Ethereum biweekly: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, opinion and research articles
4th February — 18th February. Eth2 AMA. Ethereum Trust Alliance Formed. ETHDenver 2020 took place. Status v1 now live. Celer Network’s mainnet upgrade launch. Aragon Court is live. tBTC on Ropsten. Enjin live on mainnet. Colony is in public beta. PoolTogether raises $1M. And much more!
Ethereans, welcome to the mid-February edition of Ethereum biweekly!
Seems like Eth2 is quite close, right? During these two weeks, Eth2 teams were working assiduously, making significant progress with current development.Eth2 Implementers call took place as well as Eth2 AMA. The part that’s gained the most attention is a discussion of the beacon chain launch timing: maybe July; very strong confidence that it will be this year. “Validated, staking on Eth2: #2 — Two ghosts in a trench coat” by Carl Beekhuizen was published last week. In this installment, he discusses the consensus mechanisms behind Eth2. Eth2 has a novel approach to deciding which block is the head of the chain, along with which blocks are and are not a part of the chain. By using a hybrid between the two mechanisms, Eth2 aims to have a consensus which, in addition to being rapid and safe when the network is behaving normally, remains safe even when it’s being attacked. A must-read! Jim McDonald published some suggestions for network health metrics for Eth2. “Ethereum 2: A Validator’s Journey Through the Beacon Chain” by Alex Tudorache of Alethio is out. These weeks, the Nimbus team was working on the first mobile testnet on Android. Lighthouse can now run 100K validators on 12 cheap AWS instances. Prysmatic Labs team’s latest biweekly update covers the announcement of a new teammate, Victor Farazdagi, code updates, lots of optimization updates and much more. Danny Ryan blogged Eth2 quick update no. 8. “Eth2 Misconceptions: Top 5” by Trenton Van Epps was published. And don’t forget to check out phase 0 updates, testnet news, some info about phase 1 and 2 and more in this latest update from Ben Eddington in “What’s new in Eth2” February edition!
According to the latest ConsenSys statistics, there are more than 3000 Dapps on Ethereum! Progress of the ecosystem does not stand still and these two weeks made a lot of essential news for all Ethereum lovers! On February 10th, 2017, Aragon was first announced to the world and a community was born on a mission to create a new fair, free jurisdiction native to the internet. Exactly three years later, the judiciary arm of Aragon’s jurisdiction, Aragon Court, has gone live with 247 jurors! With the Aragon Network launch underway, the team is beginning to plan for the next and final phase of the launch process. Read about the Aragon Association’s proposal for evolving Aragon Network governance in their latest blog post. This week, Celer announced the launch of their layer-2 state channel mainnet upgrade, Lyra, on Ethereum. The 0x team released a stop-limit order pattern, leveraging price feeds operated by Chainlink. Moreover, ZRX holders can now move their stake at any time during an epoch. DeFi Saver added 0x to the list of decentralized exchanges that they support. Colony is in public beta live on mainnet. Try it now! Augur Weekly is out. The Aztec team created 10,000 zkDAI by depositing $10k DAI into their contract. Sponsored Images are now live on all Brave platforms, and they reward Brave users with 70% of the ad revenue when they opt into Brave Rewards. Matic’s incentivized testnet is live. AirSwap Delegates is live on mainnet. Decentraland Marketplace is expanding to include Wearables and Names — and the team is kicking things off with a four-day trading event. The top three traders will win Premium LANDs and special edition NFTs! Furthermore, Matic and CryptoKitties are coming to the Decentraland Treasure Hunt. The new Dether App is now available in Spanish, Russian and French. District0x’s District Registry is live on mainnet. PoolTogether Raises $1 Million. Gitcoin team announced its partnership with Ethereum Classic Labs at ETHDenver last weekend. The team also announced a new weekly mini CLR rounds, which will be funded by Gitcoin’s 10% bounty fee (around $200 a week) and any earning on the platform is eligible for matching. Mattereum’s asset passports are live on mainnet. The Enjin all-in-one blockchain development platform went live on the Ethereum mainnet this week. High Priests, a website that allows you to donate money to open source projects on Gitcoin by delegating your funds to “high priests” announced. Arbitrum rollup is live on testnet, supports Solidity compiler. AdEx is out of beta, now live for everyone. Golem joins Filecoin trusted setup ceremony seeing decentralised storage as a key part of the project's future. Golem Task API has been released on testnet three weeks ago, the team patched it last week and released that too, thanks to your feedback — now their dev Gert-Jan has prepared a super helpful guide to get familiar with it, dig in! Status v1 is live and available in the App Store, Playstore, and via APK: peer-to-peer messages, borderless financial transactions, and secure dapp exploration all from your smartphone. tBTC was launched on the Ropsten Ethereum testnet this week which means users can now play around with the dapp and mint tBTC. mStable, a protocol for unifying and securing tokenized assets on Ethereum introduced. The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents a Dai Savings Rate Spread adjustment, a Dai Stability Fee adjustment, a Debt Ceiling adjustment, a Sai Stability Fee adjustment, and a Surplus Auction adjustment. Merchants can now accept DAI as a form of payment using the Coinbase Commerce system. Pundi X and MakerDAO to launch the Crypto Merchant program in LATAM markets. Zero Collateral loans with cDai, live on mainnet. Dharma introduces the dToken and its iOS App is live. Set Social Trading launched, partnership with DEXTF formed, the ETH 26 EMA Yield Set went live and more from the Set team in their January Community Update #7. Notify, a notification dapp that works with all Ethereum wallets, announced. Optimism announced that they are open-sourcing the engine that powers a fully EVM compatible Optimistic Rollup. Opyn, tokenized options platform to speculate/insure, is live on mainnet. Lots of updates from the MetaMask team appeared in their monthly recap including an overview of their recent ‘MetaTransaction Challenge’, recapping the recent drama around the MetaMask app being removed from the Google Play Store, what’s new in MetaMask development and more. Authereum now live. Kyber Ecosystem Report #11 is now out. Check out OMG Network Audit Reports Simplified. Learn about the work going into the Streamr Data Unions (DU) developer framework and more in January’s dev update. Read Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter. MetaClan, the first eSports DAO focused on leveraging enhanced play-to-earn mechanics to unlock value for developers, players and spectators introduced. Loom Universe Bi-Weekly Highlights were published. Also, LOOM is now available for trading on CoinbasePro in New York. Etherisc’s flight insurance app returns on Rinkeby testnet using Chainlink. Nethermind v1.6.3 with Beam Sync preview on Goerli testnet, Parity v2.7.2 released. Ethereum Trust Alliance, a global coalition of professional security organizations brought together to increase trust in the Ethereum ecosystem, formed. Largest bank U.S JPMorgan to merge its blockchain unit with Ethereum’s ConsenSys. And worth mention, someone has just created a smart contract on Ethereum with source codes in the shape of a monument in memory of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower of China’s coronavirus outbreak, who died of the disease.
