Ethereum biweekly: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, opinion and research articles
7th January — 21st January: Eth2 phase 0 spec released. > 22K validators now rolling on the Eth2 client testnet. Aragon crossed 1,000 orgs on mainnet. OmiseGo Network security audit completed. Aave protocol is live. Decentraland announced its Public Launch. The ZRX Portal introduced. Marketing DAO is open for proposals. Fuel v1 open beta announced. Update on the Vyper Compiler. Justin Drake explains polynomial commitments.
Ethereans, welcome to 2020, the year Ethereum 2.0 delivery begins! Progress does not stand still and these two weeks made a lot of essential news for you as usual!
Last week, Eth 2.0 final spec released. This version of the phase 0 v0.10.0 spec will be the one that undergoes all of the audits and be the base for the multi-client testnet! An audit of the deposit contract is ongoing, in addition to audits regarding the Beacon chain code, with Eth2.0 clients waiting for this version release before planning any multi-client testnet launch. Although the stated changes are in regards to the signature standards, there were some changes to the Beacon chain design itself late last year with that all now finalized. Just how many of these changes have been incorporated by Eth2 clients is unclear with the major ones having to restart their client-specific testnets. Yet this release is a crucial step towards the full launch, with coders and everyone else now awaiting the audit reports which might require some further changes.
During these two weeks, Eth2 teams were working assiduously. Eth2 Implementers call took place. Prysm Testnet v0.9.3 released. This version of the testnet comes with a mainnet parameter configuration which means it’s now capable of handling the load of the Eth2 mainnet. They’re also hiring a full-time software engineer to work on Eth2. Sigma Prime is initiating a Request for Proposal (RfP) for an open source, minimal User Interface which can be connected to the validator client and beacon node components of the Lighthouse client. Danny Ryan has posted another eth quick update going over the recent v0.10.0 phase 0 spec release, the Sigma Prime teams hard work building the Lighthouse client, the relaunch of the public Prysm testnet and giving an overview of a new proposal to expedite the merging of Eth1 and Eth2.
The Ethereum ecosystem moves fast! These weeks, many updates on projects build on Ethereum appeared: The ZRX Portal, a web interface where ZRX holders can delegate their tokens to staking pools set up by market makers, was introduced. Geth v1.9.10 (Rojo Loco) released major improvements include bumping the transaction propagation limit to 64kb, integrates DNS discovery, and includes a host of performance improvements and bug fixes. Aragon crossed 1,000 organizations on mainnet. ANJ pre-activation is now live ahead of the full Aragon Court launch! Also, Aragon Chain’s specification has just been published by ChainSafe. Check out their announcement post for the full details! More than 100 jurors have pre-activated for Aragon Court. Quantstamp has completed the security audit of the OMG Network’s More Viable Plasma (More VP). Flashloans within one transaction using Aave Protocol are live on mainnet. Orchid’s decentralized VPN launched. Decentraland announced its Public Launch on February 20th, 2020. Join the celebrations with a massive Treasure Hunt. Check the blog for full details. The Dether App referral program is officially live. MEW version 5.2.9, released, features multiple fixes and updates, including a full Russian language localization, the first of a few languages the team has planned. Assemble Beta Introduced — the latest product from The Status Network. Assemble is a community, owned peer-to-peer crowdfunding tool aimed at supporting web3 projects. Learn more about Assemble and how you can support projects or get your work funded. AZTEC completed ignition ceremony. Augur weekly update was published. Sponsored images in Brave was introduced. 50 million DAI locked in DeFi. The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote proposal into the voting system to raise the Sai Stability Fee from 5% to 9%. Metamask’s bounty for a generalized metatransaction standard announced. The Coinbase Pro mobile app is now available for Android. New Golem release has Concent on mainnet, new usage marketplace, and Task API on testnet. Livepeer’s Streamflow protocol update is complete and a new tokenholder site is launched. Marketing DAO is now open for proposals. The EEA announced that it has partnered with Whiteblock to provide a testing environment for the EEA global membership base. rTrees announced, a virtuous donation dapp powered by DeFi that plants real trees using only the interest earned on the DAI in your wallet. Fuel is a highly-optimized version of Minimal Viable Merged Consensus (aka Optimistic Rollup) that is more responsive and cheaper than the original design, while retaining identical security guarantees, ships first public testnet. The Fuel v0 testnets will be a series of short-lived testnets as the team iteratively improves performance and stability and adds new features. Plasma Group is now Optimism, a public benefit corporation dedicated to scaling Ethereum in a way that enshrines fair access to public goods. Last week, Plasma Group researchers raised $3.5M for Optimistic Rollup research and development. Gitcoin Grants Round 4 has seen 4860 contributions from 1059 unique community members, worth $98275 in just over 12 days. Kyber Ecosystem Report was published. The Ocean Protocol team posted a yearly recap. Raiden Pulse #9 is out. Molecule is live on mainnet with a bonding curve for a clinical trial for Psilocybin microdoses. Spencer Dinwiddie tokenizes his NBA contract on Ethereum and much more!
