Ethereum biweekly: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, opinion and research articles
18th February — 3rd March. ProgPoW discussion. Loopring Exchange is live. Compound announces governance plan. Synthetix adds Ether collateral. EthCC begins. And much more!
Ethereans, the team keeps bringing us closer to Serenity every day!
During these two weeks, Eth2 Implementers call took place as well Ethereum Core Devs Meeting. Opposition continues to grow against implementation of the controversial Programmatic Proof-of-Work (ProgPoW) proposal in the Ethereum community. For those who are not familiar, ProgPoW is an ASIC-resistant PoW algorithm meant to replace ETHhash, the current hashing algorithm for the platform. First mooted two years ago, it suddenly reemerged as a concrete plan set for the middle of this year following an Ethereum Core Devs Meeting on February 21st. Leading stakeholders filed a petition on Github on February 26th to register their disapproval with the decision. Authored by ETHBoston Organizer Justin Leroux, the petition claims the change lacks community support: “Because Ethereum is a global platform with a large and diverse group of stakeholders, it is critical that major changes to the protocol have a clear purpose and broad support. EIP-1057 clearly lacks that support, yet activation is still being considered.” The petition is signed by more than 70 people including Hayden Adams, CEO and founder of Uniswap, Andrew Keys, co-founder of DARMA Capital, and Tim Coulter, CEO of Truffle Suite.
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! Compound introduced its governance system this week that includes a new governance token called COMP. This new system will gradually turn over the governance of the Compound system to the community. Moreover, it hits 200m in assets these weeks! Loopring zkRollup Ethereum Exchange is live. The Keep team puts together a tBTC 101 blog post for you. Study up and get ready for our mainnet launch coming soon! The Aragon team is shutting down the Flock grants program. They will refocus on lean grants and small-scale experiments. And once the Aragon Network DAO reaches Phase 3, it will be sovereign to make its own capital allocations. Moreover, Aragon Buidler plugin 0.1.0 released as well as The Aragon Committees app v1.0.0-beta.2. The new issue of Augur Weekly was published. Check out Melon Terminal v2, a new frontend for Melon to go with Melon v1.1 adding assets and Uniswap/0x v3. In the Achernar release, the Synthetix team was introducing Ether as an alternative form of collateral in Synthetix. It’s a major piece of new functionality, so they’re launching with a three month trial period to observe demand and user engagement. Brave is releasing a new system for hiding unwanted, privacy harming page elements. Brave browser now automatically points to Wayback Machine on error 404. Following last week's iOS app release, the Dharma team have released its app to the Google Play store which means Android users can now earn 6.6% APR on their dollars in minutes. Coinbase becomes the first pure-play cryptocurrency company to receive Visa membership. You can now send and receive ETH and tokens using your ENS name right inside of the popular Coinbase Wallet mobile app. PoolTogether tickets are now tokenized. saveDAI introduced. Founded by Chris Blec, new DeFi Watch is curating info on all things related to DeFi security and risk. LINK RSI Set launched. Mobile wallet app Frontier has integrated DeFiZap. The Metaverse is officially open to the public, the culmination of many years of hard work and the beginning of a brand new era for Decentraland. And the Treasure Hunt has ended: 66k rewards were given to over 6k users! You can now acquire up to $10,000 of LAND paying 12–40% interest over 6 months by collateralizing the loan with an NFT. district0x Network Roadmap 2020 was published. MEW welcomes Aave DeFi to Dapps Page. KyberDAO and a new KNC model will be launched in Q2. Loom Network Company Update is now out: Matthew Campbell has recently stepped down from his role as CEO of Loom Network, and with this departure, Vadim Macagon has taken over. February was pretty darn amazing for Maker and for the community as a whole. From hitting a huge DeFi milestone and Maker’s debut in the Forbes Fintech 50 to the release of the new white paper and Dai integration in Coinbase Commerce. More news in the blog post, including Governance updates, new integrations, and event highlights. In the “How to Securely Manage Company Crypto Funds with Gnosis Safe Multisig” post, Eric Conner explains the benefits of securing crypto in a multisig and walk through the 1-minute Gnosis Safe setup process. Ocean Protocol and ProtoFire are collaborating to build decentralized data marketplaces to facilitate the continued expansion of the open data economy. Uniflash, a decentralized flash loan protocol that gives all fees to users. It currently supports Ether and ERC20 tokens, introduced. Status announced the #stick2web3 Sticker Market Competition with over $1,500 in prizes. Streamr Community Survey results is now out. Colin JG Miles joins Zilliqa team as Head of Marketing. The Storj team has reached $2 million STORJ tokens paid to storage node operators. Catch Storj recent town hall and hear their latest company updates from the leadership team in our report below. DeFi Audits, a new initiative to bring increased transparency to various DeFi protocols on Ethereum, announced. Ethereum Foundation’s wishlist for ecosystem support was published. EthDenver finalists and ETHLondon winners were announced. EthCC began.