As for the social side, last weekend, ETHDenver 2020 took place. Check out the livestreams below! There were a couple of Eth2 presentations at the Trust-Less virtual conference: Terence from Prysmatic Labs gave an overview of the beacon chain and the Prysm client, followed by Collin Myers on Eth2 Validator Economics. Vitalik Buterin posted “Timeliness detectors and 51% attack recovery in blockchains” on ethresear.ch. Leighton Cusack, CEO of PoolTogether joined the Into the Ethers podcast to talk about their no-loss savings game built on Ethereum. James Simpson, CEO and co-founder of mStable, joined the podcast to discuss their new product, to talk about how mStable creates baskets of digital assets to remove risks such as counter-party risks and more. Kevin Owoki, the leader behind the Gitcoin project, discussed the nature of open-source funding, its implications for how companies can be structured, and the problems and solutions created by financial mechanisms built into fund dispersement on POV Crypto podcast. Michael Dunworth comes to POV to discuss his experiences working at Wyre and his opinions about crypto in general. Kain Warick, the Founder of Synthetix, a company creating synthetic assets for DeFi, enabling exposure to fiat currencies, commodities, and cryptocurrencies featured Epicenter. Camila Russo joined Chain Reaction. Tune it on!
More to follow! Have a great week everyone and stay sharp!
“The thing that I often ask startups on top of Ethereum is, ‘Can you please tell me why using the Ethereum blockchain is better than using Excel?’ And if they can come up with a good answer, that’s when you know you’ve got something really interesting”
- Vitalik Buterin
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #80 [2020–2–7]
2. Next Upgrade Timing (based on EFI list)
3. Testing updates
4. EIPIP Meeting #2 Updates
5. Open RPC
6. Review previous decisions made and action items
7. Next call: Feb 21, 2020 14:00 UTC
Tim Beiko’s notes:
EIP1962 generalized elliptic curve and pairing engine implementation in Go.
Nethermind v1.6.3 with Beam Sync preview on Goerli testnet.
Parity v2.7.2 and the next steps for Parity client maintenance under GPL3 (though reportedly most participants preferred a more permissive license).
Slockit’s Incubed ultralight client server setup wizard.
Turbo-geth uses 70% less disk space using B+- Trees as well as Bolt instead of leveldb. In production, this would reduce archive nodes to below 1tb.
Semi-stateless initial sync experiment using Turbo-geth.
EVM-LLVM alpha release, to allow LLVM tooling to compile to EVM.
Eth2.0 Call #33 [2020/2/6]
- Testing and Release Updates
- Client Updates
- Research Updates
- Networking
- Spec discussion
eth2 quick update no. 8
Posted by Danny Ryan on February 4, 2020
- Audit and formal verification of deposit contract bytecode completed by Runtime Verification
- The word of the month is “optimization”
- Ongoing Phase 2 research driven by Quilt and eWASM. Welcome TXRX to the table
- Whiteblock releases gossipsub testing results
- Stacked spring! Conferences, hackathons, bounties, and more
Rocket Pool Development Update — 6th of February, 2020: This update covers the progress of the GUI client for node operators in the Rocket Pool network and gives a glimpse into the roadmap for 2020.
Nimbus’ first mobile testnet on Android:
Building Nimbus on Android: Part 2 / Eth 2.
[AMA] We are the Eth 2.0 Research Team (Pt. 3): Eth2 research team ask me anything on Reddit. The part that’s gained the most attention is discussion of the beacon chain launch timing: maybe July; very strong confidence that it will be this year.
Click here to view the 1st and 2nd ETH 2.0 AMAs.
The beacon chain explorers are outdoing themselves in providing views of the testnets: here’s beaconcha.in and EtherScan both showing Prysm’s network. Alethio is doing their thing with a nice beacon node-centric view of the network status, eth2stats.
Bitfly (the outfit behind both EtherChain and beaconcha.in, and also, interestingly, Ethermine) are really pushing forward. They’ve added functionality to estimate when your validator will be activated, and are working on a service to alert you if your validator is down. Not only that, but they have started an Eth2 knowledge base. There’s only a nice glossary there for now, but it’s a good start. I get the sense that EtherChain is often second choice on Eth1, but perhaps they are aiming to be #1 on Eth2.
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #44 — “More Optimizations”: biweekly update from the Prysmatic Labs team with the announcement of a new teammate, Victor Farazdagi, code updates, lots of optimization updates and much more.
Lighthouse can run 100k validators on 12 cheap (dual core, 4gb ram) AWS instances:
Eth2 Misconceptions: Top 5 by Trenton Van Epps.
Development tools
A Practical Guide To Building Zero Knowledge dApps: Kendrick Tan’s practical guide to building zk dapps.
Hands-on Your first ZK application!: Kimi Wu’s hands on your first zk dapp.
OpenZeppelin contracts v2.5 — with CREATE2, enumerableset and big NFT gas savings.
OpenZeppelin CLI v2.7 — full Solidity v0.6 support, typechain artefacts.
Guide to use Create2.sol library in OpenZeppelin Contracts 2.5.
Subspace v1.3 — new methods to track blocks, gas price and blocktime.
Remix v0.9.3 — you can now test the functionality of receive & fallback functions.
