funding round
This was a huge jump from Round 3 (see Vitalik’s review here), almost doubling all major numbers. From 80 projects to 230 projects. From 477 contributors to 1,115 contributors. From 1,982 contributions to 5,936 (!).
Before looking ahead, let’s take a closer look at the top five projects from the tech and media rounds to see who the community rallied around in highest concentration.
The Top 5 Tech Grants:
Media Round:
Gitcoin’s 2020 CLR Plans:
First and foremost, Gitcoin plans to distribute the funds for Gitcoin Grants Round 4 no later than 2/3/2019.
From there, Gitcoin looks — with the support of the Ethereum Foundation and other matching partners — to run at least quarterly rounds in 2020, with a planned 4 CLR rounds. The hope is the regularly scheduled rounds will help grantees use these funds not only as additional donations, but as a strong source of funding for their operations in the Ethereum community. A rough schedule for the rest of the year is below.
- Q2 Match: March 16th — March 30th
- Q3 Match: June 15th — June 29th
- Q4 Match: September 14th — September 28th
The goal is to allocate at least $1.5MM (via matching + community contributions) to Ethereum infrastructure during this time — and the team is well on their way with $344K with developers in the first month.
Announcing the first dFusion Bug Bounty: Find the bugs, get rewarded. Earn up to $50,000 for every bug you report.
Gnosis in 2019, 2020, and Beyond: The year in review and a hint of what’s ahead.
In the glow of futures imagined three decades prior, 2019 was a learning experience for Gnosis. The team worked hard and launched several products.
- dxDAO Decentralized Governance: They initialized and stepped back from the dxDAO in Q2 of this year. During the initialization period, over 400 participants locked 20 million USD equivalent in ETH and ERC20s to earn voting power in the DAO. Today, the dxDAO is run by a small and dedicated independent community who have rebranded the DAO and continue to use it as a tool to govern DEXs (decentralized exchanges). In fact, only weeks ago, Kleros and the dxDAO published a joint announcement about their TCR and DEX token listings. The team is proud that the dxDAO was one of the first in hopefully a long line of experiments to give governance of software protocols over to their users, or in the words of Nathan Schneider, providing an option for platforms to “exit to community.”
- DEXs: In Q1, Gnosis team deployed on Mainnet their first proof of concept DEX, the DutchX trading protocol. The DutchX uses an auction mechanism designed to handle large volume orders with minimal slippage. Today, the dxDAO governs the DutchX, including parameters such as its auction thresholds, token listings, and interfaces. While they’re glad the DutchX trading protocol’s use continues with the dxDAO, the team did not find the user base they anticipated while designing the protocol. This launch was ultimately our most valuable lesson of the year, reinforcing the need to build more modular tools that are more closely aligned with the community’s needs. You can read more below on how the team is incorporating this lesson into development cycles for the launch of the new DEX protocol in 2020.
- Sight Prediction Markets: In Q4, the Sight prediction market platform launched in closed beta. Sight is the first regulated, blockchain-based prediction market platform, providing users with peace of mind regarding source of funds and market resolution. Sight builds on the conditional tokens framework, which means that its outcome tokens are interoperable and can share a liquidity pool with other prediction markets built on the framework. The team hopes to see conditional tokens become an open standard for prediction markets and many other use cases that require complex events to be registered on a blockchain.
- Gnosis Safe Multisig: Additionally in Q4, the team launched the Gnosis Safe Multisig, the successor to the community-favorite, original Gnosis multi-signature wallet, which currently stores over 1B USD equivalent in crypto funds. The Gnosis Safe Multisig boasts of added security, with audited and formally verified contracts, usability, with over six months of user testing, and modularity by design. They strongly recommend moving your funds from the original multi-signature wallet to the Gnosis Safe Multisig for continued maintenance and new features, like the support of new ERC standard tokens. You can set your Safe Multisig up in less than 60 seconds here: https://gnosis-safe.io.