A lot of research articles were published. For those interested in keeping tabs on the latest in stateless Ethereum research, a condensed summary of everything discussed on the January call is now out. Vitalik Buterin posted “A strange kind of pairwise-bounded quadratic funding” and “With fraud-proof-free data availability proofs, we can have scalable data chains without committe” pieces on ethresear.ch. Karl Floersch wrote on “MEV Auction: Auctioning transaction ordering rights as a solution to Miner Extractable Value”. Ryuya Nakamura published proposal to modify Casper FFG (used in Eth2) to support subjective finality i.e. allow clients to finalize blocks with their local assumptions. Carl Beekhuizen wrote on “Validated, staking on Eth2: #1 — Incentives”. The author discussed Eth2’s design philosophy last time, this article’s focus is on Eth2’s incentives through the lens of that philosophy. More specifically, he looks at the incentives effecting Eth2 and how they are realised in the form of rewards, penalties, and slashings. Carl then walks through how and why validators are incentivised to remain online, why you won’t be slashed for going offline, and more. “Evaluating Staking Services” by Jim McDonald is now out. Will Villanueva wrote about the options for Eth1 to Eth2 bridges and phase1 fee market. Justin Drake explained polynomial commitments. Gavin Andresen loves Tornado.Cash and published some thoughts on making a wallet on top of Tornado Cash. In last week’s Zero Knowledge episode, the hosts chat with the Roman Storm and Roman Semanov from Tornado.cash all about mixers. They explore what they are used for and how they work, how Zero Knowledge can be incorporated to provide more privacy, what the challenges are and what the future holds for the Tornado.Cash project. Moreover, they learn more about Plonk with Ariel Gabizon and Zac Williamson from Aztec. Paul Hauner of Sigma Prime joined the Into the Ether podcast to talk about Eth2. Leighton Cusack, CEO and cofounder of PoolTogether, described how the Ethereum-based no-loss lottery applies the psychology of winning a prize to the action of saving money, to get more people to save, why this is better than a typical lottery, and how blockchain technology makes it even better than a typical no-loss lottery on Unchained podcast. Ameen Soleimani and Gabriel Shapiro discussed venture DAO on Wizard of Dapps.
And worth mention, the security audit for the Python-based Vyper compiler was completed and returned two key results: there are multiple serious bugs in the Vyper compiler and the codebase has a high level of technical debt which will make addressing these issues complex. In addition, being able to write smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain using Solidity remains one of the most sought after skills by companies going into 2020, according to a recent blog post by employment-oriented service company, LinkedIn. In its report, LinkedIn disclosed a growing need for developers who can use Solidity, an object-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts as popularized by the Ethereum network.
More to follow! Have a great week everyone and stay sharp!
Development
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #78 [2020–1–10]
- EIP-2456
- EIP-1962
- EIP-2348
4. EIPIP (EIP Improvement Proposal) Meeting
5. Review previous decisions made and action items
Slockit released a stable version of their Incubed stateless ultralight client, aimed at IoT devices. 150kb to verify transactions or 500kb including EVM. incentive layer coming soon.
StarkWare mainnet tests find that a much bigger block size does not affect uncle rate and argues that a further decrease in gas for transaction data would be warranted.
Guide to running Geth/Parity node or eth2 Prysm/Lighthouse testnet on Raspberry Pi4.
Nethermind v1.4.8.
The 1.x Files: January call digest
This is a digest of the topics discussed in the recurring Eth1.x research call, and doesn’t represent finalized plans or commitments to network upgrades.
The main topics of this call were:
- Rough data quantifying advantages of switching to a binary trie structure
- Transition strategies and potential challenges for a switch to binary tries
- “Merklizing” contract code for witnesses, and implications for gas scheduling/metering
- Chain pruning and historical chain/state data — network implications and approaches to distribution.
Eth2.0 Call #31 [2020/1/9]
- Testing and Release Updates
- Client Updates
- Research Updates
- Networking
- Spec discussion
- Open Discussion/Closing Remarks
Ethereum 2.0 Final Spec Released:
Danny Ryan, the Ethereum 2.0 coordinator, has announced the final release of the ethereum 2.0 spec version 0.1.
“Major release centered on the integration of the IETF BLS standards into the eth2 spec…
This release also contains a deep and much-needed reorganization of files/directories… The rest of the changes are some minor optimizations and cleanups. Most of these are generally backward compatible, and all should be very straight forward to integrate.
v0.10.0 marks a stable target for Phase 0 for multi-client testnets and security reviews. We expect some revisions in February/March pending the results from each.”
Ben Edgington of PegaSys, one of the ethereum 2.0 clients, clarified this version release is “intended to be another frozen release, as the basis for both testnets and an audit.”
An audit of the deposit contract is ongoing, in addition to audits regarding the Beacon chain code, with eth2.0 clients waiting for this version release before planning any multi-client testnet launch.
Although the stated changes are in regards to the signature standards, there were some changes to the Beacon chain design itself late last year with that all now finalized.
Just how many of these changes have been incorporated by eth 2.0 clients is unclear with the major ones having to restart their client-specific testnets.
Yet this release is a crucial step towards the full launch, with coders and everyone else now awaiting the audit reports which might require some further changes.
“There’s a 13,000 long queue of validators waiting to enter,” the Prysm testnet says, Edgington. “New validators are onboarded at a maximum rate of 4 per epoch at the start, so that’s two weeks of the backlog by my calculations!”
eth2 quick update no. 7
Posted by Danny Ryan on January 16th, 2020
- Release of v0.10.0 spec as stable target for multi-client testnets and security reviews
- @paulhauner and @sigp_io team hard at work building Lighthouse
- Relaunch of Prysm testnet, now with aggregators and mainnet configuration
- A new proposal for an expedited merging of eth1+eth2 (aka Phase 1.5)
Prysm Testnet v0.9.3 Release Info: This version of the testnet comes with a mainnet parameter configuration which means it’s now capable of handling the load of the eth2 mainnet.
Installing and Running an Ethereum 2 Prysm Validator on the Testnet: A guide to staking on Prysmatic’s testnet.
Lodestar Grants Update: Lodestar update on light clients and dev tooling.
Lighthouse client update: 40x speedup in fork choice, 4x database speedup, faster BLS: Sigma Prime is initiating a Request for Proposal (RfP) for an an open source, minimal User Interface which can be connected to the validator client and beacon node components of the Lighthouse client.