Plenty of research articles were published. Will Villanueva posted an implementation, vision and background plan for Eth2 phase 2 moving forward. This represents the work Quilt will likely focus on over the next year. Dankrad was preventing shard state data loss using custody roots — a nice presentation of proofs of custody and data availability checks in near-stateless Eth2, with cost estimates. Nicolas Liochon sparks a lively discussion with Trustless validator blackmailing with the blockchain. He identifies a way for an attacker to make money from getting people’s private keys, or pretending to. Sam from the Quilt team has just published his work on Automated Detection of Dynamic State Access in Solidity. Barry Whitehat published some zk ideas: private social network search and private order matching.
As for the social side, Karl Floersch and Ben Jones from the Optimism team joined the Into the Ether podcast to discuss their research and plans around optimistic rollups, a scaling solution for Ethereum. Joseph Delong, senior software engineer at ConsenSys, joins the podcast to discuss a variety of Ethereum topics. CEO and co-founder of smart contract auditing firm Quantstamp, comes onto POV Crypto to illuminate the inner workings of the blockchain ecosystem. Anthony Sassano and Chris Blec featured The Block Experience. Famously of neutral opinions in the crypto-sphere, Andreas Antonopolous comes to give his POV about the Ethereum vs. Bitcoin debate. Lev Livnev, a formal verification researcher at dapp.org and a founding partner at Symbolic Capital Partners, talks about the two attacks on bZx in the last week. Tune it on!
Good news is, the Ethereum team is well underway in planning for the first Devcon in which Eth2’s beacon chain is live and ether is staked! In addition to the improvements listed above, they are planning for an event with continued dogfooding, a smoother ticketing process and more — all to be outlined in coming posts. As for this year’s region, the Devcon 6 search began prior to Devcon 5 with an understanding that the further ahead they are in terms of planning, the smoother the process will be for all attendees. After listening to community input, undergoing a thorough site-search in over 10 cities, the team confident that they have landed a region and venue that are truly deserving of the event, and that accomplish every goal laid out above to help make this the best Devcon ever. The team will be announcing the location of Devcon 6 shortly — keep an eye on the EF Blog for more on site-selection, and for early application information and more!
“Initially, I thought that Ethereum was a thing that would be used for people to write simple financial scripts. As it turns out, people are writing stuff like Augur on top of it.”
- Vitalik Buterin
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #81 [2020–2–21]
2. Next Upgrade Timing
3. Open RPC
4. Testing updates
5. EIPIP Meeting №3 Updates
Adding a section of ‘Motivation’ to Meta EIP of upgrade
6. Review previous decisions made and action items (if notes available)
7. Next call: Mar 6, 2020 14:00 UTC
Latest core devs call. Notes. Lots of next fork planning. EVM subroutines likely happening pending Solidity benchmarks, ProgPoW back on the agenda, lots of eip1962 precompile talk.
The main topics of this call were:
- The rough plan for the 1.x research summit in Paris following EthCC
- The Witness Format
- The ‘data retrieval problem’
The 1.x Files: February call digest: Notes from the latest stateless Ethereum call. Witness format and the data retrieval problem.