Ultimate number converter for Ethereum developers by ABDK: ABDK adds a number converter to its online toolkit.
Ethers.js and Google’s Bigquery.
Completing the Web3 Development Cycle with Alethio: Alethio adds API endpoints for Rinkeby, Kovan and Ropsten testnets, as well as webhooks.
MythX, Quantstamp, Runtime Verification, Sooho, SmartDec and ConsenSys Diligence starting Ethereum Trust Alliance, a security rating system for deployed Eth code.
Ethereum Blocks Subgraph: for Time Travelers: Time travel queries using a subgraph from The Graph.
Brownie now supports Vyper.
Property-based Eth code testing with Brownie.
Microsoft’s Azure Eth development kit is now generally available.
Anatomy of a Bridge Reserve Smart Contract Vulnerability (and how we fixed it): A write up of the bug that Sam Sun found in three of Kyber’s bridge reserves.
EthVigil’s interactive tutorials for devs new to Ethereum concepts.
3Box Comments and Chatbox plugins now have emojis, likes, and votes. 3Box Confidential Threads API.
Pisa’s any.sender, a non-custodial way to abstract away your transactions via API.
Blocknative’s internal transaction monitoring.
Compiling Formality to Javascript.
A look at the Trueblocks frontend to get all the data you want out from running your own node.
QueryEthereum: GraphQL API from a browser tab.
SplunkConnect for Ethereum, analytics platform connects to Infura or your node.
Setting up your Eth dev environment, a quick start guide from Compound.
Create-Eth-app: CLI tool to create Ethereum-powered React apps with one command.
Terminal v2 — Netlify on IPFS.
Dapphero video tutorial — web3 nocode
Governance and new standards proposals
EIP2515: Replace difficulty bomb with difficulty freeze.
EIP-1559 Mini Update: Volcanize has completed their EIP-1559 implementation in GETH and are updating the EIP to match the latest spec. Next steps are more scrutiny by core devs and feedback from the community.
DigixDAO: A Divorce Story: A case study for voting systems and cryptonative arbitrage.
What we learnt from the rise and fall of the DigixDAO autonomous organisation.
MetaCartel Ventures DAO is live on mainnet.
Pre-registration open for theLAO, as it is set to launch in a few weeks for up to 100 accredited investors.
SignalDAO’s experiments with automating DAO voting using Telegram bots.
Aragon Court is live on mainnet, arbitration for their DAOs. currently working on some moot/hypothetical cases.
Kleros Governor, the DAO to govern Kleros.
DAOifying Uniswap’s pools, an idea from Sunny Aggarwal.
New games with RageQuit: Why the RageQuit functionality is important.
Follow the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
Ethereum Trust Alliance Formed: The Ethereum Trust Alliance is a global coalition of professional security organizations brought together to increase trust in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Why ENS uses Ethereum and not a new basechain.
ENS’ registry migration is complete:
How Whisper-fork Waku does DNS based discovery.
Matt Leising says he knows who the DAO hacker is:
SHPLONK, an explainer of last week’s paper from Boneh, Drake, Fisch, and Gabizon.
Tough-to-Disrupt Municipal Market Attracts Blockchain Developer: ConsenSys acquires Heritage Financial Systems, a municipal bond broker-dealer, to tokenize them on Codefi.
ConsenSys to divide software and investment businesses, cuts staff by 14% as it aims for $200M raise: Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys is shifting focus — and downsizing as a result.
The Brooklyn, N.Y., company announced at an all-staff meeting its latest restructuring would shrink the firm’s headcount by approximately 14 percent. When asked, ConsenSys did not explain how many individuals the cuts would affect or state its current headcount.
“In the coming months, ConsenSys will finalize the transition from its venture production model and spin out a number of its internally funded projects into the ConsenSys Investments portfolio,” the company said in a statement.
The move is meant to prioritize the development of some of the ethereum ecosystem’s leading infrastructure platforms. ConsenSys said Tuesday it will “operate a software business composed of several of its products optimized for a modular stack,” including Infura, PegaSys, MetaMask, Codefi and others.
According to a source with knowledge of the matter, Tuesday’s move will let ConsenSys focus on those four core products. “It really is quite sensible to separate the two business strategies,” the source said.
The company will continue its venture work under the ConsenSys Investments banner, with a focus on “early-stage equity, liquid digital assets, and strategic opportunities where applicable,” ConsenSys said in a statement.
Ethereum Hackathon Survival Guide: Everything you need to know for your next Ethereum hackathon: essential developer tools, expert setup tips, and support resources to help you build a winning dapp.
“Ethereum isn’t Decentralized”…And Other Myths by Kent Barton. Dispelling Bitcoin maximalist myths about Ethereum.
Eth2 deposit launchpad — An interface for the first world computer.
Ethereum in 2019 — Through the Lens of a Block Explorer.
Look What We’th Built: Comparing the envisioned Ethereum applications from 2014 to today.
Why ENS Uses Ethereum and ETH, Not a Bespoke Blockchain and Token.
Ethereum is a Honeypot: The Ethereum Security Series #2.
Ethereum’s EIP-1559, Eth2, and the Price of ETH.
Ethereum Rising: A User’s Guide to the Projects Worth Watching in 2020.
How to start using your own Ethereum bot — no code edition.
How to scale anonymous transactions with Zeropool.
ENSRegistry migration: updating your resolver and subdomains.
Torus out of beta. Use your Google, Facebook, Reddit, Discord or Twitch accounts for your Eth account.
Waku spec v3, Whisper-alternative, with some simulations for messaging scalability.
Tornado.cash releases full details of recent UI vulnerability. Clicking “share URL” would store the note via API call in a bunch of 3rd party services.
bZx Hack Full Disclosure (With Detailed Profit Analysis).
Ethereum Account Abstraction Explained.
An Introduction to Ethereum Report.
Eleven questions to ask your rollup provider.
Turbo-Geth, What’s Different: The Database.
DeFi user research on Set protocol & Gnosis wallets.
