Ethereum biweekly vol.52: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, development tools and research articles
1st September — 15th September. Eth2 updates, ESP Q2 allocation update, MetaMask mobile now available, SushiSwap saga, Etherscan releases yield farm list, Muse teams up with Cryptokitties, Gitcoin Grants Round 7 is ready to start, and more!
Greetings, Ethereum family! These weeks have been a kind of wild ride, so let’s dig into what’s new with Paradigm!
According to the recent quick updates from Danny Ryan, Eth2 Medalla testnet is stable but Eth2 needs client diversity and you are incentivized to pick a non-majority client. Learn more on Spadina (deposit and genesis dress rehearsal) testnet which is coming up, progress on the Medalla Data Challenge and more updates in Eth2 quick update №16. Check out stirring and unique update from the PryLabs team as they have made their mainnet release checklist public so that everyone can see what the road to phase 0 mainnet looks like, and find lots of technical updates in the September update from the Nimbus team. Moreover, up until 20th October 2020, the Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring a Medalla data analysis and data visualization blog post challenge. Check out the details below. The Foundation also posted an update on their Q2 allocations as part of their ecosystem support program. Don’t hesitate to read it.
Over the weekend, Chef Nomi, the pseudonymous founder of decentralized exchange protocol, decided to send back the $14 million in ETH that he took from the treasury which just added to the absolute craziness of the last two weeks in Ethereum. The development comes less than a week after Nomi converted some of the SUSHI tokens apportioned to the project’s development team into ETH, sparking furor and triggering a market drop in the process, as well as allegations of an exit scam. That move ultimately kicked off a process that saw control of SushiSwap shifted to the chief executive of FTX. Earlier, more than $800 million in funds was then moved from Uniswap liquidity pools to SushiSwap as part of a migration process.
As for other ecosystem projects’ updates, MetaMask mobile is now available on Android and iOS. The Augur team announced a new proposal to the community to improve Augur v2. New technical developments from 0x Labs and the 0x ecosystem were published. COMP Governance & Distribution update is now out. The Ether, a new website that hopes to act as the premier Ethereum social governance portalis, is now live. Last Friday, one of the most special DAOs of the year launched Aavegotchi DAO. Brave now at 18m+ monthly active users. The new Gitcoin Grants Roadmap outlines how Gitcoin will solve sybil/collusion resistance + increase round sizes in lockstop. Kyber Ecosystem Report №18 is here. Lots of likely useless forks these week, which you can see on Etherscan’s new yield farming page. BarnBridge closes a seed round. StableCredit introduced from yEarn. Rarible releases support for NFT yInsurance. Set v2 rollout and road to Yam v3 explained. Set and DeFi Pulse announced the launch of the DeFi Pulse Index Set on TokenSets. After integrating with OMG Network, stablecoin issuer Tether is now planning to add support for another Layer-2 scaling solution — ZK-Rollups. Muse and Cryptokitties have teamed up to offer two limited-edition Cryptokitties. DEFI-S, an index for exposure to AMMs (BAL), zkRollups (LRC), derivatives (UMA), asset management (MLN), and interoperability (REN, PNT), announced. And much more!
That’s all for today! Have a great week everyone and stay sharp!
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #95 [2020–09–04]
Beiko’s notes, lots of discussion about EIPs below (gas cost increases).
Geth v1.9.21, stabilized RAM use in fast sync, extends call tracing.
OpenEthereum’s vision for Parity client: focus on Eth mainnet. As such, deprecating IPFS/Swarm as well as Kovan testnet and other non-Ethereum chains, backporting features to the v2.5 codebase.
Latest Turbogeth weekly alpha release, RPC Daemon improvements and new RPC calls.
Getting started with Turbogeth on Ubuntu (~700 gigs storage for archive node).
Intro to Nethermind’s discovery protocol.
Tim Beiko is looking to talk to heavy gas users, wallets, exchanges, miners, infra about the proposed eip1559 fee market change:
Alexandria, a sketch of state network over latest version of discovery protocol.
Eth2.0 Call #47 [2020/9/2]
Eth2 Quick Update №15: Updates on Medalla, client diversity, the eth1 <> eth2 merger, testing and audits for phase 0 and more.
Eth2 Quick Update №16: Spadina (deposit and genesis dress rehearsal) testnet coming up, progress on the Medalla Data Challenge and more updates from Danny Ryan.