- Gnosis Ecosystem Fund and Community: The team held their second annual DappCon, a conference in Berlin focused on Ethereum development and applications, and tickets for DappCon 2020 will go on sale in March. Their co-founded workspace for blockchain and web 3.0 initiatives Full Node continues to be the heart of the community in Berlin, and this year they’re excited to announce a new, monthly public event series. Finally, the grants program the Gnosis Ecosystem Fund received 40 applications and funded 12 projects building on Gnosis.
Brass Golem Beta 0.22.1: In case you missed it, just two weeks ago the team released Brass Golem 0.22 and with it, launched the Concent Service and the usage-based marketplace to mainnet and our new Task API to testnet.
Kyber is coming to ETHDenver, USA!: Build with Kyber! Take part in our ETHDenver hackathon bounties from 14–16 Feb.
Ampleforth (AMPL) is now available on Kyber Network!
Global Digital Content (GDC) is now available on Kyber Network.
Executive Vote: Activate Sai Debt Ceiling, Sai, and Dai Stability Fee Adjustments.
The Benefits of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology. The new year arrived on the heels of Multi-Collateral Dai, which has attracted many new people from around the world to Maker. To help these new users learn all they can about crypto, blockchain tech, Dai, and everything the Maker Protocol has to offer, the team begins a 6-part Welcome to Crypto series. The series will cover everything from the advantages of digital assets and how to buy crypto to how to read cryptocurrency price charts, and why they matter. Dig in!
MetaTransaction Hackathon Winner!
Judging the Generalized MetaTransaction Contest.
Welcoming Unstoppable Domains to MEW! Have you gotten yourself a blockchain domain name yet? No more excuses–make your wallet more secure, AND make it fashion.
Blockchain Domain Names Leading Crypto Out of Obscurity. MEW is preparing for the ENS registry upgrade, with a release going out in the next few days. Users who own domains don’t need to do anything, however, please be aware that MEW’s ENS manager will be disabled February 3rd through February 5th to support the migration.
Unleash the Potential of Ocean Protocol, Unlock the Power of the Data Economy: The winners of the inaugural Ocean Protocol Data Economy Challenge.
OmiseGO January 2020 Roundup: The team hits a major milestone this month by completing the audits of the contracts in their plasma framework. They engaged two auditors to find issues in their implementation and check the voracity of the contracts. The audit reports are ready and they’ll be releasing these to the public in the coming weeks. To know more about what they’re up to next, read blockchain update 35.
This month, the team attended the 4th edition of Bangkok Enterprise Blockchain. Organised by Atato, this meeting focused on sharing real-world experiences of using blockchain for business, and how user experience can be improved to encourage adoption.
There, OmiseGo Head of Commercial Units, Alexei Schaller, gave a presentation on “Enterprise Applications of the OMG Network.” He spoke about the ways OMG Network can help big businesses with things like exchange of assets, auditability requirements, and more.
OmiseGO — AMA 29 with Vansa & Kasima:
Check out our biweekly update on Polkadot.
Check out our biweekly update on Polkadot.
February 3, 2020 — Town Hall # 50.
Nimbus Awarded Follow-up Grant from Ethereum Foundation to Continue R&D on Eth2.0 Client and New Expansion Projects. The Nimbus team has been awarded $650k to continue work on the completion of a public multi-client ready testnest, further auditing, and preparations for production use.
Status V1 the messenger of choice 2020.
Announcing Early Access For Tardigrade:The team announced their Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage service is finally ready for production workloads. They’re welcoming the first paying customers to experience the advantages of decentralized cloud storage with an early access release (RC 1.0). They expect a complete production launch this quarter, at which time the team will remove the waitlist and open user registration to all.
With this release, Tardigrade users can expect:
- Full service level agreements: For both the early access release and the production launch, Tardigrade users can expect 3 9s of availability (99.9%) and 9 9s of durability (99.9999999%).