Projects updates
0x:
ZRX holders can now move their stake at any time during an epoch! Check it out:
The team released a stop-limit order pattern, leveraging price feeds operated by Chainlink:
Aragon:
Aragon was announced to the world on February, 10th 2017 — three years ago. That’s why February 10th has been denominated as Fight for Freedom Day by Aragon community.
In these three years, the team has created and launched the most advanced platform for decentralized organizations — counting more than 1,000 DAOs created with $8M under management. But that’s not everything. That’s just the beginning.
The vision for Aragon is to create a digital jurisdiction. A place on the Internet where people can self-organize in a free, peaceful, sustainable, and inclusive way.
The first step was to create the tools for DAOs to exist. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) allow for borderless, non-violent organization. Smart contracts give DAOs their great properties, but they also constrain them.
In 2017, the team figured out that DAOs need to grow outside of their blockchain and machine-powered smart contracts. DAOs need subjective agreements. DAOs and their users need an equivalent of the legal system, but fully native to them.
And that’s how the idea of Aragon Court was born — a new efficient, borderless, and secure dispute resolution protocol for the Internet era.
Aragon Court works by drafting human jurors to review disputes and motivating them with financial rewards and penalties to adjudicate well.
The demand-side of the market comes from DAOs and users who rely on Aragon Court as a dispute resolution provider if members of their organization come to a disagreement. The supply-side of the market comes from users who stake Aragon Court’s token (ANJ) to serve as jurors, adjudicate disputes, and earn rewards.
During the pre-activation period, more than 1,000,000 ANT has been staked into the system, with 247 jurors signing up.
After this historic launch, community members will be conducting a precedence campaign — a series of simulated disputes to stress-test the system.
The next step will be to transition the governance of the entire protocol to ANT holders, who will work on governing the protocol in exchange for a portion of the revenues of Aragon Court.
Evolving Aragon Network governance: With the Aragon Network launch underway, the team is beginning to plan for the next and final phase of the launch process. Read about the Aragon Association’s proposal for evolving Aragon Network governance.
Augur:
Augur Weekly — New Hampshire to Nevada: A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.
Further Reading:
- The Political Trade Podcast — TastyTrade
- Augur Edge — Ben Davidow
- Old Bull TV
- Predicting Politics
Augur Weekly — What Happened in Iowa(?): A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.
Basic Attention Token:
Sponsored Images now available on all Brave platforms, rewarding users who opt into Brave Rewards with 70 percent of the ad revenue: Sponsored Images are now live on all Brave platforms, and they reward Brave users with 70% of the ad revenue when they opt into Brave Rewards. Check out the current campaign with Brave launch partnerBlockFi.
OK Google, don’t delay real browser privacy until 2022. Web browsers should protect your privacy, even when sites want to track you. Using Brave will get you third-party cookie blocking today, and their privacy protections go way beyond third-party cookies. Brave is private by default. Chrome is not.
New desktop browser released (1.3.113) with New Tab Page Sponsored Images (70% revenue share for the user), the ability to opt in to privacy-respecting Brave Ads for over 30 new regions, a Chromium upgrade (80.0.3987.87), and many fixes:
Coinbase:
Margin trading is now available on Coinbase Pro: Starting February 13th, Coinbase Pro customers in 23 U.S. states can access up to 3x leverage on USD-quoted books.
Digital Gold, Scarcity, and Bitcoin Halvings.
Coinbase Reports: Black Americans & Crypto: Black Americans surveyed by Coinbase are twice as likely to have been negatively impacted by the current financial system; are also more interested in learning about crypto.
Coinbase resources for 2019 tax returns.
Coinbase UK adds support for Cosmos (ATOM).
Decentraland:
Trade NFTs on the new Decentraland Marketplace: Premium LANDs and special edition NFTs to be won in launch trading event.
ID goes DI: Introducing a new decentralized identity system for Decentraland.
Matic joins the Decentraland Treasure Hunt 20.02.2020: Score $3000 USD worth of MATIC tokens.
CryptoKitties join the Decentraland Treasure Hunt: 5000 digital cats invade the Metaverse!
Technical updates — 4 Feb, 2020: Releases, improvements and fixes from the Decentraland engine room.
MANA has been added to Coinbase Pro in New York as a fully tradable asset:
Dether:
The New Dether App is Now Available in Spanish, Russian and French.
district0x:
District0x’s District Registry is live on mainnet, a TCR for its community.
More than two years ago, the team published a blog post introducing their plans for the core design for The District Registry. At the time, token curated registries (TCR) were still a new and untested concept, with many open unanswered questions about their operation. Fast forward to current time, and both within the district0x project and certainly in the cryptocurrency space at large, they’ve seen a number of examples of TCRs working in a variety of schemes. They are thrilled to add to that history with the launch of their newest dApp, the District Registry, which will house all future districts on the district0x network, and serve as the hub through which all governance processes surrounding the operation of those districts is conducted.
https://registry.district0x.io/
The District Registry is a TCR utilizing the district0x Network Token (DNT) in an incentivized community voting game, determining which marketplaces are in the district0x network, and which aren’t. Voters risk nothing, but are incentivized to be right, while district creators and challengers are putting their DNT at risk of loss to the winning side. On the registry voting side, it’s similar to the DANK registry from Meme Factory.
Submissions for new districts are permissionless, requiring only some relevant identifying information (a website, logo, twitter handle, etc.) and a bit of DNT to get started. However, unlike Meme Factory, a submission to the District Registry is open to challenge at any time.
When districts enter the registry, an Aragon entity is automatically spun up according to the name provided. This entity acts as the surrogate for all governance activity. Through the District Registry interface, DNT holders can stake DNT to any active district, and in doing so, receive voting rights to participate in polls conducted on that particular district’s Aragon entity. These voting rights are minted in proportion to a mathematical “curve”, which the district’s creator selects during the submission process. In the future, the app will support more complex curves to enable even more unique organizational structures.
In short, the District Registry allows DNT holders to put their tokens to work in both policing and governing the network of marketplaces being built in the district0x ecosystem.
The District Weekly — February 15th: News and updates from the district0x Network.
The District Weekly — February 8th.
district0x Dev Update — February 4th, 2020: Development progress and product changes from district0x.