What’s New in Eth2–5 September 2020: Another great update from Ben covering the beacon chain, phase 1.5 (eth1 <> eth2 merger), research updates and more.
Medalla Data Challenge Announced: Up until 20 October 2020, the Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring a Medalla data analysis and data visualization blog post challenge.
Nimbus Update: September 11th: Lots of technical updates in this update from the Nimbus team.
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #56 — “Road to Mainnet”: Interesting and unique update from the PryLabs team as they have made their mainnet release checklist public so that everyone can see what the road to phase 0 mainnet looks like.
Somer Esat’s guide to staking with Nimbus using Ubuntu.
Images and guide to validating on Raspberry Pi4 with Lighthouse/ Nimbus/ Prysm/ Teku.
An overview of attestation.
Phase1: understanding shards as “data availability layer”.
Fizzy wasm interpreter v0.4.
/r/ethfinance AMA with Sigma Prime.
Layer2
StarkWare’s Cairo STARK prover for generalized computation.
Using that compression, optimistic rollup Fuel benchmarks 2500 tps for token transfers.
A general-purpose L2-friendly ENS standard.
Loopring Swap Announced: Loopring Swap is an interface that sits on top of Loopring’s layer 2 DEX which offers gas-free trading.
Gitcoin Announces Layer 2 Integration: Gitcoin will use the layer 2 scaling technology zkSync for round 7 of grants and use Loopring in round 8.
Development tools
Solidity is finally a first class Github citizen: automatic Solidity detection
Solidity v0.7.1: functions can be defined at file level, copy calldata structs to storage
Truffle v5.1.43, better Solidity v0.7 support
OpenZeppelin Contracts v3.2, adds proxy contracts in Solidity v0.6
Waffle now supports the Jest testing framework
Truffle v5.1.44, debugger prints location on tx failure, node v12 works
EthOver VScode plugin for viewing source code, bytecode, disassembling
Static analyzer Slither v0.6.13, better Solidity v0.6 support, some Yul support
Py-RLP v2 (much faster due to internals in Rust)
Headlong v3.8 — ABI v2/RLP for the JVM
A walkthrough of changes in Solidity v0.7
Sharing common data using libraries
Everything about events and logs in Eth reference guide
Using TheGraph tutorial
A guide for devs new to Ethereum using Python
New maintainer Chainsafe’s roadmap (TypeScript) for web3JS, now with a v1.3 release candidate
rDai’s library to track interest
Using external adapters in Chainlink
Trail of Bits recommended process for developing secure Eth code
Unique sorting in Solidity using value arrays
BLS sigs in Solidity
Governance and new standards proposals
ERC-2309 Has Become an Official Standard: ERC-2309 is a standardized event emitted when creating/transferring one, or many non-fungible tokens using consecutive token identifiers.
ERC2942: EthPM URI Specification
EIP2972: Wrapped Legacy Transactions
EIP2926: Chunk-Based Code Merkleization
EIP2929: Gas cost increases for state access opcodes
EIP2930: Optional access lists
EIP2935: Save historical block hashes in state
EIP2936: EXTCLEAR Opcode For SELFDESTRUCTed contracts
EIP2937: SET_INDESTRUCTIBLE opcode
EIP2938: Account abstraction (Evaluating account abstraction DoS vectors)
EIP suggested process changes: change abandoned to withdrawn and removing implementation as a core requirement
A proposed EIP process overhaul from axic
Martin Swende benchmarks cost of calling precompiles
Follow the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
ESP Q2 Allocation Update: The Ethereum Foundation posted an update on their Q2 allocations as part of their ecosystem support program.
Ethereum Cat Herders Update #29: Medalla data challenge, YOLOv2 proposals, Peep an EIP, EIP-1559, breakout-room, hackathon, Gitcoin grant, and other community updates.
The Ether is Now Live: The Ether is a new website that hopes to act as the premier Ethereum social governance portal.