Latest Nethermind fixes some peering issues.
Geth v1.9.11 Released: DNS discovery, sqrt tx propagation bandwidth, new .js engine and bug fixes in this new release.
Draft spec for block witnesses.
Draft EIP to add BLS12–381 precompiles to the EVM.
Implementing account abstraction via new PAYGAS opcode.
Rich transaction compile draft EIP: Allow transactions from EOAs to bytcode directly.
Eth2.0 Call #34 [2020/2/27]
- Testing and Release Updates
- Client Updates
- Research Updates
- Networking
- Spec discussion
- Open Discussion/Closing Remarks
The Beacon Chain Ethereum 2.0 explainer you need to read first.
On the way to Eth1 finality by Mikhail Kalinin. Getting to Eth1 finality with Eth2.
Nimbus status update — February so far: discv5, BLS sigs, lightweight stack traces.
Rewards and Penalties on Ethereum 2.0 [Phase 0].
A Short History and a Way Forward for Phase 2: Will Villanueva posted an implementation, vision and background plan for eth2 phase 2 moving forward. This represents the work Quilt will likely focus on over the next year.
Update on fuzzing the beacon chain clients. Finding bugs, expanding capabilities.
Automated detection of dynamic state access.
A short history and a way forward for phase 2.
Casey Detrio’s simple protocol for cross-shard transfers.
Quick demo on getting an eth2 EE up and running using Quilt’s SEE tool
Development tools
Introduction to Ethereum Studio:
dEth node: claims to be 60% faster than Ganache.
Patterns for computing/accumulating interest.
Samczsun and Mudit Gupta find Nexus Mutual bugs.
Email notifications in dapps.
Solidity unit testing using Remix tests, part 2.
Loredana’s ChainLens contract searcher is available as a Remix plugin:
Embark v5.2 — proxy contract support and scripts execution.
Math in Solidity series: Numbers and Overflow.
Realtime websocket integrations via API, aimed at devs new to Eth.
Composable Airscript v0.7.
Eth2 things you can hack on at hackathons.
Making Solidity stack traces and console.log more useful with a JSON-RPC interface to connect to Buidler EVM from wallets and front ends.
A linked list implementation in Solidity.
Sokt: a library for managing multiple Solidity versions for Java or Kotlin.
Writing upgradeable contracts in OpenZeppelin tutorial.
Dapp starter kit using Buidler + Waffle + TypeChain + Vue (TypeScript).
Tx2uml generates a UML sequence diagram of all the contract calls, even in big txs.
Gas stipends, the 1/64 rule, contract calls, and the insufficient gas griefing attack.
Solfuzz: assertion checker for Solidity contracts using gray box fuzzing.
Gnark: fast groth16 snark verification library in Go.
Security considerations around flash loan patterns.
Austin Griffith video on flash loans:
Governance and new standards proposals
ERC2520: Multiple contenthash records for ENS.
ERC2525: ENS login.
ERC2537: BLS12–381 curve operations.
ERC2539: BLS12–377 curve operations.
ERC2542 add TXGASLIMIT, CALLGASLIMIT, TXGASREFUND opcodes.
ERC2541: EY SW6-Bis curve operations.
ERC2535: Diamond standard for upgradeable contracts.
ERC2547: Composable multiclass token.
EIP2544: ENS Wildcard resolution.
EIP2538: Anti-ProgPoW statement from community members.
Compound announces a governance token to control all parts of the protocol.
Submit your startup to TheLAO for funding.
MolochDAOs on Aragon (Dandelion orgs) are live on mainnet.
ProgPoW returned as a debate topic these weeks, as core devs scheduled a separate hard fork for just ProgPoW.
Follow the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
Devcon: What is Ahead:
The team is well underway in planning for the first Devcon in which Eth2’s beacon chain is live and ether is staked! In addition to the improvements listed above, they are planning for an event with continued dogfooding, a smoother ticketing process and more — all to be outlined in coming posts.