- 1TB credits for storage and bandwidth: All users who signed up for the waitlist will receive this credit after adding a STORJ token balance or credit card to their account. All waitlist credits will expire after one full billing cycle after Storj production launch, so claim them now so you don’t miss out! After users utilize their credits, they’ll be charged for their usage.
- 1TB limits on storage and bandwidth: During this early access period, all accounts will have limits of 1TB for both their static storage usage and their monthly bandwidth. Submit a request through our support portal if you need to increase this limit.
- Backward compatibility: Developers building on top of Tardigrade can expect their applications to have full backward compatibility with the general availability production launch.
News: The Avast scandal shows us that users need to capture the value of their data themselves.
Other project’s updates:
A list of every project with ENS that has or hasn’t updated to the new registry:
A URL shortener using ENS + the lightweight director access protocol referenced above in dev tools.
PoolTogether, the no-loss lottery on Ethereum, surpassed 2,000 users & 1,000,000 DAI this week. Congrats to the PoolTogether team!
Set Social Trading is live on mainnet. Set Social Trading is a marketplace and network that enables traders to create and manage their own Sets, giving the public instant exposure to their trading strategies. Users can follow along with these strategies by simply minting a Set on TokenSets which copies every single action the trader enacts.
How people are using Pepo, crypto’s TikTok.
Fuel’s testnet is in open beta, fraud proofs under 1m gas.
Synthetix: the state of Synthetix and 2020 roadmap adding ETH as collateral.
Tornado.cash’s UI had a vulnerability. Check to see if you’re affected.
The Next Chapter for Bounties: Mark Beylin announces in this blog post that the team has decided to stop all development work on the Bounties Explorer and Protocol. He then gives an overview of all the work that the team accomplished and what’s next.
Dolomite DEX Launches Limit Order Margin Trading: After months of development and working with our beta testers, we’re excited to announce that margin trading is now available to all traders on Dolomite.
Portle App Updated: Timur added multiwallet support, redesigned the website, squashes bugs & improved performance and open sourced the code for Portle!
Dex.ag Improvements: Better bids and offers and lower default slippage of 0.20% are available on the new live.dex.ag beta website.
Gilded Finance Launches Open Finance Platform: Gilded is an open finance platform for business to business (B2B) payments.
ConsenSys’s DeFi Score Update: The DeFi Score now scores projects based on what degree of centralization they have (such as who holds the admin keys and can the price oracle be manipulated).
Chainlink Launches Price Reference Data for DeFi: Over 25 oracle networks are now live on the Ethereum mainnet tracking the price of tokens such as SNX, LEND and LRC.
Set Labs and DEXTF Form Strategic Partnership: The partnership focuses on building the next-gen asset management infrastructure which tweaks some of the traditional relationships between the actors in the asset management industry, as we know them today, and the role of custody.
Argent Integrates the DSR: You can now gain exposure to the Dai Savings Rate with a few clicks by simply using the Argent mobile wallet app.
RealT’s Second Property is Sold: The second property on RealT, 5942 Audubon, has been sold and has 153 unique owners!
TokenSoft Launches Accounts for Security Tokens: TokenSoft’s new investment accounts offer a brokerage-style experience for investors who trade security tokens.
Mashable on DeFi: “I took out a loan with cryptocurrency and didn’t sign a thing”
Introducing Maple: Maple Loans is a platform where users form Communities to borrow and lend undercollateralized loans to other Community members. The protocol takes care of requesting, funding, settling and making repayments allowing Communities to experiment and be creative with identity and risk assessment.
Introducing Rocket: Rocket allows users to get a loan by using their NFTs as collateral. It’s currently live on the Ethereum Ropsten testnet.
Introducing Ethernal: Ethernal is a multiplayer dungeon generated entirely from the blockchain, inspired by classic text and grid-based MUD games.
Introducing CherryDai: CherryDai interest bearing ERC20 token which represents fractional ownership in a liquidity pool plus the returns from offering the swaps. Interest rates offered in swaps are set based off pool utilization to align demand with market rates.