MyCrypto’s guide to eth2 for casual Ethereum users
EthGas.app, a nice viz of the recent gasprice history as well as current prediction
Chainlink’s fair sequencing service research: let an oracle network order transactions to thwart MEV (miner extractable value, link to Daian, et al paper). Required computation currently unfeasible, working on improvements
Crazy gas fees this week: Matcha has free limit orders during this time of gas spikes. Dharma app has free trades as well
Remco Bloemen’s detailed tour through scaling layer1
Livepeer’s analysis of how to deal with crazy gas prices
Swiss Canton Zug to Accept Taxes in Bitcoin, Ether From Next Year: The canton of Zug, one of the member states of the Swiss Confederation, is set to accept bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) for tax payment from next year. The Zug administration announced the news last Thursday, saying that beginning February 2021, companies and individuals will be able to pay their taxes in the two cryptocurrencies for an amount of up to CHF 100,000 (~$110,000).
“We do not take any risk with this new payment method, as we always receive the amount in Swiss Francs, even if payment is made in Bitcoin or Ether,” said Heinz Tannler, finance director of the Zug administration.
Restoring the Dai peg with the Triforce yETH/MKR/Dai yVault
Simplifying Eth 2.0: Shards as data availability layers
The Core Value Proposition of POAP Explained
Guide to Staking on Ethereum 2.0 (Ubuntu/Medalla/Nimbus)
A Developer’s Guide to Ethereum, Pt. 1
Ocean Datatokens: From Money Legos to Data Legos
Projects updates
0x:
0x Developer and Governance Update — September 2020: New technical developments from 0x Labs and the 0x ecosystem.
Aave:
Introducing GHST: GHST is the eco-governance token of Aavegotchi and it powers every activity in the Aavegotchi universe, from participating in the DAICO, to buying Aavegotchis, and even farming rarity.
These weeks, Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO at Aave featured in the scope of podcasts:
Aragon:
Last Friday, one of the most special DAOs of the year launched Aavegotchi DAO:
Augur:
Augur AMM, L2 & Para Augur: The Augur team announced a new proposal to the community to improve Augur v2.
Despite a successful launch there is a lot left to do for Augur. Liquidity and usage are orders of magnitude lower than what most envision for the protocol for a variety of reasons, the two most notable being:
- Transactions are expensive. During most of Augur V2’s development, gas prices hovered in the 5 gwei range. While the system was tailored around that expectation, it is clearly no longer the case and Augur needs to adapt.
- Demand for DAI trading isn’t as high as expected. In particular there is a competing demand to be able to trade using ETH like in Augur V1, especially in a bull market. This sentiment existed and was vocal during Augur V2 development, so it’s not entirely surprising, but the decision was made to focus on one user experience for launch.
Bancor:
Brave:
An Introduction to Brave’s In-Browser Ads.
Brave at 18m+ monthly active users:
Coinbase:
Six months in: Scaling lessons from my first 180 days
Lessons from training teams to use React Native
Around the Block #8: The promise and potential of synthetic assets
Celo is now available on Coinbase
yearn.finance (YFI) is launching on Coinbase Pro
UMA is now available on Coinbase
Loopring (LRC) is launching on Coinbase Pro
Compound:
COMP Governance & Distribution Update:
Since the distribution of COMP began in June:
- 15 governance proposals were created; 12 were implemented
- A new interest rate model was developed by Dharma, and deployed for the DAI and USDT markets
- The Augur team spearheaded risk management changes for REP, during the upgrade to REPv2
- COMP token-holders voted to change the protocol’s price oracle to the Open Price Feed, an open-source project where a set of reporters sign price data which can be posted on-chain by any Ethereum address — and which doesn’t rely on the team
- The community built an entirely new feature, market-level Borrowing Caps, to limit risk to the protocol
- Autonomous Proposals were created, which allow anybody with 100 COMP to gather support for a Governance proposal
When community governance first went live, the team explained how the total supply of COMP tokens would be allocated. Out of 10,000,000 total COMP, they reserved 775,000 tokens “for the community to advance governance through other means — which will be announced at a future date.”
Here’s how those tokens are being distributed to the community:
- In June, they designated up to 500,000 COMP for distribution through Coinbase Earn. COMP tokens will be available through Coinbase Earn until November 2021, at which point Coinbase will transfer all remaining tokens to the Compound protocol’s Reservoir contract
- A few days ago, the team sent the remaining 275,000 COMP directly to the Reservoir contract. They believe the best way to promote decentralization is to allow the community to allocate these tokens through the Governance process
In total, 5,004,949 COMP will be distributed to the community — just over half of the total supply.