As for this year’s region, the Devcon 6 search began prior to Devcon 5 with an understanding that the further ahead they are in terms of planning, the smoother the process will be for all attendees. After listening to community input, undergoing a thorough site-search in over 10 cities, the team confident that they have landed a region and venue that are truly deserving of the event, and that accomplish every goal laid out above to help make this the best Devcon ever.
The team will be announcing the location of Devcon 6 shortly — keep an eye on the EF Blog for more on site-selection, and for early application information and more.
Ethereum Foundation’s wishlist for ecosystem support.
EthDenver finalists. All the EthDenver submissions.
ETHLondon winners. All ETHLondon submissions.
ETH Denver 2020 Vlog from Dave Craige:
Ethereum community members submit dissenting ProgPoW petition: Members of the Ethereum community published a petition last Wednesday indicating a level of stakeholder dissent against the activation of ProgPoW, a proposal that seeks to transition Ethereum’s hashing algorithm to an ostensibly ASIC-resistant scheme.
Supporters of ProgPow believe the change would help avoid a miner-led fork in the months leading up to Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake. ProgPoW would allegedly disadvantage those using specialized mining equipment that is superior, in terms of computing power, to GPU-based miners.
The petition and a full list of signatories has been published on GitHub.
“Because Ethereum is a global platform with a large and diverse group of stakeholders, it is critical that major changes to the protocol have a clear purpose and broad support,” reads the petition. “EIP-1057 clearly lacks that support, yet activation is still being considered.”
Signatories of the petition — including Hayden Adams, CEO and founder of Uniswap, Tim Coulter, CEO of Truffle Suite, and Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of DARMA Capital, among others — believe the change would create a new level of division in the Ethereum community. As the petition points out, Ethereum is already slated to transition from proof-of-work towards proof-of-stake consensus with the ETH 2.0 beacon chain launch, projected to occur later this year.
“A stated goal of ProgPoW is to avoid contentious forks while transitioning to proof-of-stake, yet it is at odds with its own aims if activation increases the likelihood of that undesired outcome,” reads the petition.
DeFi pulse cofounder Scott Lewis, another signatory, told The Block that “there is a clear consensus in the grassroots Ethereum community that ProgPOW should not be shipped.”
“If that does not matter to the ethereum governance process, the ethereum governance process needs to change,” he said.
Waku spec v0.4.
Register a .kred DNS domain, get NFT that controls ENS and DNS records.
Etherscan’s 2019 year in review charts.
Taylor Monahan’s DeFi and Risk essay.
Flash attacks will be the new normal.
Joseph Lubin at EthCC:
Check by address all of your token approvals.
Hyperledger Besu v1.4 — better tx signing, better APIs, better sync.
The State of Optimistic Rollup.
Prize Savings: the ultimate money lego.
Future Applications & Products on Ethereum.
Walkthrough of an Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof for Sudoku Puzzle.
A bill focused on stablecoins has been introduced in Congress.
Risky Business: #DeFi and Ethereum’s Coming of Age Story.
When One Billion Ethereum Transactions?
Ethereum: The Concept of Gas and its Dangers.
Channelizing an Ethereum Application.
Projects updates
0x:
The Melon protocol team added support for 0x v3:
Aragon:
Dissolving the Flock grants program: The team announced Aragon Flock in late 2018. The idea was to decentralize the development of the project by offering sizable grants to teams who would build the Aragon Network and its core infrastructure.
They wanted to find founders willing to assemble teams to build core infrastructure. The Aragon Association would give them funding and vested ANT, so that they are aligned with the network long-term.
Unfortunately, the team found out that the grants program had significant issues and wrong incentives. Mainly these were:
- Checklist-based approach
- Public feedback didn’t work
- Upfront funding
- No-strings-attached funding
- High coordination costs
On top of these root issues, Flock was too early for the stage of the project. Even though usage metrics are growing considerably, Aragon hasn’t reached strong product-market fit yet.
In September 2019 there were several discussions in the community with regards to Flock. It became clear to me that it was important to focus on them. Luis Cuende decided to stop leading Aragon One to become the Executive Director of the Aragon Association. He focused all my energy in evaluating the situation, always with the intention of maximizing the odds of Aragon being massively successful.