Stablecoin.services introduced: a website offering a collection of common Dai and Chai operations, gas-free! You can transfer Dai or Chai, sell Dai > Eth, Chai > Eth on Uniswap, convert Dai <> Chai — all without holding any Ether! gas-free DAI/CHAI transfers, Uniswap trades, and DAI/CHAI conversion.
Rho: an on-chain interest rate swaps protocol designed as an automated market maker. With Rho, traders can open positions directly with the protocol at any time instead of having to wait for a counterparty.
4 Factors We Considered Before Choosing Ethereum: Blog post from Orchid on why they chose Ethereum over other blockchains.
Opinion and research articles
Stateless EEs and delayed block inclusion: Vitalik Buterin on Eth2 phase 2.
Negative votes in quadratic funding: Vitalik on economics.
A strange kind of pairwise-bounded quadratic funding by Vitalik.
A note on Ethereum 2.0 attestation aggregation strategies by Hsiao-Wei.
Casper FFG Meets Subjective Finality by Ryuya Nakamura. This presents Casper SFG — the Subjective Finality Gadget.
TL;DR
- We propose Casper the Subjective Finality Gadget (SFG), a modified version of Casper FFG.
- Casper SFG improves Casper FFG to support a subjective commit rule, by which clients can finalize a block based on their local assumption on the number of faults.
- We use a mixed fault model for SFG, where fault assumption is analyzed for safety and liveness, respectively.
cadCAD is “An open-source Python package that assists in the processes of designing, testing and validating complex systems through simulation.” Well, Barnabé Monnot has managed to use this import the whole beacon state and run simulations of the beacon chain, with blocks, attestations, and all. This platform could be used for studying validator behaviour: will rational validators seeking to maximise their income really behave as we assume they will? This work is coming out of the new Robust Incentives Group at the Ethereum Foundation.
Alex Vlasov has been thinking about time synchronisation and potential attack vectors. When a distributed protocol like the beacon chain relies on a different distributed protocol such as NTP, then there is a danger of inheriting that protocol’s weaknesses.
Jordi Baylina’s Iden3 zk rollup slides.
Podcasts and videos
Aave: Unleashing More Potential in DeFi on Into the Ether: Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave, joins the podcast to talk about the recent launch of their new DeFi protocol. Aave is an open source and non-custodial protocol to earn interest on deposits & borrow assets. They talk about how Aave differs from other DeFi products such as Compound and Maker. Stani explains how Aave brings new features to DeFi such as flash loans and aDai which both have the goal of utilizing more of the lending pools. Flash loans seem like a revolutionary money lego that will be a breakthrough product for DeFi.
Talking DeFi with Camila Russo, Kain Warwick and Justin Leroux on Into the Ether: For the first livestream of the year, the hosts decided it was only fitting to talk about the hottest topic in Ethereum, DeFi. Camila Russo, Kain Warwick and Justin Leroux join us to walk through important DeFi topics. They start with some basics and value propositions for the space. Then they transition into the large growth they’ve seen in the past year when it comes to locked ETH and how high can it go? The conversation then heads towards user experience and regulations. This is both a great overview and deep dive into the current state of decentralized finance.
Brendan Eich on How Brave Is Working to Decentralize on Unchained: Brendan Eich, CEO and president of Brave, discusses his history in tech prior to crypto, including working at Netscape, how he created Javascript in 10 days and his short stint as CEO of Mozilla, what problems with ads that Brave is trying to solve, and why Brave needs the Basic Attention Token. He explains why Bitcoin wouldn’t work for cryptocurrencies on the platform, why they use BAT over stablecoins, and how Brave strips ads from publishers’ webpages, but doesn’t from Facebook or Google, and how it causes collateral damage to publishers. He talks about how the browser is a middleman, how Brave works with Uphold and why it doesn’t require KYC unless the users wants to cash out on his or her Brave rewards. He also explains why he isn’t worried that BAT could meet the four prongs of the Howey test, what it will look like when Basic Attention Token is decentralized and why he doesn’t know if publishers are earning back in BAT the ad revenue that Brave blocks.