Gitcoin:
Gitcoin team announced its partnership with Ethereum Classic Labs at ETHDenver last weekend:
Gitcoin Announces Weekly Mini CLR Rounds: These new weekly mini CLR rounds will be funded by Gitcoin’s 10% bounty fee (around $200 a week) and any earning on the platform is eligible for matching:
Gnosis:
Tokens, Gaming, and Forking Gardens: How prediction market tools like conditional tokens can change gaming. This post is part of an ongoing Gnosis Ecosystem Fund series on application use cases. If you’re interested in their grants program, get in touch.
Bots on Ethereum, if you can’t beat them, join them! Meet gelato: a no code bot to automate your Ethereum tasks. Tutorial.
Golem:
Decentralized storage and zkSNARKS — Golem joins the Filecoin trusted setup ceremony: The team thinks that decentralized storage is a key part of the future, and of the internet of the future — as well as decentralized compute, such as the one they build here at Golem.
The shiny new Task API, fleshed out: Now it’s time to dig a little bit deeper into what this is, and what it means for the Golem users. To make this article more dev-oriented, to give Glem users a deeper dive into the API.
Keep Network:
tBTC is live on testnet!
Kyber Network:
Kyber Automated Price Reserve (APR): Capital Efficient, Low Slippage Market Making: Most efficient liquidity contribution method for token teams and individual token holders.
Anatomy of a Bridge Reserve Smart Contract Vulnerability (and how we fixed it).
Network Stats: What a way to start the year, highest unique number of addresses, highest first time addresses, highest ETH and USD volumes, and highest total number of trades in a single month!
With activity across Kyber reaching all time highs, many integrations saw equally strong growth with Fulcrum and MyEtherWallet both reaching over 250% month-on-month growth:
Loom Network:
Loom Universe Bi-Weekly Highlights:
LOOM is now available for trading on CoinbasePro in New York:
Maker DAO:
Governance Polls: Adjustments to DSR Spread, Dai Stability Fee, Debt Ceiling, Sai Stability Fee, and Surplus Auction — February 17, 2020: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents a Dai Savings Rate Spread adjustment, a Dai Stability Fee adjustment, a Debt Ceiling adjustment, a Sai Stability Fee adjustment, and a Surplus Auction adjustment.
A Guide to Crypto Wallet Types: This is part four of a six-part Welcome to Crypto series, which will cover everything from the advantages of digital assets and how to buy crypto to how to read cryptocurrency price charts, and why they matter.
Catch up:
Part 1: The Benefits of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology
Part 2: How Does Cryptocurrency Have Value, and Why Should I Care?
Part 3: The Different Types of Cryptocurrency Tokens Explained
Executive Vote: Activate the Sai Debt Ceiling Adjustment and Suspend Monetary Policy Votes for Technical Fixes: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve alterations to the protocol:
- Lower the Sai Debt Ceiling by 5 million to 25 million Sai
- Suspend monetary policy votes when there are emergency technical changes to be made to the system
The Executive Vote (FAQ) will continue until the number of votes surpass the total in favor of the previous Executive Vote. This is a continuous approval vote.
Dai Integrated as a Payment Option on Coinbase Commerce, Offering the Stablecoin to Millions via Shopify, WooCommerce, and Other Merchants: Last week, Coinbase Commerce, a popular platform that helps merchants accept cryptocurrency payments in a completely decentralized way, has integrated Dai as a payment method. Merchants around the world can now accept Dai as a payment for goods and services in minutes. Moreover, merchants do not pay a fee to use Coinbase Commerce, making onboarding free in addition to simple and secure.
New White Paper Describes the Multi-Collateral Dai System and the New Features of the Maker Protocol.
Pundi X and MakerDAO launch the Crypto Merchant program in LATAM markets:
Data viz on Maker’s Sai to Dai migration success.
MetaMask:
MetaMask Monthly: January 2020: Lots of updates from the MetaMask team including an overview of their recent ‘MetaTransaction Challenge’, recapping the recent drama around the MetaMask app being removed from the Google Play Store, what’s new in MetaMask development and more.
MyEtherWallet:
How to Swap Crypto in MEW, in 3 Steps or Less.
Ocean Protocol:
Introducing Blockchain Powered Marketplace to Monetize Logistics Data: dexFreight and Ocean Protocol are building the first Web3 marketplace for logistics industry to unlock and monetize data.
dexFreight and Ocean Protocol Partner to Enable Transportation and Logistics Companies To Monetize Data: First Web3 omnichannel data marketplace for logistics industry.
Motivation for the Global Initiative on AI and Data Commons: Address to the Global Initiative on AI and Data Commons, at United Nations ITU Headquarters.
Unleash the Potential of Ocean Protocol, Unlock the Power of the Data Economy: The winners of the inaugural Ocean Protocol Data Economy Challenge.
OmiseGo:
Understanding the Importance of a Smart Contract Audit with Quantstamp!
OMG Network Audit Reports Simplified.
Parity:
Built on Substrate: KILT Protocol.
Contributors Join OpenEthereum
Raiden Network:
Status:
Town Hall #51 — February 17, 2020: The team launched V1! This week Town hall has a quick thanks from Jarrad and an update on funding. And updates from PeopleOps, Marketing, Ambassadors
Announcing Status Version 1.0! Status version 1 is live — combining a peer-to-peer messenger, cryptocurrency wallet, and Ethereum-enabled browser into a single decentralized, private and secure communication and payment tool.
The Status Mobile App Technology Stack: Status is an open source, decentralised messaging platform, non-custodial crypto wallet, and web 3.0 browser, designed to act as a network node which interacts.
The Status Network Quarterly Report — Q4 2019: The team is recapping thehighlights of 2019 in the Q4 report — a tour through The Status Network looking at all of their work across development, community, and ecosystem.
Managing your ENS name in Status v1: How to reclaim your existing ENS nameRegardless of whether you registered an address in Status, directly through the Ethereum Name Service, or through another provider,
Building Nimbus on Android: Part 2 / Eth 2.