This required tough decisions that were needed for the project to be leaner and be able focus on what’s most important.
After running the experiment for more than a year, and with careful consideration, the Aragon Association has decided to shut down the Flock program.
They will keep funding proven teams and doing lean grants and small-scale fund allocation experiments. And once the Aragon Network DAO reaches Phase 3 later this year, it will be sovereign to make its own capital allocations.
You can read more about the Aragon Association’s plans for 2020 and how the team is evolving Aragon Network governance.
Aragon Buidler plugin 0.1.0 released:
The Aragon Committees app v1.0.0-beta.2 has been released:
Tim Draper Backed Aragon, Disrupts Traditional Governance With A Decentralized Court: Aragon Court and TiDraper’s stake featured on Forbes.
Augur:
Augur Weekly — New Hampshire to Nevada: A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.
More on Augur:
- Augur.net
- Augur v2: A Tour of the Prediction Protocol’s First Major Upgrade
- The Ultimate Guide to Decentralized Prediction Markets
- Augur Master Plan
- Announcing the Augur v1 Cutoff
- Augur v2 Transition Update
Basic Attention Token:
Brave Browser partners with Wayback Machine to fight 404 errors:
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately? Episode #2: Third-Party Cosmetic Filtering: Brave is releasing a new system for hiding unwanted, privacy harming page elements. These include empty page space caused by blocking trackers, and third-party ads that cannot be blocked at the network layer. Brave’s system uniquely attempts to hide tracking third-party ads, while supporting sites that use privacy-preserving first-party ads. You can help test this system by downloading and using Brave Nightly. If everything looks good from testing, third-party cosmetic filtering will be in Brave’s stable release soon.
Failure to enforce the GDPR enables Google’s monopoly:
Coinbase:
Things You Need to Know about the Bitcoin Halving and Ethereum’s Competitors Nearing Launch. Coinbase Around the Block sheds light on key issues in the crypto space. In this edition, the team reveals key takeaways from the upcoming Bitcoin halving as well as Ethereum’s newest competition.
Coinbase becomes a Visa principal member: Coinbase becomes the first pure-play cryptocurrency company to receive Visa membership.
Onboarding thousands of users with React Native: A retrospective for companies considering React Native.
Reliable fee-less Bitcoin transactions in Custody with Child-Pays-for-Parent.
Send crypto more easily with Coinbase Wallet.
Kyber Network (KNC) is now available on Coinbase.
Decentraland:
The gates to Decentraland have opened! Over $100k USD in prizes to be won.
The Metaverse is officially open to the public, the culmination of many years of hard work and the beginning of a brand new era for Decentraland.
It sees the final implementation of a range of features integral to the development of the Metaverse:
- SDK: allowing Builders to create any sort of interactive 3D scene
- Builder: a drag-and-drop 3D editor that lets you build interactive scenes on your LAND without the need to code
- Marketplace: where people trade their virtual LAND, as well as Avatar accessories, wearables and names and our main product, the World Explorer, the web application that opens up the world to absolutely everyone
Read about another of the major implementations at our DAO Landing Page.
The Treasure Hunt has ended! 66k rewards were given to over 6k users, incl. 700k+ MANA, 590k ANJ, 82k+ MATIC, 10k+ wearables, 2k+ Cryptokitties, 33 Axies, 25 LAND and two HTC Exodus 1 phones. Congrats and thanks to the 12k+ active users who joined the fun!
Building the foundations for a decentralized virtual world: Setting up a DAO to decentralize policy, assets, and infrastructure; and a foundation to further Decentraland’s mission.
Dether:
district0x:
district0x Network Roadmap 2020: Where the team has been and where they are going in the coming year.
The District Weekly — February 29th: News and updates from the district0x Network.
The District Weekly — February 22nd.
Gitcoin:
Global Communities: Hackathon Retro.
Skynet Virtual Hackathon: Launching on Gitcoin 2/28.