How to build the Nimbus client on Android.
Development tools
Update on the Vyper Compiler:
The idea behind the Vyper Project was to develop something that was designed at the language level to naturally exhibit a high degree of safety. The project was originally authored by Vitalik as a proof-of-concept replacement for Serpent, its predecessor, but shortly after its creation Vyper found itself without a dedicated maintainer. Luckily, there were enthusiastic community members that took up the torch and continued development of the project, and we (the EF Python Team) became re-involved in the project for some time earlier this year.
This fall, a preliminary security audit was performed by the Consensys Diligence team on the Python-based Vyper compiler. You can read the results for yourself here.
The Ethereum team encourages you to read the report, however, there are two main take-aways.
- There are multiple serious bugs in the Vyper compiler.
- The codebase has a high level of technical debt which will make addressing these issues complex.
Since the existing Python-based Vyper implementation is not yet production ready, it has been moved out of the ethereum github organization into its own organization: vyperlang. The existing maintainers are planning to address the issues independently once again, but we will continue to follow the project closely here: > https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
Meanwhile, the team continues work on a Rust-based compiler in tandem. More on that below, but first, here’s a bit more on how they got to where they are today.
Over the course of this year the team worked with the project maintainers to focus on improving the code quality and architecture of the project. After a few months of work they were skeptical that the python codebase was likely to deliver on the idea that Vyper promised. The codebase contained a significant amount of technical and architectural debt, and from the perspective it didn’t seem like the existing maintainers were focused on fixing this.
Exploring Rust
Earlier this year in August, the team explored producing a version of the Vyper compiler built on fundamentally different architecture. The goal was to write a compiler in Rust that leverages the existing work by the Solidity team and uses the YUL intermediate representation to allow them to target EVM or EWASM during compilation. A Rust based compiler can be easily compiled to WASM, making the compiler much more portable than one based in Python. By building on top of YUL they would get the EVM and EWASM compilation for free, only requiring the compiler to handle the transformation from a Vyper AST to YUL. They were sufficiently far along with their Rust based Vyper compiler when the Python Vyper audit was released, and were confident in the directionl. The audit confirmed many concerns around the python codebase and helped to validate the direction they’ve taken.
The work continues
That said, the maintainers of the Python Vyper codebase do intend to continue with the project. While the team doesn’t plan to have continued involvement in the python codebase, they wish them luck but also wanted to make note of recent events to avoid inadvertently signalling that the project was safe to use.
So at present there are currently two “Vyper” compilers: The EF-supported work towards building a compiler written in Rust to deliver on the original idea of Vyper, and the Python effort which will work independently toward the same goals in the Python codebase.
Truffle v5.1.9, now Istanbul compatible.
Truffle’s experimental console.log
SolUI: generate IPFS UIs for your Solidity code. akin to oneclickdapp.com
BokkyPooBah’s Red-Black binary search tree library and DateTime library updated to Solidity v0.6
Overhauled OpenZeppelin docs.
Exploring Commit-Reveal Schemes on Ethereum.
Verifying smart contract security with Remix (Part 1): Basic bug detection and Solidity assertions.
Training materials for Slither, Echidna, and Manticore from Trail of Bits.
Soon you’ll need to pay for EthGasStation’s API.
PSA for Developers: Implementation of API Key requirements starting from February 15th, 2020 onwards.
A look at vulnerabilities of deployed code over time.
A beginner’s guide to the K framework.
Vulnerability: hash collisions with multiple variable length arguments.
Verifying wasm transactions (and part2).
Austin Griffith’s eth.build metatransactions:
Build your own customized Burner Wallet.
Abridged v2 aiming to make it easy to onboard new users of web2 networks.
Ethcode v0.9 VSCode extension.
Governance and new standards proposals
EIP1559 implementation discussion.
EIP2456: Time based upgrades.
EIP2464: eth/65 transaction annoucements and retrievals.
ERC2462: interface standard for EVM networks.
ERC2470: Singleton Factory.
bZxDAO: proposed 3 branch structure to decentralize bZx.
Announcing The Generalized MetaTransaction Contest: Metamask’s bounty for a generalized metatransaction standard.
Follow the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
LinkedIn: Blockchain is the #1 Most in Demand Skill Right Now.
Gavin Andresen loves Tornado.Cash and published some thoughts on making a wallet on top of Tornado Cash.
MarketingDAO is open for proposals.
Almonit.eth.link launches, a search engine for ENS + IPFS dweb.
Build token pop-up economies with the BurnerFactory.
RicMoo: SQRLing mnemonic phrases.
Avado’s RYO node — nodes opt-in and let users access them via load balancer:
Aztec’s BN-254 trusted setup ceremony post-mortem. Confidential transactions launching this month.
What the EEA TestNet Launch Means for Blockchain and Enterprise: Discussing enterprise use cases for the EEA TestNet with leading blockchain experts.
Plugin APIs in Hyperledger Besu.
Privacy and blockchains primer aimed at enterprise.
A massive list of corporations building on Ethereum.
How Is Blockchain Verifiable by the Public and yet Anonymous?: This article discusses the difference between the levels of anonymity on private blockchains and public blockchains
Decentralized Exchanges in 2019 — A Recap by Numbers.
A Beginner’s Guide to Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
Ethereum: The Money-Game Landscape.
3 DeFi DApps Starting 2020 Off Strong.
Preventing Corruption in Financial Markets: Monica Singer’s Story: Monica shares her journey from CEO of Strate, a leading Central Securities Depository, to joining ConsenSys to champion the adoption of blockchain technology in Africa.
Progressive Decentralization: A Playbook for Building Crypto Applications.