How DeFi Liquidators Make Money With Just Bots on Unconfirmed: Tom Schmidt, junior partner at Dragonfly Capital, talks about how liquidators are making money in DeFi — on which protocols, how liquidations work, and how much money they’re making. He also discusses how liquidators do their work, how easy it is to create a bot to watch for liquidation opportunities, and how competitive the space is. They also discuss the growing competitive pressures, both from other liquidators as well as savvier borrowers.
David Hoffman: RealT on Security Token Academy: David Hoffman is the COO at RealT, an Ethereum-based platform for tokenizing real property ownership in the United States. RealT empowers investors around the globe to buy into the US real estate market through compliant, fractional, tokenized ownership–powered by blockchain. RealT’s first tokenized properties are single-family homes in Detroit, Michigan.
In this interview with STA’s Derek Edward Schloss, Hoffman walks through the RealT platform, the launch of its first tokenized properties in Detroit. RealT’s unique opportunity for overseas investors, and why RealT decided to tokenize on the Ethereum blockchain — including its platform integration of MakerDao’s Dai stable token.
TokenSets from Chico Crypto:
Ethereum DeFi is going to lead the next crypto bull run & TokenSets is becoming our favorite tool, to secure those bull run gains! Trading technical indicators & tehcnical analysis is a great way to increase gains, but it’s a full time job! What if erc20 tokens, smart contracts & stablecoins could trade based on technical indicators for you? This is TokenSets. Today we dive into the Set protocol, how it functions & actually purchase our own set! If DeFi decentralized finance is your thing, this is a Chico Crypto episode you do not want to miss!
Intro to Aave | Decentralized Lending & Borrowing Protocol on Ethereum:
Aave is a decentralized & non-custodial protocol for lending & borrowing cryptoassets. This video reviews usage of Aave via the project’s hosted website and through 3rd parties.
Aaron Krugman and his Moonshot Sets on POV Crypto:
Berlin Ethereum Meetup — January 2020:
Steffen Kux — INCUBED
Dean Eigenmann — Ultralight Beam
Theo Goodman — an Introduction to nym
Check out Devcon5 videos!
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io (February 4th, 2020):
Understanding the validator lifecycle by Jim McDonald:
Ethereum 2 uses proof of stake to secure its network, where computer processes known as “validators” cast votes on the next block to be included (hereafter “attesting”), as well as proposing their own blocks to include. However, validators are not simply “on” or “off”: they go through a number of transitions during their lifecycle. This article examines the validator lifecycle in depth, showing what happens in each state and transition, what triggers transitions, and how long each transition takes.
Staking On Ethereum 2.0 — What You Need To Know featuring RocketPool:
The hosts are joined by Dave, the founder of a little Ethereum startup called RocketPool. They are building a decentralised staking network to support the move to proof of stake on Ethereum 2.0. In this interview they explain everything you need to know about the coming changes & how you can stake ETH to earn rewards by securing the new ETH 2.0 blockchain.
Roadmap
To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.
A hard fork refers to a radical change to a network’s underlying protocol that creates new rules defining which blocks and transactions the network will consider valid. Due to the decentralized nature of blockchain, the community has to work with each other as well as system developers to agree on which changes will be programmed into various clients, which, in Ethereum’s case, include Parity, and Nethermind and others.
The original timeline for the Ethereum development stages and the intermediate hard forks:
Block #0 — Frontier
This was the initial development stage of Ethereum, from July 30th, 2015, to March 2016.
Block #200,000 — Ice Age
Ice Age was a hard fork to introduce an exponential difficulty increase, to motivate a transition from Proof-of-Work consensus to Proof-of-Stake when ready.
Block #1,150,000 — Homestead
The second state of Ethereum launched in March 2016.