Gnosis:
How to Securely Manage Company Crypto Funds with Gnosis Safe Multisig. In the post, Eric Conner explains the benefits of securing crypto in a multisig and walk through the 1-minute Gnosis Safe setup process.
Golem:
Meme-Driven Audience Profile Development: Golem & the Web3 Stack: As the team continues evolving their software and vision, they’re asking ourselves all the hard questions about what are they building, who are they building it for, and if they’re communicating it accordingly.
Keep Network:
Introducing tBTC: The Safest Way to Earn with Your Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Earn Wins ETHDenver tBTC Hackathon Prize.
Kyber Network:
Kyber’s On-Chain Liquidity Protocol enables Axie Infinity to accept ERC20 Payments for NFTs.
KyberDAO and a new KNC model will be launched in Q2!
UBT is now available on Kyber Network:
Loom Network:
Matthew Campbell has recently stepped down from his role as CEO of Loom Network, and with this departure, Vadim Macagon has taken over.
Vadim has been with Loom Network since its inception, and has held multiple roles during his time at the company, most recently as the Blockchain Engineering Manager.
What’s Changing?
Effective immediately, the team is discontinuing the bounty program. It didn’t work out how they expected it would, and just caused a lot of resentment.
Recently, they’ve been working on a couple of new projects, one targeting the healthcare industry and one targeting the travel industry. They’ll be posting details about these projects in the near future.
What’s Staying the Same?
Boosting Basechain performance remains a core goal for 2020, as well as expanding interoperability with other useful blockchains, and keeping a healthy token staking ecosystem with reputable validators.
They’ve previously mentioned improving the speed of Basechain using WASM and sharding, but performance is not just about the speed at which the chain can chew through transactions. The tean has been running blockchains for a while, and are well aware of the ever expanding disk usage and associated costs. So they’ll continue tuning the resource usage of Basechain nodes to drive down the costs.
At the same time, they’ll continue supporting all kinds of dapps on Basechain, improving the documentation, and providing dev support via Telegram.
Maker DAO:
Making Maker: February 2020: February was pretty darn amazing for Maker and for the community as a whole. From hitting a huge decentralized finance (DeFi) milestone (hint: it starts with a “B” and ends with “illion”) and Maker’s debut in the Forbes Fintech 50 to the release of the new white paper and Dai integration in Coinbase Commerce, ….. More news in the blog post, including Governance updates, new integrations, and event highlights, but let’s first look at the numbers from Daistats.com as of Feb. 28, 2020, 10:00 am PT.
Executive Vote: Activate the Debt Ceiling Adjustments and Set the Dai Savings Rate Spread.
Distributed Ledger Technology and the Trust Revolution.
How to Read Cryptocurrency Price Charts, and Why They Matter: This is the final installment of the six-part Welcome to Crypto series, which covers everything from the advantages of digital assets and how to buy crypto to how to read cryptocurrency price charts, and why they matter.
MetaMask:
MyEtherWallet:
MEW Welcomes Aave DeFi to Dapps Page.
Ocean Protocol:
Ocean Protocol partners with ProtoFire to build dApps: Expanding Ocean ecosystem and the open data economy with dApps. Ocean Protocol and ProtoFire are collaborating to build decentralized data marketplaces to facilitate the continued expansion of the open data economy.
OmiseGo:
Parity:
Write Wasm smart contracts with ink! 2.0.
Raiden Network:
Status:
Nimbus status update — February so far.
Streaming Mobile Money with Sablier.
Mobile DeFi: Advanced financial tools in your pocket.
Announcing the #stick2web3 Sticker Market Competition with over $1,500 in Prizes.
Storj:
The Team Has Reached $2 Million STORJ Tokens Paid to Storage Node Operators.
Catch Storj recent town hall and hear their latest company updates from the leadership team:
Streamr:
Streamr Community Survey Results.
Swash news: updated features, mobile compatibility and the road ahead.
Zilliqa:
Zilliqa wraps up token swap: 98.3% of interim tokens were exchanged for native ZIL, which can now be used for transactions, by DApps on the Zilliqa blockchain, and as gas fees.