Compound.js, Governance Updates, Autonomous Proposals, OKEx Integration:
- Compound.js in Beta Testing
Compound Labs has launched the beta version of Compound.js, a JavaScript SDK for Ethereum and the Compound Protocol. Rather than programming in Solidity, developers can use Compound.js to interact with Compound’s smart contracts using JavaScript or Node.js.
Key protocol methods like mint, redeem, borrow, and repayBorrow can now be executed using simple 1-liners, making it easier and faster for developers to build applications on top of Compound. In addition to Compound methods, developers can also make generic Ethereum read and write calls to any smart contract.
You can read more about Compound.js in the Medium announcement, view the source code on GitHub and NPM, and review developer documentation on the Compound website.
Governance Updates
Since the last newsletter, Proposal 22 has passed with support from the community:
Proposal 22: New Feature: Borrow Caps
Submitted by community member @blck on behalf of @Arr00, Proposal 22 implements a new Comptroller with a “Borrow Caps” feature. This proposal has been discussed at length in the community forums — see this post for full context.
Borrow caps would enable governance to set limits for total borrowing in each market. For each new borrow request in a market, the new total borrows would be checked against the borrow cap and revert if the new total borrows is too high.
Borrow caps are intended to be used as a safeguard for the protocol, for example to defend against “infini-mint” risk, where a collateral position is inappropriately given a value approaching infinity, and a bad actor tries to borrow all $300 million of Ether currently held in the protocol.
This proposal does not actually implement any borrow caps — usage of the feature must be set through future proposals.
Proposal 21 has passed with 85% support from the community:
Proposal 21: Reduce COMP emissions by 20%
- Status: Executed August 31st, 2020
- Proposer: Gauntlet
- Voting Results: 1,119,629 For and 195,969 Against
- Summary: CompSpeed has been lowered from to 0.176 COMP per Ethereum block. This lower emission rate helps ensure that the protocol has a large reserve of COMP to incentivize positive community and user participation.
Ongoing Discussions
See below for highlights from the Compound governance forum, and join in the discussion:
- “Community Gas Fund” — @arr00 suggests the creation of a community gas fund funded by SAI reserves, in order to subsidize new contract deployments and gas-less governance voting.
- “Lower Proposal Threshold to 100 COMP” — @lay2000lbs suggests lowering the governance proposal threshold from 100k COMP to 100 COMP, which has sparked a vibrant discussion around empowering more users to participate in governance.
- “Financially Incentivizing voting/voting delegation” — @odette introduces the concept of COMP emissions going to governance participants.
- “Update cUSDC interest rate model” — @arr00 suggests updating the cUSDC interest rate model to match the current cDAI and cUSDT interest rate models.
- “YFI Listing Proposal” — @paraficapital suggests adding YFI as a supported market on Compound.
Be sure to either vote on proposals with your COMP, or delegate your COMP voting rights to a representative of your choice.
Introducing Autonomous Proposals
Compound Labs has released a new tool to make it easier for community members to gather votes for a proposed protocol upgrade: Compound Autonomous Proposals (CAPs).
In the current governance system users need 100k delegated COMP to submit a formal proposal into the voting process — which can be a daunting ask for many community members. With this tool users can now create a CAP with only 100 COMP. They can then collect votes to be delegated to the CAP itself, and once the CAP has reached the 100k delegated COMP threshold it can be submitted as a formal proposal into the governance voting process.
Here is the first-ever Autonomous Proposal: Set Pause Guardian to Community Multi-Sig. It needs >100,000 delegated votes to be submitted as a formal proposal. To delegate to it, visit the Vote page of the Compound App, and delegate your votes to the address of the CAP (0x0cde9622b23ababfccef9755b5f7c9e759ef4820).
You can read more about Autonomous Proposals in the announcement on Medium.
OKEx Launches Compound Integration
OKEx, one of the top spot and derivative exchanges by volume, has integrated Compound to allow users to earn interest on all of the assets that the protocol supports (BAT, DAI, ETH, USDC, USDT, WBTC, ZRX). The Earn product features no minimum holding period aside from 1-day redemption processing, and additional COMP bonuses for certain assets.
OKEx has also built a flexible borrowing product that will launch in the near future, marking the first time a major exchange will have integrated Compound’s borrowing functionality.