Block #1,192,000 — DAO
The infamous DAO case. This was a hard fork that reimbursed victims of the DAO hack and caused Ethereum and Ethereum Classic to split into two opposing systems.
Block #2,463,00 — Tangerine Whistle
Another hard fork to change the gas calculation for certain I/O heavy operations and to clear the accumulated state after a DoS attack that exploited the low gas cost of those operations.
Block #2,675,000 — Spurious Dragon
A hard fork addressing more DoS attack vectors and another state clearing. Also, a replay attack protection mechanism.
Block #4,370,000 — Metropolis Byzantium
This was the third stage of Ethereum development, launched in October 2017. Byzantium was the first of two hard forks for Metropolis.
Block #7,280,000 — Constantinople
The first significant milestone in 2019 was Constantinople/St. Petersburg update that was deployed on the main network on February 28th, 2019. This was the second hard fork from the Metropolis stage. Initially, the Constantinople upgrade was planned for block number 7,080,000. That upgrade had to be postponed due to a security vulnerability.
Block #9,069,000 — Istanbul
On December 8th, 2019 the network has undergone an Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) driven hard fork, dubbed Istanbul, in which six distinct upgrades have been added to the network.
Istanbul brought upgrades that:
- Aligns the costs of opcodes with their computational costs and improves denial-of-service attack resilience
- Makes layer 2 solutions based on SNARKs and STARKs more performant.
- Enables Ethereum and Zcash to interoperate
- Allows contracts to introduce more creative functions.
Specifically:
EIP-152 Adds the ability to verify the Equihash PoW within an Ethereum contract. This enables a relay and atomic-swap transactions between Zcash.
EIP-1108 Makes zk-SNARKs cheaper, allowing for cheaper scaling and privacy applications to be built.
EIP-1344 Adds a way for contracts to track the correct chain. To be used by contracts, especially those used by layer 2 (state channels, plasma), to follow the correct layer 1 chain, especially during a hard fork.
EIP-1884 Changes the cost of some EVM opcodes to prevent spamming attacks and to balance blocks better. The amount that must be paid for each operation in Ethereum usually matches the computation required for that operation. This change increases some costs of some opcodes that are computationally intensive but currently cheap.
EIP-2028 Makes zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs cheaper by reducing the cost of calling data within transactions. This makes layer 2 solutions able to increase throughput.
EIP-2200 Changes the calculation of cost of storage in the EVM and enables contracts to introduce new functions including re-entry locks and same-contract multi-send.
Block #9,200,000 — Muir Glacier
The latest fork was called Muir Glacier. The Ethereum mainnet has undergone this, less than a month after its Istanbul update. The Muir Glacier update was activated on January 2nd, 2020, with only one improvement proposal, EIP 2384. The proposal aims to delay the difficulty bomb, a built-in algorithm of the Ethereum blockchain that could drastically increase the difficulty in mining a new block if left unaccounted for. The update is designed to delay the difficulty bomb for another 4,000,000 blocks, or approximately 611 days.
You can read more about this on the Muir Glacier Fork meta EIP 2387 and previous difficulty bomb upgrades in EIP 649 and EIP 1234.
Eth2 — Serenity
Serenity is the last stage of Ethereum development. It will introduce Eth2, the new Ethereum blockchain that will finally have Casper, a new Ethereum Virtual Machine, and much more. The goal of Serenity is to improve the scalability, security, and programmability of Ethereum. Instead of 15 TPS on a single chain, Eth2 will process thousands to tens of thousands of transactions per second without compromising on decentralization.