Welcoming Industry Heavyweight Colin JG Miles as Head of Marketing at Zilliqa.
Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — January 2020.
Other project’s updates:
Compound Announces Governance Plan: Compound introduced its governance system this week that includes a new governance token called COMP. This new system will gradually turn over the governance of the Compound system to the community.
Compound hits 200m in assets:
Loopring Exchange Now Live: Loopring Exchange is the first publicly accessible zkRollup exchange on Ethereum mainnet. It is 100% non-custodial, inheriting Ethereum-level security guarantees while capable to perform at a throughput 1000x greater (and 600x cheaper settlement cost) than the current state of the art layer-1 DEXes.
Melon Terminal v2, a new frontend for Melon to go with Melon v1.1 adding assets and Uniswap/0x v3.
Melon as asset management automator.
Synthetix’s Achernar release is live, adding ETH as collateral: In the Achernar release, the Synthetix team is introducing Ether as an alternative form of collateral in Synthetix. It’s a major piece of new functionality, so they’re launching with a three month trial period to observe demand and user engagement.
Dharma Android App Now Live: Following last weeks iOS app release, the Dharma team have released their app to the Google Play store which means Android users can now earn 6.6% APR on their dollars in minutes.
Dharma now has fee-free debit card fiat<>Dai deposits and withdrawals.
Due to sponsors, PoolTogether is higher EV than just holding cDai/cUSDC.
PoolTogether tickets are now tokenized, here’s how to get a free one:
LINK RSI Set Launched: The LINKRSI Set from TokenSets implements a crossover strategy on the ChainLink Relative Strength Index oscillator indicator. LINK is the first crypto-asset other than ETH or BTC that is a components of a Set.
RealT Rent Payments V2: RealT is using Compound Finance to bolster the rental payments to RealToken holders. Rental income to token-holders will be increased by 1/2 of the Compound Dai Supply-Rate.
DeFiZap Integrated into Frontier: Mobile wallet app Frontier has integrated DeFiZap which means you can now access the dapp on the go.
Coinbase Wallet Integrates ENS: You can now send and receive ETH and tokens using your ENS name right inside of the popular Coinbase Wallet mobile app.
Introducing Decentraland Virtual Mortgage: You can now acquire up to $10,000 of LAND paying 12–40% interest over 6 months by collateralizing the loan with an NFT.
Announcing DeFi Audits: DeFi Audits is a new initiative to bring increased transparency to various DeFi protocols on Ethereum.
1x.ag — an automated leverage aggregator.
Uniflash Introduced: Uniflash is a decentralized flash loan protocol that gives all fees to users. It currently supports Ether and ERC20 tokens.
Remco Bloemen, Austin Williams and Stephane Gosselin also have some flashmint contracts out there.
Introducing saveDAI: With saveDAI, in just a few clicks you can open a dollar-based savings account that earns interest, has built-in insurance and can be easily transferred to another person or account of your own — all without dealing with a bank.
Introducing Burni: Burni is an experiment in creating non-fungible tokens with a proof-of-burn fungible token investment. As Burni-NFTs (“Burnins”) are minted, 97.5% of the original ERC-20 tokens are “used up” and removed from the total circulating supply, such that the base cryptocurrency becomes a finite deflationary resource.
Dripscore Introduced: Drip is an on-chain achievement dashboard. If you’ve completed any of the listed challenges on Drip (such as minting a Set, summoning a Cheeze Wizard, using Compound), you get more drip score.
Zora: a marketplace for Unisocks-style sales, from Saint Frame.
Nori: a marketplace for carbon removal, and how it fixes the problems with carbon offsets.
Creepts, a tower defense tournament on Rinkeby testnet.
Introducing DeFi Watch: Founded by Chris Blec, DeFi Watch is curating info on all things related to DeFi security and risk.
Opinion and research articles
From Ethresear.ch:
What’s New in Eth2–21 Feb 2020
- From my new PegaSys colleague, Alex Vlasov, Time as a Public Service in Byzantine context. Not specific to Eth2, but an important consideration for any distributed system relying on the accuracy of time reporting.