Decentraland:
Wearables Initiative: Meet the winners #2
Wearables Initiative: Meet the winners #1
Gitcoin:
Gitcoin Grants Roadmap: The new roadmap outlines how Gitcoin will solve sybil/collusion resistance + increase round sizes in lockstop.
Gitcoin Grants Round 7 is ready to start.
Gnosis:
Crypto hedge fund Arca called on Gnosis to return money to investors, arguing the project hasn’t delivered value to token holders.
Golem:
Unraveling Golem’s The Next Milestone, Part III: This new post lays out the elements of New Golem’s reference architecture, and illustrates how they interact to form a working ecosystem.
Golem GitHub Digest #6: SGX proof-of-concept for New Golem: GitHub coverage of the Golem team’s SGX support proof-of-concept and layer 2 payments progress for New Golem.
Alpha Reveal: developer feedback summary: A few weeks ago, the team released the Alpha reveal for The Next Milestone, the very first glimpse into New Golem.
Community Update — CIP August winners and Golem Monsters Art Contest: Community Incentives Program August winners and Golem Monsters Art Contest coverage.
Kyber Network:
- ATH 30-day trading volume: $397M in Aug vs $389M for the entire 2019
- Hosting the 1st KyberDAO Community Call with Ambassador DeFi Dude
- New Smart Reserve Routing system to save gas
- Tokens $REPv2 $KAI $MATIC $pLTC $STMX
Recap: KyberDAO Community Call #1
Genesis Vision (GVT) is now available on Kyber Network
Loom Network:
Maker DAO:
Governance Poll: Domain Team Onboarding, Collateral Onboarding, and more: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents polls to implement Domain Team onboarding, Collateral Onboarding, and more.
Executive Vote: Changes to USDC-A and PAX Parameters, Reduce Box Parameter:The Governance Facilitators and the Maker Foundation Smart Contracts Team have placed an Executive Vote into the voting system which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.
- The USDC-A collateralization ratio will be decreased from 110% to 103%.
- The PAX collateralization ratio will be decreased from 120% to 103%.
- The USDC-A debt ceiling will be increased from 100 million to 200 million.
- The PAX debt ceiling will be increased from 5 million to 30 million.
- The Vat global line parameter will increase from 823 million to 948 million.
- The box parameter will be changed from 30 million to 15 million.
Executive Vote: Increase the USDC-A Debt Ceiling, Whitelist tBTC on the ETHBTC Oracle:
The Governance Facilitators and the Maker Foundation Smart Contracts Team have placed an Executive Vote into the voting system which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.
- The USDC-A Debt Ceiling will be increased from 40 million to 100 million.
- The Vat global line parameter will increase from 763 million to 823 million.
- tBTC will be whitelisted on the ETHBTC Oracle.
Maker Governance Review: August 2020: The Maker Governance Review is a monthly recap of all Governance activity, from Governance blog posts and polling/voting history to Governance Cycle progress.
Meet Sandy Khaund, the Maker Foundation’s Newest Board Member: The Maker Foundation Board has appointed Sandy Khaund, Vice President of Blockchain Products at Ticketmaster, as its third non-executive director.
Executive Vote: Onboard USDT and PAX; Multiple Other Changes: The Governance Facilitators and the Maker Foundation Smart Contracts Team have placed an Executive Vote into the voting system which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.
The Maker Protocol’s Liquidations System Upgrade 1.2 Is Live: The Maker Protocol’s Liquidations System 1.2 upgrade has been released and contains several improvements.
Melon:
Melon Council comments on MIP#7: The Melon Council has been working on assessing the viability of Melon Improvement Proposal #7 (MIP#7) and they shared some initial feedback on the proposal submitted on June 25th, 2020 by Tom Shaughnessy (Delphi Digital), Ceteris Paribus and Chris Manessis (Moonchain Capital).
MetaMask:
MetaMask Mobile Now Available on Android and iOS: Explore dapps, manage your digital assets, and more with MetaMask’s new mobile Ethereum wallet.
Ocean Protocol:
Introducing Blockchain-Powered Minimum Viable Logistics Data Marketplace
Ocean Datatokens: From Money Legos to Data Legos: How DeFi Helps Data, and Data Helps DeFi.
The Web3 Sustainability Loop: A system design for long-term growth of Web3 projects, with application to Ocean Protocol.