There has been a lot of discussion and rumors around when Serenity is going to be launched. Justin Drake, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and Eth2 contributor, proposed his ‘natural candidacy’ for the ‘Hello World’ date of Ethereum 2.0. He started a discussion in the official Ethereum GitHub repository with the specifications of Ethereum 2.0 — a new version of the Ethereum network that is being developed at the moment. He said that the fifth anniversary of the Ethereum blockchain, July 30th, 2020, would be better suited for this event. On December 15th, 2019, he explained why he decided to choose this date in another Ethereum 2.0 repository. He used the only indicator: three months of reliable operation for a multi-client testnet. Drake hopes that this testnet will be deployed in Q1. So, accordingly to his estimations, it could be launched as early as in Q2: “We’d be looking at Q2 launch at the earliest.” Danny Ryan, core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and another major Ethereum 2.0 contributor, supposes that the ETH2 mainnet may be launched earlier. He adds that he “continues to be much more optimistic than the date in this PR (pull-request)”. Other participants of the discussion avoided announcements of some exacts release dates — they proposed to estimate it later with more development progress to come.
However, the majority of developers foresee these main phases of Eth1’s evolution to Eth2:
- Phase 0: Beacon Chain (Q1 2020)
- Phase 1: Shard Chains (2021)
- Phase 2: eWASM (New Ethereum Virtual Machine) (2021/early 2022)
- Continued Improvement (2022)
Phase 0 — Beacon Chain
Shipping in late Q2/early Q3 of 2020
On the beacon chain, we will finally see Casper. The Beacon Chain will be a separate blockchain from the main Ethereum blockchain. This new chain will have a PoS consensus algorithm, and it will run in parallel to the main PoW Ethereum blockchain. Initially, the blockchain will be created for simplicity and will not support smart contracts or accounts.
These weeks, Phase 0 spec v0.10.0 released. This version of the Eth2 phase 0 spec will be the one that undergoes all of the audits and be the base for the multi-client testnet!
Phase 1 — Sharding
Shipping in 2021
Sharding will be introduced on the Beacon chain, and it will have initially 100 shards. Validators will validate transactions from their own shard, and in the first phase, they won’t approve any smart contract, account or asset.
While sharding will bring more scalability, there are a few setbacks to take into account. Validators have a small pool of transactions to validate, which makes it easier for a 51% attack, as they only need 51% computing power (or stake) of the shard they are in, instead of the whole network. This technique can also lead to higher centralization, as each shard can be validated with a small group of validators.
It will be fascinating to see how this stage is implemented, as it still needs thorough testing to ensure all validators are randomly selected to avoid centralization and any risk attack.
Phase 2 — State Execution
Shipping in late 2021/early 2022
During Phase 2, the foundational aspects of the previous Eth2 releases will come together and provide functionality for the updated network. A new operational mechanism called Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) will be launched instead of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. eWASM will work much faster.
One of the main issues with the current EVM is that it processes transactions sequentially. With the PoS and Sharding changes, there’s a need to process transactions in parallel, and the current EVM won’t be suitable for this.
The new EVM called stands for Ethereum WebAssembly, an open standard defining a portable binary code format for executable programs. This new architecture for the EVM will allow for much better performance and will make it possible to support smart contracts, accounts, states and much more on the new blockchain. The current status of the eWASM development is at the very early stages, as it is planned to be released in 2021. There’s still a lot of research to do around this phase.
Continued Improvement
Continued Improvement is the code name to encompass all the future changes, fixes and improvements of the previous stages, and whatever comes along. The following technologies to be implemented:
- Cross-shard transactions
- Lightweight clients
- Super-square charting
- Closer ties
See the Eth2 Phase 2 Wiki for current progress, discussions, and definitions regarding this work. The Eth2 Project Management repo holds ongoing notes and meetings.
Rumors
Twitter:
Ethereum looks stronger than ever says Vitalik Buterin:
Reddit discussions:
Any ideas when the eth2 deposit contract will go live?
Updated awesome list: MythX smart contract security tools, howtos, docs and articles.
“Nearly every DeFi smart contract that’s capable of holding your funds has an admin key.”
Ethereum 2.0 Scientific Papers.
Mycelium Wallet to Support ETH.
ELI5 — What is quadratic funding?
Building a retirement fund using Ethereum.
New ERC20-Based Game & Crypto Market Simulator.