Storj:
2020 in the Cloud: Predictions from Storj Labs.
Use Cases for the Decentralized Cloud.
Maximizing Bandwidth Earnings for Storage Node Operators.
Quarterly Update: Storj Town Hall January 2020.
Streamr:
Do people want to sell their data? Insights on how to build a successful Data Union. Do people want to sell their data? Will they act collectively to pool and trade their information? New research unlocked answers.
Dev Update, January 2020. Learn about the work going into the Streamr Data Unions (DU) developer framework and more in January’s dev update.
Zilliqa:
Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — January 2020.
Other project’s updates:
DeFi hit $1 billion USD equivalent locked up!
A spreadsheet of admin keys in DeFi.
DeFi Saver Integrates 0x: DeFi Saver added 0x to the list of decentralized exchanges that they support.
The Colony Public Beta is Live!: Colony is in public beta live on mainnet. Try it now! This is Colony getting started guide. Here are some answers to questions they’re sure will come up. Come and join the conversation on Discord.
Colony Network’s BetaColony — the experimental version of the MetaColony.
The First 10,000 zkDai: The Aztec team created 10,000 zkDAI by depositing $10k DAI into their contract (“skin in the game”).
CelerNetwork releases multi-hop state channels and open sourced the state channels node, as well as launched the testnet for its guardian watchtower network.
Matic’s incentivized testnet is live:
Mattereum’s asset passports are live on mainnet.
Enjin Live on Mainnet: The Enjin all-in-one blockchain development platform went live on the Ethereum mainnet this week.
AirSwap Delegates is live on mainnet. Configure automated trading rules, onchain limit orders, liquidity integration with Kyber, and ability to add new tokens.
China’s Coronavirus Whistleblower Is Now Memorialized on Ethereum: Someone has just created a smart contract on ethereum with source codes in the shape of a monument in memory of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower of China’s coronavirus outbreak, who died of the disease.
Etherisc to Leverage Chainlink Oracles For Decentralized Flight Insurance Product: Etherisc’s flight insurance app returns on Rinkeby testnet using Chainlink.
Announcing Idle Finance v2: A DeFi rebalancing protocol (an autobalancer similar to Staked’s RAY).
Collateral Swap — swap between Maker collateral (eg, ETH<>BAT) with Aave + Uniswap:
List of DeFiZaps — one click to do a bunch of DeFi actions.
Gauntlet’s analysis of why Uniswap is a good oracle.
Credentify, an API to issue standard European education credentials stacked into ECTS.
Circles’s universal basic income is live on Kovan testnet:
Maple Loans undercollateralized loans through communities with the option to slice up the risk CDO-style.
Zero Collateral loans with cDai, live on mainnet:
Dharma’s dtokens: dTokens are wrapper tokens, similar to rDAI, around Compound cTokens. In short, dTokens are interest-bearing stablecoins denominated in Dai or USD Coin that are backed by their respective cTokens on Compound. 10% of the interest earned by dTokens will be given to Dharma.
Dharma iOS App Live: Dharma’s new iOS App lets you earn 7.3% APR on your dollars by simply linking up your debit card to the app.
Set Community Update #7 — January 2020: Social Trading launched, partnership with DEXTF formed, the ETH 26 EMA Yield Set went live and more from the Set team.
PoolTogether Raises $1 Million: The investment round was led by IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from ConsenSys Labs and DTC Capital. How PoolTogether selects winners.
DEX.AG Generation 2 Now Live: Key improvements include judge market vs CEXes with live charting, judge market depth to optimally split up orders and see potential arbitrages when markets get crossed.
GridPlus Update: February 7, 2020: Justin Leroux from GridPlus updates us on all the progress that the team has made over the last month including Lattice1 updates, a new web wallet, updates to GridPlus Energy and more.
Ramp Gets Open Banking License in Europe: Ramp, a Warsaw-based start-up, is the first crypto company to receive an Open Banking License in Europe after being authorised by The Polish Financial Supervision Authority (“KNF”). This will allow for faster, simpler and cheaper processing of crypto transactions in the entire European Union.
Introducing Zap Out: Zap Out lets you seamlessly go in and out of liquidity pools on Uniswap with DeFiZap.
mStable Announced: mStable is a protocol for unifying and securing tokenized assets on Ethereum. They’ll be going live on mainnet in the next few months and will include an open reward pool to bootstrap liquidity, utility and a decentralized community of governors.
High Priests Announced: High Priests is a website that allows you to donate money to open source projects on Gitcoin by delegating your funds to “high priests”. The real magic is that these are no-loss donations as only the interest generated on your DAI is donated to projects (through rDAI).
Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum rollup is live on testnet, supports Solidity compiler.
Optimistic Virtual Machine Alpha: how Optimism will offer full EVM support in their optimistic rollups.
Perun’s Ethna: Channel Network with Dynamic Internal Payment Splitting.
StateChannels reduces gas cost by ~75% by reducing all storage to a minimum bytes32 slot.
Opyn Now Live on Mainnet: Opyn allows users to protect their Compound Finance deposits against both technical and financial risk by introducing a two-sided marketplace for tokenized put options called oTokens.
Metacoin. Ameen proposes a solely-ETH collateral, onchain Uniswap oracle, and governance minimized stablecoin.
Nuoscan, a Nuo Network explorer.
AdEx is out of beta, now live for everyone. Advertising platform with instant Dai payouts using unidirectional payment channels.
bZx had an extreme arbitrage event, using flashloans to push the oracle down. bZx will use their admin key to stream the remaining collateral to iEth holders. Check out the data visualization of the transaction from bloxy.info:
Notify Announced: Notify is a notification dapp that works with all Ethereum wallets. You can use it to notify users of updates like liquidations, kittys mated with or whatever you want. Simply call the contract and the user gets the message as a token.
Authereum Now Live: Authereum is an Ethereum wallet interface that comes packed with features and integrations. This week, they went live on the Ethereum mainnet so you can check them out now. They also announced raised $1.1mil from investors.