Raiden Network:
Fresh Raiden Weekly issue 135 is out. This week featuring:
- WebRTC development updates
- Cross Token Network Payments
- Overview of new projects building on Raiden
Set Protocol:
Introducing the DeFi Pulse Index on TokenSets: Set and DeFi Pulse announced the launch of the DeFi Pulse Index Set on TokenSets. The DeFi Pulse Index (DFP) is built on Set Protocol’s new v2 infrastructure and consists of 10 of the most popular DeFi tokens available on Ethereum. Check it out here.
The Set V2 Rollout Explained: This post explains the 3 phases of the Set v2 rollout — phase 1 brings with it multi-asset support and index Sets, with phase 2 comes yield farming, and with phase 3 comes improvements for Set Managers.
Status:
V1.6 Release — The Start of an Android Referral Program & Bug Fixes: V1.6 Release — The Start of an Android Referral Flow & Bug Fixes. Status v1.6 introduces some bug fixes, and the start of a privacy preserving referral service on Android.
Nimbus update: September 11th: Highlights include: audit fixes, a new sync (syncv2) that greatly speeds up syncing time, a special database pruner to help prune existing databases, multiclient interop scripts that are working as expected with other clients.
EIP-1559 Update & Breakdown: Recent updates, and break down the overall Ethereum fee issues.
Status is the Official Communication Partner of the 7th Annual Hackers Congress Paralelni Polis: Status to be the Official Communications Partner for the 7th Annual Hackers Congress Paralelni Polis — October 2–4.
Stop trusting companies, start trusting code
Spam Mitigation Efforts: Mitigation efforts are in place with mid-term and long term solutions being explored for a spam attack that has happened in some Status public channels. Learn more about the efforts.
Storj:
Using Tardigrade and the Decentralized Cloud to Speed Up Sync Times for GETH
Integrating Decentralized Cloud Storage with Duplicati
Easy Cloud Backups with Duplicati and Storj Labs
Synthetix:
The Synthetix Volume Program Announced: This is a new initiative designed to incentivize native integration of the Synthetix protocol across DeFi platforms and protocols.
Meet the new Synthetix grantsDAO interface: The new UI for the grantsDAO introduced.
The Synthetix Volume Program: The new program incentivising Synth trading volume across DeFi.
Zilliqa:
Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — August 2020
Win BIG with the new Zeeves Loyalty Programme
A Guide to Zilliqa Ledger Nano X app
Other project’s updates:
Pseudonymous SushiSwap Founder Returns 38,000 ETH: Chef Nomi, the pseudonymous founder of decentralized exchange protocol SushiSwap, said last Friday that they returned some 38,000 ETH — worth some $14 million at press time — to the project’s treasury fund.
The development comes less than a week after Nomi converted some of the SUSHI tokens apportioned to the project’s development team into ETH, sparking furor and triggering a market drop in the process, as well as allegations of an exit scam. That move ultimately kicked off a process that saw control of SushiSwap shifted to the chief executive of FTX. Earlier, more than $800 million in funds was then moved from Uniswap liquidity pools to SushiSwap as part of a migration process.
“I would like to apologize to everyone who I have caused troubles to. I was emotional, I was greedy, I was afraid. I made bad controversial decisions under pressure. And it hurt everyone. I failed your expectation and I am sorry,” Nomi wrote in one post.
Lots of likely useless forks this week, which you can see on Etherscan’s new yield farming page.
NewPairs Alpha Launched: NewPairs is an aggregator for new listings with market depth, price, and volume metrics for new liquidity pools from different DEX platforms, sorted by date added.
Muse x Cryptokitties: Muse and Cryptokitties have teamed up to offer two limited-edition Cryptokitties that you can check out here.
Tether Planning zkRollup Support: After integrating with OMG Network, stablecoin issuer Tether is now planning to add support for another Layer-2 scaling solution — ZK-Rollups.
The Road to V3: YAMv2 Interim Governance Summary: This post from the Yam Finance team summarized all of the changes that will be included with Yam v3 (as voted on by YAM token holders).
Yearn.finance Updated: yETH, yWETH vaults added, SNX assets updated and the website footer populated with a bunch of relevant links. Yliquidate.finance was also launched that allows for automated liquidations using flash loans.