Ethereum’s scalability has potential to improve 2,000x due to Istanbul update.
Ernst & Young Doubles Down On Its Bet With Ethereum.
Build your own customized Burner Wallet.
Jonny Rhea Launches Ethsear.ch: Ethsear.ch is an Ethereum specific search with the goals of making Ethereum content more accessible and allowing for autonomous control/maintenance.
The Trillion Dollar Case for ETH.
Composability between Ethereum Layer 1 and 2.
What is Ethereum’s Ice Age? The Difficulty Bomb Explained.
5 Ethereum DeFi Apps Revolutionizing Saving.
Ethereum Meta Transactions: Our Take.
Projects updates
0x:
The ZRX Portal, a web interface where ZRX holders can delegate their tokens to staking pools set up by market makers, was introduced.
Over 6 million ZRX has already been staked!
ANJ pre-activation is now live ahead of the full Aragon Court launch! More than 100 jurors have pre-activated for Aragon Court
Aragon Chain Spec Goes Public: Aragon Chain’s specification has just been published by ChainSafe.
Last week, ChainSafe team announced that they have published the specification for Aragon Chain. Aragon Chain is a new chain optimized for Aragon usage. Aragon Chain will be built by implementing existing Aragon smart contracts and associated components on Ethermint, which was also built by ChainSafe. The project will also include a bridge to Ethereum to enable data and value transfer between Aragon Chain and Aragon on Ethereum. Data passed across the bridge will be able to trigger actions on Aragon Chain through an Aragon Agent on Ethereum. It is great to see an open source project like this continue to be driven forward with community approval and input. From the beginning of the project, the Aragon community has been heavily involved and an important part of the process.
The process began when Aragon One commissioned ChainSafe to write a feasibility report about the various options for building Aragon Chain. The feasibility report was delivered to Aragon One on October 9th. The Aragon One team performed a careful review of all the options presented and concluded that using Ethermint would be the best option to implement Aragon Chain. The full rationale for this decision is best explained in this article.
Augur Weekly — 4 Ways to Trade the Democratic Nomination Race: A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.
Election Betting Roundup:
Election season is upon us, and political prediction markets are heating up. Besides the popularity of these markets increasing in an election year, the number of venues to trade them (PredictIt, Betfair, Augur v2 in Q1) is increasing as well.
With the incumbent, President Trump, hailing from the GOP, this early election season brings the Democratic nomination into focus. There are a number of ways to get exposure to the overall race or specific pieces of it.
Around the Ecosystem:
- 20 Augur Predictions for 2020. Ben Davidow, friend of the Forecast Foundation and writer of The Augur Edge, gives his list of predictions for Augur in 2020. Ben has his finger on the pulse and provides some unique insights into his thought process behind how Augur might become adopted.
- InTrade, the first prediction market with 50m+ users and $200m+ wagers. Common Market details the rise and fall of Intrade, a general-purpose prediction market platform that existed between 1999–2012; as well as today’s heir apparent.
- Introducing Harber.io- combining prediction markets and NFTs for the first time. Andrew, ‘McPlums,’ Stanger announced his project, Harber.io, utilizing Augur contracts. In his own words:
Harber.io is a unique gambling platform, built on top of Augur. There is one NFT per team/outcome. To rent a token, users set a daily rental price and deposit DAI to fund the rent. Token ownership changes via modified Harberger tax rules.
- Check out the video on how to use Harbor.io below:
Introducing Sponsored Images in Brave.
The ICO’s failure to act on RTB, the largest data breach ever recorded in the UK.
The Coinbase Pro mobile app is now available for Android.
How MakerDAO doubled its users in a single weekend using Coinbase Earn.
Capture the Coin — Cryptography Category Solutions.
Cosmos (ATOM) is now available on Coinbase.
Decentraland Public Launch. Welcome to the World. Gates open 20.02.20
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.
Share the love: the new Dether referral program is here! Share the Dether app with others and get rewards, for you and for them.
The District Weekly — January 18th: News and updates from the district0x Network.
The District Weekly — January 11th.
district0x Dev Update — January 7th, 2020: Development progress and product changes from district0x.
Taking Back the Web with Embark.
Exploring Gitcoin Grants for Open Source Funding.
Overall in 2019, Gnosis received 40 project applications to the Gnosis Ecosystem Fund. In total, they funded 12 projects. Here’s a breakdown of the projects by Gnosis product category:
Brass Golem Beta 0.22.0: The release that the team is hereby launching, the brand new Brass Golem Beta 0.22.0 brings along many goodies that they have been preparing on the back burners for a long time.
Kyber Ecosystem Report #10: In 2019 Kyber grew, and grew, and grew. Kyber increased its volumes, vastly expanded the ecosystem, and pumped liquidity far and wide across the Ethereum landscape. In 2020 the team is aiming even higher with the introduction of Katalyst, their major protocol upgrade that includes an exciting new DAO governance mechanism running on a completely new token model.
A Look Back at 2019 — Loom Network Is Live, Audited, Battle-Tested, and Pulling Way Ahead.
More than 375M+ LOOM tokens have now been staked on Basechain — around 50% of the circulating supply. Stake your LOOM here and enjoy compound rewards: https://wallet.loomx.io
Executive Vote: Activate Sai Stability Fee Adjustment.
MakerDAO Pitches DeFi to the Masses at CES 2020.
Axie and MakerDAO Team Up: Axie is hosting a tournament titled ‘The Infinity Cup’ that has a prize pool of 2100 DAI & 10,000 LUNA. The tournament will be livestreamed and hosted by Axie’s COO and Growth Lead.