1inch Releases Leverage Aggregator: 1x.ag is an leverage aggregator with automated trading strategy, lowest price slippage and gas costs. 1inch claims that they can achieve the best results by using flash loans and a liquidation bot.
tBTC on Ropsten: tBTC was launched on the Ropsten Ethereum testnet this week which means users can now play around with the dapp and mint tBTC.
Introducing Splunk Connect for Ethereum: You can now ingest Ethereum node data into Splunk using the Splunk Connect app.
Introducing MetaClan: MetaClan is the first eSports DAO focused on leveraging enhanced play-to-earn mechanics to unlock value for developers, players and spectators.
Opinion and research articles
Timeliness detectors and 51% attack recovery in blockchains by Vitalik: Balance those 2 plus timeliness detectors to satisfy asynchronous requirements.
Time attacks and security models.
Batch Deposits for [op/zk] rollup / mixers / MACI.
Accelerating powers-of-tau ceremonies with optimistic pipelining.
Explaining Plasma and Rollups: Advantages & Limitations by Matic Network team.
Ethereum 2: A Validator’s Journey Through the Beacon Chain by Alex Tudorache of Alethio.
Defining Ethereum 2 Network Metrics: Jim McDonald has some suggestions for network health metrics for Eth2.
How state providers can keep the state cheaply using custody root.
Tricking frontrunners into being transaction relayers.
Validated, staking on eth2: #2 — Two ghosts in a trench coat
by Carl Beekhuizen on February 12th, 2020
A Trilemma:
FLP impossibility is a core result in the field of distributed computation which states that in a distributed system it is not possible to simultaneously have safety, liveness, and full asynchrony unless some unreasonable assumptions can be made about your system.
Safety is the idea that decisions cannot be unmade whereas liveness captures the notion that new things can be decided. A protocol is asynchronus if there is no bound on how long a message may take to get delivered.
If nodes could communicate reliably, always follow the protocol honestly and never crash, then consensus would be easy, but that is not how the world works. When these assumption don’t hold, FLP Impossibility is the proof that at least one of: safety, liveness, or full asynchrony must be compromised.
GHOSTs and their opinions on forks:
Eth2 uses Greedy Heaviest Observed Subtree (GHOST) as its fork-choice rule. GHOST selects the head of the chain by choosing the fork which has the most votes (it does this by considering all of the votes for each fork block and their respective child blocks).
Put another way, each time there is a fork, GHOST chooses the side where more of the latest messages support that block’s subtree (i.e. more of the latest messages support either that block or one of its descendants). The algorithm does this until it reaches a block with no children.
GHOST has the benefit of reducing the efficacy of attacks during times of high network latency as well as minimizing the depth of chain reorgs when compared to the longest-chain rule. This is because while an attacker can keep building blocks efficiently on their own chain thereby making it the longest, GHOST would choose the other fork as there are more votes for it in total.
In particular, eth2 uses a variation of GHOST which has been adapted to a PoS context called Latest Message Driven GHOST (LMD-GHOST). The idea behind LMD-GHOST is that when calculating the head of the chain, one only considers the latest vote made by each validator, and not any of the votes made in the past. This dramatically decreases the computation required when running GHOST, since the number of forks that need to be considered to execute the fork choice cannot be greater than the number of validators ($O(v)$ in Big O notation).
Under the rules of GHOST, validators/miners can always try to add a new block to the blockchain (liveness), and they can do this at any point in the chain’s history (asynchronous). Since it is live and fully asynchronous, thanks to our friend FLP, we know it can’t be safe.
The lack of safety presents itself in the form of reorgs where a chain can suddenly switch between forks of abitrary depth. Obviously this is undesirable and eth1 deals with this by having users make assumptions about how long miners’ blocks will take to be communicated with the rest of the network, this takes the form of waiting for $x$ confirmations. Eth2, by contrast, makes no such assumptions.
The friendly finality gadget:
A blockchain without any notion of safety is useless because no decisions could be reached and users could not agree on the state of the chain. Enter Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (Casper FFG). Casper FFG is a mechanism which favours safety over liveness when making decisions. This means that while the decisions it makes are final, under poor network conditions, it may not be able to decide on anything.
FFG is a crypto-economic adaption of the classic Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerent (PBFT) which has phases where nodes first indicate that they’d like to agree on something (justification) and then agree that they’ve seen each other agreeing (finalisation).
Eth2 does not try to justify and finalise every slot (the time when a block is expected to be produced), but instead only every 32 slots. Collectively, 32 slots is called an epoch. First, validators sign that they agree with all 32 blocks in an epoch. Then, if $\geq \frac{2}{3}$ do so, the block is justified. In a later epoch, validators get another chance to vote to indicate that they have seen the earlier justified epoch and if $\geq \frac{2}{3}$ do this, the epoch is finalised and is forever a part of the eth2 chain.
FFG employs a clever trick. Votes actually consist of two sub-votes, one for the epoch that is attemping to be justified and another for an earlier epoch that is to become finalised. This saves a lot of extra communication between nodes and helps to achieve the goal of scaling to millions of validators.
Two ghosts in a trench coat:
Consensus within eth2 relies on both LMD-GHOST — which adds new blocks and decides what the head of the chain is — and Casper FFG which makes the final decision on which blocks are and are not a part of the chain. GHOST’s favourable liveness properties allow new blocks to quickly and efficiently be added to the chain, while FFG follows behind to provide safety by finalising epochs.
The two protocols are merged by running GHOST from the last finalised block as decided upon by FFG. By construction, the last finalised block is always a part of the chain which means GHOST doesn’t need to consider earlier blocks.
In the normal case when blocks are being produced and $\geq \frac{2}{3}$ validators are voting on them, these blocks are added to the head of the chain by GHOST, and not long after justified and finalised by FFG (which considers the last few epochs).
If there is an attack on the network and/or a large porportion of validators go offline, then GHOST continues adding new blocks. However, since GHOST is live, but not safe, it may change its mind about the head of the chain — this is because new blocks are continually added to the chain, which means nodes keep learning new information. FFG on the other hand, favours safety over liveness meaning that it stops finalising blocks until the network is stable enough for validators to vote consistently again.