Other:
Ethereum’s Growth Problem: Developers are the heart of Ethereum’s Growth. Or are they?
Ethereum Developer Virgil Griffith, Declines to Plead Guilty Against Conspiracy On Him:
- Virgil Griffith, the developer for Ethereum, declined to plead guilty against the conspiracy accuse on him.
- He was accused of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic powers act in the court-martial of North Korea.
- The lawyer of Virgil reported that they are going to present all the proof against the prosecution to the jury.
CFTC Chairman Reiterates Belief That Ether Futures Will Be Launched: Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman Heath Tarbert remarked Thursday that the crypto market could see the launch of Ether (ETH)-based futures contracts.
“We have seen bitcoin futures, both cash-settled as well as physically-delivered. My guess is we are going to see Ether futures as well,” Tarbert told Bloomberg in an interview last Thursday.
The chairman first discussed ether futures in October, when he said he “absolutely” believes the futures tied to the Ethereum-based token could trade in the next six to 12 months.
Tarbert further said in Thursday’s interview that he wants the U.S. “to lead” in the advancement of blockchain technology and digital assets.
“I want to encourage innovation and it’s interesting because commodities are what we regulate, particularly derivatives on commodities,” he remarked.
Swiss Company Gets Green Light to Incorporate for a Blockchain IPO: In what’s being called a first for Switzerland, a company has been allowed to incorporate for an initial public offering (IPO) of tokenized shares on a blockchain (in this case, Ethereum).
In a press release Wednesday, the firm’s adviser, Andriotto Financial Services, said Coldrerio, Switzerland-based OverFuture SA’s articles of incorporation directly reference “the digital nature of the shares (tokens) and the use of the blockchain as the technology to keep the shareholders registry.”
The firm’s IPO prospectus indicates an offering of 8,399,000 “common equity share security tokens” on the ethereum blockchain, with smart contracts provided by with EURO DAXX, a digital assets exchange based in the country’s “Crypto Valley” city of Zug. The offering price will be €1.25 ($1.38) per share.
Upcoming events
Feb 8 — Augur v1 cutoff
Feb 14–16 — ETHDenver
Feb 20 — Decentraland launch
Feb 28-Mar 1 — ETHLondon UK
Mar 3–5 — EthCC (Paris)
Mar 6–8 — EthParis2020
Mar 29-Apr4 — EthLagos
Apr 3–7 — Edcon (Vienna)
April 24–26 — EthTurin
May 8–9 — Ethereal Summit (NYC)
May 15 — EthBarcelona R&D workshop
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Ethereum community continues to grow. There is constant stable growth in Ethereum social media channels these weeks.
Twitter (Ethereum) — Official announcement channel.
Twitter (Ethereum Network) — News from dApps .
Twitter (Ethereum Report) — Retweets from official announcement channel and team members’ pages.
Facebook — Official announcement channel. Recent publications — about Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, conferences.
r/ethereum — plain Ethereum development discussion. News about projects, links to interviews, podcasts, upcoming events.
Keep price discussion and market talk to subreddits such as r/ethfinance or r/ethtrader.
Keep mining discussion to subreddits such as /r/ethermining.
Do you have any question that feels really dumb? Try r/ethereumnoobies
Don’t forget to check out /r/ethdev for the Ethereum developer community.
Surfwith r/ethstaker. The future is at stake!
YouTube (Ethereum) — Last video on July 27th, 2017 (5000–20 000 views per video).
YouTube (Ethereum Foundation) — Videos from conferences, meetups, Ethereum Core Devs Meetings.
Check out Ethereum Community and Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forums.
There is strong stable growth in Ethereum community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Ethereum Reddit subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook likes. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
Main sources
Ethereum official social media
Core Devs Meetings
Eth2.0 Implementers Calls
Week in Ethereum by Evan Van Ness
What’s New in Eth2 by Ben Edgington
Projects build on Ethereum official blogs
Ethereum in news