Announcing The Generalized MetaTransaction Contest. MetaMask has posted a bounty that will pay out 20 ETH to anyone who implements a generalized MetaTransaction standard that could be added to any smart contract to allow MetaTransactions from any externally-owned (key-based) account.
The Essential Wallet Guide, Part 5: Smart Contract Wallets. Smart contracts are a truly versatile tool that can be used to manage diverse tasks on the Ethereum blockchain — even private key management and wallet recovery. Read about Smart Contract Wallet technology in the final part of our Essential Wallet Guide.
MEW in Your Language. MEW version 5.2.9, released, features multiple fixes and updates, including a full Russian language localization, the first of a few languages the team has planned.
On Unlocking the Value of Data. A short essay by Trent McConaghy.
2019 — The Year in Review: Milestones hit in 2019 and what’s coming in 2020.
Quantstamp completes OMG Network security audit. Quantstamp has completed the security audit of the OMG Network’s More Viable Plasma (More VP). This is the second time Quantstamp has audited OmiseGo: their first audit with Quantstamp took place in Nov 2018 in which their security engineers reviewed More VP’s predecessor, Minimum Viable Plasma.
How does Substrate handle storage? Watch Shawn Tabrizi takes a deep dive into storage on Substrate. From #Sub0.1, the Substrate developer conference:
Raiden Pulse #9: News from November and December:
Similar to the preceding two months, the last two months have mainly been used for testing as well as finding and fixing bugs. The goal of this is to get Raiden into a state where it is stable and robust enough to make it into a new release candidate and ultimately become the Alderaan milestone.
Alderaan will be the first integrated mainnet release coming with a service layer (monitoring and pathfinding service) together with new features (channel withdraw, source routing, mediation fees).
General Updates:
- Raiden Client: Since the team still in an intensive bug fixing and testing mode, they do not recommend using the latest release candidate v0.200.0-rc2 “Narcoleptic Neo”. This release has some known bugs, but stay tuned for the next testnet release, which they expect to be released soon and will fix these issues. All releases can be found on the Raiden client release page. For any technical inquiry please do not hesitate to contact the development team via our Gitter chat room.
- Raiden Light Client: In response to the Raiden Client release candidate “Narcoleptic Neo”, the light client team released the first version of the light client that is compatible with the Alderaan smart contracts. Furthermore the light client now integrates with the path finding services and it also supports mediation fees. Lastly, as a huge UX improvement, Derived Subkey support has been added to the light client. This means that users don’t have to sign each individual message in the light client anymore.
- Raiden Trust: The Raiden Trust has finished reviewing its first batch of applications and will shortly release communications about this. However, you can, at any time, apply for a Raiden Trust grant! Find all details about grant applications and guidelines here.
- Raiden WebUI: There have been multiple small new releases of the WebUI. Most of the releases have mainly been fixing smaller cosmetic bugs. You can see a list of all releases here. v0.11.0 is the most significant of the new releases and it adds a bunch of nice UI improvements.
- Weekly development updates: u/BOR4 and u/Mat7ias spent the last weekly update of the year making a summary of what happened in the Raiden Project in 2019. You can take a look at it here. As always, if you are interested in more detailed development updates, make sure to follow the weekly updates on development progress and other activities posted on Reddit by u/BOR4 or u/Mat7ias with the [GIT] label.
Introducing Assemble Beta — Decentralized, Open, Crowdfunding. Assemble Beta is the latest product from The Status Network. Assemble is a community, owned peer-to-peer crowdfunding tool aimed at supporting web3 projects. Learn more about Assemble and how you can support projects or get your work funded.
Zerion & an Oasis of DeFi Tools in Dap.ps
Development Update 34 from Storj Labs.
How we grew Streamr’s ecosystem in 2019. What is the Streamr ecosystem? How has it grown in the past year? And what will shape it in 2020 and beyond? Head of Developer Relations, Weilei reflects on the foundations laid for adoption.
Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — December 2019.
Other project’s updates:
Livepeer’s Streamflow Protocol Update Is Complete and a New Tokenholder Site is Launched: Livepeer upgrades to Streamflow release — GPU miners can transcode video with negligible loss of hashpower so video transcoding gets cheaper.
Molecule is live on mainnet with a bonding curve for a clinical trial for Psilocybin microdoses:
Aave Protocol Now Live: Aave protocol has launched on the Ethereum mainnet and users can now take out flash loans using the platform. Flash loans allow users to borrow crypto instantly with no collateral requirement.
Aztec Completes Ignition: AZTEC has completed Ignition, the biggest MPC ceremony in history by number of participants. This means that confidential transactions on Ethereum will be launching this month!
Plasma Group’s Next Steps: In this post, the Plasma Group’s members reflect on what they’ve accomplished over the last year of working together and discuss how the group will be evolving going forward.
Fuel Labs Releases Testnet: The first public testnet for Fuel, the “most efficient, scalable, and secure optimistic rollup chain on Ethereum” is now live and their code has been open-sourced.
Namestack Launched: Namestack is a service to help users acquire and use blockchain names. The first product they’ve released enables users to buy and configure ENS domains in one single click.
3Box Hub Now Supports ENS: 3Box has updated their UI and integrated the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) so users can now view ENS names right alongside 3Box profiles inside the Hub app.
Introducing ChainLink Pooling Zaps: You can now use zaps to retain 100% LINK exposure while still generating ETH <> LINK pool trading fees on Uniswap.
The Ultimate Guide to Uniswap.
Set Community Update #6 — December 2019.
Loopring Testing Phase 1: Data Recap.
Ethereum Marketing DAO Is Now Open for Proposals.
Liquidators: the secret whales helping DeFi function. Good walkthrough of DeFi network keepers.