Podcasts and videos
PoolTogether: Winning Money with Nothing to Lose on Into the Ether: Leighton Cusack, CEO of PoolTogether joins the show to talk about their no-loss savings game built on Ethereum. PoolTogether is a fascinating concept which allows people to join a daily or weekly prize pool with crypto without ever losing their initial investment or capital. Leighton walks us through how this works and explains that when users buy tickets, their crypto is sent to Compound to earn interest. The interest earned during the prize period is then awarded to the winner. He talks about future features and plans for the products and shares some thoughts on DeFi as well.
mStable: Making Digital Money Safe, Stable and Accessible on Into the Ether: James Simpson, CEO and co-founder of mStable, joins the podcast to talk about their new product. They talk about how mStable creates baskets of digital assets to remove risks such as counter-party risks and more. Everyone loves to hold Dai but the reality is there are underlying risks to that. To help with this, mStable is launching mUSD which creates an underlying basket of stablecoins to distribute risk. In doing this, if one stablecoin in the basket loses the peg, those holding mUSD are still safe due to the mechanics of the system. This is a very interesting project and James does a great job of explaining the details.
How Memes Can Help Crypto Go Mainstream on Unchained: Linda Xie, co-founder at Scalar Capital, reads her essay on how the crypto community can successfully uses memes to help people understand the technology.
Funding Open Source with Gitcoin’s Kevin Owoki on POV Crypto: Kevin Owoki is the leader behind the Gitcoin project, which is a funds allocation platform, that aims to be the funding platform for open-source development. Kevin brings a unique perspective of what it means to compensate labor in a post-Web 2 world, and helps us compare/contrast Web2 funding models with the experiments going on today. They discuss the nature of open-source funding, its implications for how companies can be structured, and the problems and solutions created by financial mechanisms built into fund dispersement.
Building the Portal to Crypto with Wyre CEO Michael Dunworth on POV Crypto: Wyre is building the what crypto needs the most; quick, seamless value transfer from Fiat to Crypto. Michael Dunworth comes to POV to discuss his experiences working at Wyre and his opinions about crypto in general.
Synthetix: Bringing the World’s Assets Into DeFi on Epicenter: Like previous crypto winters, those actually building the ecosystem have been working diligently to create applications with industry-changing potential. The year 2020 may prove to be the year of Decentralized Finance, with many exciting projects re-creating financial products common to the world of traditional finance, in the open and permissionless blockchain space. Synthetic assets enable exposure to the price action of an asset without actually holding the underlying asset. Kain Warick is the Founder of Synthetix, a company creating synthetic assets for DeFi, enabling exposure to fiat currencies, commodities (gold and silver), and cryptocurrencies. They have large aspirations to create synthetic assets for many more things, including traditional equities. Synthetic equities in DeFi is a massive opportunity that demands everyone’s attention. Once traditional equities become accessible in DeFi, anyone in the world with internet access will be able to gain exposure to financial products currently only available to the privileged few with access to markets like the Nasdaq or NYSE.
Camila Russo: A Deep Dive Into Ethereum’s Inception on Chain Reaction: On this episode, Host Tom Shaughnessy is joined by Camila Russo, founder of the Ethereum based newsletter The Defiant and author of the coming book on the birth of Ethereum titled, The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum. They dive into why Camila decided to research Ethereum’s early life, how she has been tirelessly researching the protocol for months and what to expect from her new book.
There were a couple of Eth2 presentations at the Trust-Less virtual conference. Terence from Prysmatic Labs gave an overview of the beacon chain and the Prysm client, followed by Collin Myers on Eth2 Validator Economics.
DefiZaps — All The Coolest Ethereum Defi Concepts In One Click:
Ethereum News, Innovation & Development — February Update:
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io (February 18th, 2020):
Etherscan Adds ‘Private Token Ignore List’ Feature: You can now hide all of those pesky “shitcoins” from your Ethereum wallet balance on Etherscan by simply blacklisting the token contract.
Are stablecoins parasites on ETH?
Why ETH will sustain a monetary premium.
The top25 tokens by market cap are all on Ethereum:
Roadmap
To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.
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.
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.
Recently, 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
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:
ALL ETHDenver Livestreams HERE!:)
Metamask Reaches One Million Users.
Maker makes Forbes Fintech 50!
Ethereum 2.0: Latest Updates For 2020.
[Tutorial] How to become a thought leader on crypto Twitter.
[DeFi] DAI Annual Interest Rate goes above 10%.
Unhyped: $178.4M Market Cap Augur (REP) Had Only 115 Users Last Week.
Other:
JPMorgan in Talks to Merge Blockchain Unit with ConsenSys: Investment banking giant JPMorgan is reportedly in discussions to merge its blockchain unit Quorum with Ethereum development studio ConsenSys.
Reuters reported the news on Tuesday, citing “people familiar with the plans.” The deal could formally be announced within the next six months. Notably, Quorum is an Ethereum-based blockchain network.
“Will hopefully be able to share more details soon, but for now, the details in the Reuters story are all we are sharing,” a spokesman for ConsenSys said.
The investment bank has reportedly been considering spinning-off Quorum for around two years. The Quorum brand, however, could remain after the merger.
A merger with ConsenSys would also have no impact on JPMorgan’s Interbank Information Network (IIN) and other projects running on Quorum, per the report. IIN was launched in 2017 and allows member banks to exchange information related to international payments on Quorum. Some of the notable banks on the network include Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Banking Group, among others.
Upcoming events
Feb 18-Mar 31 — Social Impact hackathon/incubator
Feb 20 — NFT.NYC
Feb 20 — Decentraland launch
Feb 28-Mar 1 — ETHLondon UK
Mar 3–5 — EthCC (Paris)
Mar 6–8 — EthParis2020
Mar 29-Apr4 — EthLagos
Apr 3–7 — Edcon (Vienna)
Apr 13 — Deadline to apply for 50k euro for blockchain startups in Europe
April 24–26 — EthTurin
May 8–9 — Ethereal Summit (NYC)
May 15–17 — ETHNYC
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.
Check out /r/ethdapps.
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