Introducing Cozy Finance: Cozy Finance is a company that develops risk-management software for decentralized finance.
Rarible Releases Support for NFT yInsurance: NFT yInsurance is a product that’s part of the yEarn ecosystem and is underwritten by Nexus Mutual cover. You can now trade it on Rarible. Also, Rarible Secures Funding from CoinFund: Rarible, a digital art-focused NFT platform, has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed round that was closed by leading New York-based blockchain investment firm CoinFund.
DHT Token Generation Event Announced: The DHT token generation event will be held on the Mesa platform which 5% of the total DHT supply up for grabs.
New Ethereum Gas Website Released: This new open source Ethereum gas monitoring website was built by Peter Kieltyka and can be found here.
Introducing The Dapp List Token: The Dapp List token is the first governance token to mine reputation on-chain.
DEFI-S Announced: DEFI-S is an index for exposure to AMMs (BAL), zkRollups (LRC), derivatives (UMA), asset management (MLN), and interoperability (REN, PNT).
MCDEX Announces Funding Round: MCDEX has closed the first funding round from several renowned influencers and key stakeholders of the industry, including Arthur ( DeFiance Capital ), Qiao Wang, DeFi Dad, Daryl Lau, Tarun, Robert Leshner and more.
Introducing StableCredit: StableCredit is a new protocol for decentralized lending, stablecoins, and AMMs built as part of the yEarn ecosystem.
UMA — Announcing the Yield Dollar on renBTC: With the launch of uUSDrBTC-OCT on UMA protocol it is now possible to leverage Bitcoin permissionlessly on the Ethereum network. You can mint renBTC from Bitcoin, then lock that renBTC into UMA. With this as collateral, you can mint uUSD, which can be used to purchase more renBTC and create a permissionless leveraged position.
POAP as proof of unique human
LexCorpus a collection of code for registry, organization, tokens, and escrow to help form legal agreements
Swerve, a new fork of Curve, reached almost $500m in total value locked in under a week.
Pine is live on mainnet (formerly UniswapEx) limit orders on Uniswap v1 and v2
Introducing BarnBridge: BarnBridge is a cross platform protocol for tokenizing risk. It is an idea & whitepaper originally conceived in Q2 2019.
Opinion and research articles
Vitalik Buterin: coordination, collusion, and forks
John Adler: Nakamoto Consensus requires social coordination and subjectivity
Understanding Ethereum by studying Geth
Shargri-la: shard simulator with an analysis of eth2 transaction fees
Podcasts
The Bull Case for DeFi | Vance Spencer on Bankless.
Aave to Billions | Stani Kulechov on Bankless.
Why Decentralized Trading Has 10Xed in a Few Months on 5 Unchained.
How SushiSwap Proved That Liquidity Is Not a Moat on Unconfirmed.
Gauntlet: The Simulation Platform for Blockchain Protocols on Epicenter.
Aave Founder Stani Kulechov on Creating the World’s First Decentralized Money Market on Crypto Testers.
Videos
How to Unstick a Pending Transaction on Ethereum:
Codeup38: YEth + StableCredit featuring Andre Cronje:
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io:
Roadmap
Vitaliks Eth2 and beyond flow chart:
An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap.
To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.
Check out the original timeline for the Ethereum development stages and the intermediate hard forks here.
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.
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.
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.
Other
Upcoming events
Sep 17 — Q&A for devs new to Ethereum
Sep30 — Oct25 — EthPlanet hackathon
Oct 1–30 — EthOnline hackathon
Oct 20 — submission deadline for Medalla data challenge
Nov 6–7 — virtual Trufflecon
Nov 16 — MetaMask Provider breaking changes
Check out Ethereum virtual events list.
Social media metrics
There is strong stable growth in the Ethereum community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Ethereum Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com
Ethereum blog — Official announcement channel.
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.
Check out /r/ethdapps.
Surfwith r/ethstaker. The future is at stake!
YouTube (Ethereum Foundation) — Videos from conferences, meetups, Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, Eth2 Implementers calls, etc.
Check out Gitter, Ethereum Community and Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forums.
Twitter (Ethereum Network) — News from dApps .
Twitter (Ethereum Report) — Retweets from the official announcement channel and team members’ pages.
This is not financial advice.
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Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Reddit.
Main sources
Ethereum official media channels
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