Curve: a uniswap-like exchange for stablecoins, currently USDC<>DAI.
rTrees. rTrees works by activating otherwise idle money — the USD-pegged stablecoin DAI — to generate interest from liquid lending pools, and then donating the accrued interest to Trees for the Future, who use it to plant real trees.
Orchid’s decentralized VPN launches.
OpenZeppelin is looking for a Security Researcher to join our amazing team!
StarkEx says they can do 9000 trades per second at 75 gas per trade with offchain data, with the limiting factor being the prover, not onchain throughput.
Introducing the bZxDAO: bZx announced this week that they are transitioning to a DAO governance model. In this post, they explain why and how they’re going to be going about this process.
Artemis is now Teku: The Artemis Ethereum client has been renamed to Teku. We’ve updated the eth2 teams page on EthHub to reflect this change.
Opinion and research articles
A strange kind of pairwise-bounded quadratic funding by Vitalik Buterin.
With fraud-proof-free data availability proofs, we can have scalable data chains without committe: Vitalik on sharding.
MEV Auction: Auctioning transaction ordering rights as a solution to Miner Extractable Value by Karl Floersch.
Phase 1 Fee Market and Eth1 — Eth2 Bridging by Will Villanueva: Options for eth1 to eth2 bridges and phase1 fee market.
State Provider Models in Ethereum 2.0 by Ansgar Dietrichs.
Visualizing Efficient Merkle Trees for Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
A Cambrian Explosion of Crypto Proofs.
Optimistic Game Semantics. Vision for a Unified Layer 2 by Ben Jones, Karl Floersch.
Beacon Runner: A BeaconState cadCAD wrap: Simulation environment for eth2 economics.
Podcasts and videos
Paul Hauner: Ethereum 2.0 is on the Horizon on Into the Ether: Paul Hauner of Sigma Prime joins the podcast to talk about Ethereum 2.0. Sigma Prime is building the Lighthouse client which is an eth2 client built in Rust. They spend most of the time focused on phase 0 and what is involved with the initial release. Paul talks about the testnet they have been running with 16,000 validators and shares good info on the hardware requirements for stakers. He gives an update on what is left before launch and they talk about what the user experience will be like for those wanting to stake ETH.
Hasu: Discussing Ethereum and Bitcoin’s Differences: Hasu, an independent cryptocurrency researcher, joins the podcast to discuss Bitcoin and Ethereum. Hasu has very good insights into the crypto community and he shares those on this episode. They discuss the current state of both the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities and where their current narrative journeys have landed them. They also dive deep into the topics of monetary policy, PoW vs PoS, development funds and much more. This is a great conversion about the differences in the two communities and why it’s OK for there to be options out there.
Mixers with Tornado.cash on Zero Knowledge: In last week’s episode, the hosts chat with the Roman Storm and Roman Semanov from Tornado.cash all about mixers. They explore what they are used for and how they work, how Zero Knowledge can be incorporated to provide more privacy, what the challenges are and what the future holds for the Tornado.Cash project.
Dive into Plonk!: The hosts learn more about Plonk with Ariel Gabizon and Zac Williamson from Aztec. PLONK is a recent highly efficient, universal SNARK construction. They explore what distinguishes Plonk from some other other new constructions including their focus on Lagrange-bases to deconstruct complex problem statements into simple polynomial identities.
Dragonfly Capital on Why Ethereum Is So Far in the Lead on Unchained: Alex Pack, founding partner of Dragonfly Capital, and Haseeb Qureshi, Dragonfly managing partner, talk about why Dragonfly has a global focus, how they choose investments, and why they try to be as agnostic as possible about asset type. They also discuss why most protocols, including Bitcoin, still look like venture bets, why, at the moment, Bitcoin looks like a better investment than anything built on top of Bitcoin, and why Lightning hasn’t yet taken off and why they think it won’t. They also cover what the future holds for Bitcoin. They explain what they think will happen in the smart contract platform race, why Ethereum is so far in the lead and whether anything will become an Ethereum killer. They also cover Libra, and how Libra affects their investments in stablecoins, why Xi Jinping’s “blockchain, not crypto” emphasis is a dead end, whether blockchain-based identity is an investable area, what they think the killer app is or will be and their predictions for 2020. Also, Haseeb, a former professional poker player, describes how poker playing is similar to crypto trading.
PoolTogether: Save Money, With a Chance to Win on Unconfirmed: Leighton Cusack, CEO and cofounder of PoolTogether, describes how the Ethereum-based no-loss lottery applies the psychology of winning a prize to the action of saving money, to get more people to save, why this is better than a typical lottery, and how blockchain technology makes it even better than a typical no-loss lottery. He also talks about how PoolTogether works, why it currently uses Dai and Compound and whether it would use other stablecoins and interest-bearing platforms. They also discuss who is using it, why many non-crypto people are interested, and how they plan to reach more of their target audience.
Building a Crypto Civilization with Balaji Srinivasan on Unqualified Opinions: On the 11th anniversary of Bitcoin’s genesis block, former Coinbase CTO Balajis Srinivasan launched Nakamoto.com to much fanfare, as well as controversy surrounding the site’s choice of name. On the latest episode of Unqualified Opinions, Balaji and Ryan discuss the intent behind the site, which at present boasts curated insights from 60 high-profile contributors, including Zooko, Naval, Vitalik. Balaji shares his concerns over the uncomfortable places modern technology and social media are taking society as well as his philosophy for building a future that he’d want to live in. The conversation covers the evolution of crypto discourse online and how Nakamoto.com aims to create a more civil place for discussion with Bitcoin as its foundation.
Episode 29: Venture DAO with Ameen Soleimani and Gabriel Shapiro on Wizard of Dapps.
- Reflections on Moloch DAO and the next steps for iteration
- Design philosophies of Venture DAO (legal and engineering)
- Moloch’s natural legal innovation with minority protection
The LAO — Moloch v2 Smart Contract Audit Kickoff Call
Q&A with Marley Gray about the EEA’s Token Taxonomy Initiative.
Check out Devcon5 videos!
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io (January 21st, 2020):
Validated, staking on eth2: #1 — Incentives
The authors discussed eth2’s design philosophy last time, this article’s focus is on eth2’s incentives through the lens of that philosophy. More specifically, they look at the incentives effecting eth2 and how they are realised in the form of rewards, penalties, and slashings.
They then walk through how and why validators are incentivised to remain online, why you won’t be slashed for going offline, and more.
If not for being offline, when do slashings occur?
Slashing has two purposes: (1) to make it prohibitively expensive to attack eth2, and (2) to stop validators from being lazy by checking that they actually perform their duties. Slashing a validator is to destroy (a portion of) the validator’s stake if they act in a provably destructive manner. The two major ways a validator can behave slashably maliciously within eth2 phase 0 are double voting and surround voting (read the original paper for more on how Casper FFG works in detail):
Double voting is when a validator votes for two different blocks during the same epoch, which means they are signalling support for two different versions of reality. The simplest example of why this is forbidden is a validator sending transaction $a$ in block $A$ and $b$ in block $B$ where $a$ and $b$ spend the same ETH. This is the Proof of Stake version of the classic double-spend attack.
Slashing of surround votes also prevents two versions of the chain from becoming finalised by punishing validators who create votes which present multiple different versions of reality which they claim to be true at the same time. More specifically, attestations (votes for blocks) are surround votes when a validator attests to one version of reality and later attests to another version, but in a way that doesn’t make clear that they no longer believe in the first.
Double and surround voting are the only way validators can be slashed within phase 0, but additional rules are added in later phases to ensure that validators actually store and make available the shard data that they sign (which prevents validators from being lazy or from withholding information).
A validator that correctly follows the protocol never emits a slashable vote in normal operations. If not an intentionally malicious action, forming a slashable message only occurs as a result of some bug or accident. To minimise the pain of such errors, the amount of stake destroyed is proportional to the number of other validators slashed around the same time. If a small number of validators commit some slashable offence, it is unlikely that they are trying to attack eth2 because a successful attack requires many validators. Slashings that occur in small numbers are therefore assumed to be honest mistakes and are punished lightly (a minimum of 1 ETH). On the other hand if many validators commit an offence during a similar time, then a large amount of their stake is burnt (up to their full balance) as it is assumed to be an attack on the network.
Validators that are slashed are prevented from participating in the protocol further and are forcibly exited. In the case of an honest mistake, this prevents offending validators from doing further harm to themselves by being slashed again; whereas in the malign instance, this removes malicious validators from the protocol.
So what happens to validators who are offline?
Validators that are offline when they are supposed to be participating in the protocol are penalised, but in the normal case these validators only stand to lose what they would have made as rewards had they participated correctly in the protocol. This means that validators that are online > 50% of the time will still see their stake increase over time.
As a result of this mechanism, validator clients that need to go offline for maintenance etc, are usually best off if they just go offine for a short time instead of exiting and re-joining the protocol (both of which have associated delays).
This means that validators need not go to extreme lengths with backup clients or redundant internet connections as the repercussions of being offline are not so severe. In fact, any such system in which two entities can sign messages can be detrimental as primary and backup clients could end up both being online at the same time and emitting slashable votes (via the double voting mechanism explained earlier) as was the case with the first Cosmos slashing.
This regime of offline penalties holds provided that blocks are being finalised (2/3 of validators (weighted by stake) are online and their votes are being counted). This is the expected state of eth2 during normal operation. If less than 2/3 of nodes are online then something has gone catastrophically wrong in the realm of eth2. The family of consensus protocols that Eth’s Casper is a part of can no longer reach agreement under these conditions.
What does eth2 do if > 1/3 of validators are offline?
This is where the inactivity leak mentioned at the start of the article comes in. The inactivity leak reduces the balances of the offline nodes over time so that the ratio of online validators to total validators (weighted by stake) can once again exceed 2/3 so eth2 can continue to make decisions as a protocol.
Inactivity leaks are one of the ways eth2 has been designed to survive a WW3-style event. If such an event were to knock out more than 1/3 of all validators, then the offline validators would find that their balances decreased to the point that their participation was no longer needed for eth2 to continue as a chain.
Anti-correlation and decentralisation
Both the slashing mechanism and the inactivity leak encourage validators to make decisions that cause their nodes to fail in manners different to those of others. That is — to ensure the smallest possible slashings and to prevent inactivity leaks, a validator should attempt to have their clients fail in ways that are different to others’.
This places pressure on all validators to decentralise every aspect of being a validator as, for example, validators that rely on the same source of truth like Infura or use AWS to host their clients will be worse off if something goes wrong.
With all the many ways to be punished, why would a someone want to be a validator?
As stated in the first article, “validators will be lazy, take bribes, and they will try to attack the system unless they are otherwise incentivised not to.” The punishments discussed so far discourage bad behaviour, but rewards are needed to encourage validators to perform actions that benefit eth2.
There are 3 major classes of rewards:
Whistleblower rewards
A validator that raises the alarm on another validator by providing proof that gets them slashed is rewarded for their efforts in cleaning up the eth2 streets.
Proposer rewards
Validators are randomly assigned the duty of producing a block; the chosen validator is called the proposer. A proposer is rewarded for their efforts in the following ways:
- Including a proof from a wistleblower that gets a validator slashed
- Including new attestations from other validators
These rewards encourage validators to provide helpful information to the chain when they are chosen to produce a block.
Attester rewards
Attestations are votes that signal that a validator agrees with a decision in eth2. These types of messages form the basis of consensus and are rewarded in 5 different ways:
- Getting your attestation on-chain
- Agreeing with other validators about the history of the chain
- Agreeing with others about the head of the chain
- Getting your attestation on chain quickly
- Pointing to the correct block in the assigned shard
Scaling validator earnings
There are two common approaches for paying validators in PoS systems: fixed rewards and fixed inflation. In the fixed reward model, validators are paid a fixed amount for doing their jobs, and the inflation rate then depends on how many validators sign up. This has the problem of how to correctly set the reward rate. If the reward rate is set too low then too few validators will participate, while a reward rate that is too high encourages extensive validation beyond the requisite security and wastes money.
The complimentary model is one with a fixed inflation rate where some total reward is divided amongst the active validators. This model has the benefit of allowing market forces to find the right amount to pay validators as they all make individual decisions about whether or not to participate based on current earnings. There are downsides to this model. Validator earnings can be erratic making profitability decisions difficult for individual validators. This model also makes the protocol vulnerable to discouragement attacks in which validators attempt to prevent each other from participating to increase their own profit (even at their own temporary loss).
eth2 aims to have the best of both worlds by choosing a reward model in which validator rewards are proportional to the square root of the total amount of ETH staked. This hybrid model attempts to suppress variations in inflation and validator return rates while still allowing market forces to determine the correct amount to pay each validator for the security provided.
Hope for the best, but expect the worst
Each of the facets of eth2’s incentive scheme is a result of designing a protocol under the philosophy laid out in the last article. Examples of this include the anti-correlation mechanisms encouraging decentralisation and inactivity leaks helping eth2 to survive World War 3, but the main idea underpinning how the incentives work is the assumption that “validators will be lazy, take bribes, and that they will try to attack the system unless they are otherwise incentivised not to”. If someone attacks eth2 in one of the ways discussed here, they better be prepared to throw away a lot of ETH because one way or another they are going to lose it all.
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)
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!
Shipping in 2021
As stated by Vitalik Buterin on sharding:
“Imagine that Ethereum has been split into thousands of islands. Each island can do its own thing. Each of the islands has its own unique features and everyone belonging on that island, i.e., the accounts, can interact with each other and they can freely indulge in all its features. If they want to contact with other islands, they will have to use some sort of protocol”.
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:
Reddit discussions:
22,000 Validators Now Rolling on the Ethereum 2.0 Client Testnet.
SunContract — the first peer-to-peer platform for energy trading.
Call for Ethereum Marketing Ideas (MarketingDAO).
Contribute to the Rotki Gitcoin grant and help us create financial tools that respect your privacy.
My view on ETH powered payment cards.
The First Search Engine for the dWeb (ENS+IPFS) Has Launched.
Gavin Andresen Pivots to Ethereum.
Sweet site showing all the nodes running the prysm eth2 testnet (map view too).
Ethereum Still in Hot Demand as Solidity Makes LinkedIn’s Most Desired Skills of 2020.
Other:
ETC Can Be Merged Into an Ethereum 2.0 Shard Says Vitalik Buterin: ETC briefly made it to the top ten coins recently, turning the leaderboard into three Bitcoins and two Eths for a few hours.
The copy clone of Ethereum, however, can just be merged into Ethereum 2.0 as a new shard just like Eth’s current Proof of Work (PoW) chain will be merged.
“Technically very possible!” — Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, publicly said before further adding:
“You can just use the same merger process to import the ETC state that is planned for ETH, and then the ETC execution environment code would enforce a different exchange rate vs beacon chain eth, based on the rate at the time of the merger (or some other pre-agreed formula). This is if you want to re-merge the currencies.”
Spencer Dinwiddie Tokenizing his NBA Contract on Ethereum: Brooklyn Nets player Spencer Dinwiddie said that his tokenized investment vehicle launched on Jan. 13 in spite of the NBA’s threat to ban him from the professional basketball league.
“The Spencer Dinwiddie bond launches January 13th. I’ll also be taking 8 fans to ASW with me. #NBAVote,” he tweeted on Jan. 10.
The bond will be issued with the help of security token platform Securitize, whose CEO Carlos Domingo announced the partnership on Twitter.
The idea first surfaced in Oct. 2019 when Dinwiddie announced his plan to roll out an Ethereum-based investment platform, DREAM Fan Shares, to sell 90 tokens called SD8 coins, Forbes reported. The scheme would allow him to instantly collect up to $13.5 million off of his $34 million guaranteed three-year contract. Token holders would then receive monthly payments in the next three years with a 4.95% base interest rate.
Ethereum Researcher Virgil Griffith Indicted Over North Korea Event Appearance: Virgil Griffith has been released on bond shortly after being indicted over allegations relating to a conference appearance in North Korea last April.
In a court document filed in the Southern District of New York on Jan. 7, Griffith is charged by a grand jury with one count of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Griffith was released on bail on Jan. 9, Inner City Press reported.
The defendant and others had conspired to breach the prohibitions of the act when Griffith provided services to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea without obtaining approval from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, according to the indictment. The developer is also alleged to have attempted to evade U.S. legal requirements during his actions.
The document adds that one or more of the alleged co-conspirators is expected to be brought to New York and arrested.
Upcoming events
Jan 21 — Gitcoin grants quadratic matching ends
Jan 26 — deadline for MarketingDAO proposals
Jan 31 — deadline for EU ledger 200k euro grants for blockchain startups
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 29-Apr4 — EthLagos
Apr 3–7 — Edcon (Vienna)
April 24–26 — EthTurin
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