- Here’s the follow-up article, Time attacks and security models which considers a security model for the Eth2 beacon chain.
- Vitalik is thinking about 51% attack recovery in blockchains.
- Dankrad is Preventing shard state data loss using custody roots — a nice presentation of proofs of custody and data availability checks in near-stateless Eth2, with cost estimates.
- PegaSys again: Nicolas Liochon sparks a lively discussion with Trustless validator blackmailing with the blockchain. He identifies a way for an attacker to make money from getting people’s private keys, or pretending to.
- Casey has A protocol for cross-shard ETH transfers that’s simpler and more transparent than its predecessors.
- Finally, Sam from the Quilt team has just published his work on Automated Detection of Dynamic State Access in Solidity. This is about checking that contracts only do static state access. That is, they only access parts of state knowable in advance, which helps with state witness construction in transactions.
- Barry Whitehat zk ideas: private social network search and private order matching
- “ProgPoW: The Ethereum Community Speaks” Blog Post by Hudson
Podcasts and videos
Optimism: Scaling Ethereum with Optimistic Rollups on Into the Ether. Karl Floersch and Ben Jones from the Optimism team join the podcast to discuss their research and plans around optimistic rollups, a scaling solution for Ethereum. They break down and explain what optimistic rollups are and how they can improve the Ethereum experience. They recently announced the OVM which allows application developers to easily port over their smart contracts from the EVM chain to the OVM chain. They then talk about their recent funding raise and unique ways to fund these efforts. This is a great walkthrough of the new breakthrough scaling technology coming to Ethereum.
Diving Into Ethereum 2.0 Research, DeFi and Flash Loans with Joseph Delong on Into the Ether: Joseph Delong, senior software engineer at ConsenSys, joins the podcast to discuss a variety of Ethereum topics. Joseph has been heavily involved in Ethereum 2.0 research so we spend most of time on that topic. His research team, TXRX, was recently built out to research eth2 topics such as cross shard transactions, eth1 <> eth2 bridge and much more. He also has a passion for DeFi and he walks us through why and what excites him about it. They wrap up talking about flash loans and the powerful impact they will have on the space.
Keeping Crypto Safe with Richard Ma of Quantstamp on POV Crypto: CEO and co-founder of smart contract auditing firm Quantstamp, comes onto POV Crypto to illuminate the inner workings of the blockchain ecosystem. Quantstamp has been trusted to audit and verify the integrity of many of the money legos in the current DeFi ecosystem. They discuss the following topics:
- How Quantstamp was born
- New interest in getting Bitcoin in DeFi
- Dissecting the bZx exploits
- The implications of flash loans
- Dangerous attack vectors in DeFi
- Why permissionless finance important
Bitcoin and Ethereum with Andreas Antonopoulos on POV Crypto: Famously of neutral opinions in the Crypto-sphere, Andreas Antonopolous comes to give his POV about the Ethereum vs. Bitcoin debate. David asks Andreas his opinion on if Bitcoin is expressive enough to host a financial system. Christian asks Andreas what the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities get right and get wrong.
How 2 DeFi Attacks Made Almost $1 Million in Profit on Unconfirmed. Lev Livnev, a formal verification researcher at dapp.org and a founding partner at Symbolic Capital Partners, talks about the two attacks on bZx in the last week. He describes what the attackers did, why he thinks flash lending is not the culprit and how much he thinks bZx is to blame. Plus, they talk about what this means for DeFi in general and where the space goes from here.
Anthony Sassano: The main use-case for ETH 2.0 & The impact of social trading on Set Protocol on The Block Experience.
Chris Blec — Decentralised finance on ETH & Taking back financial control.
Decentralized Finance with Tom Schmidt on SE Daily.
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io (March 3rd, 2020):
2020s: The Rise of Ethereum: What the Internet did to data, Ethereum will do to finance.
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.
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.
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:
ZK Scaling will be unstoppable in 2020: Loopring and now DeversiFi.
CoronaCoin: Crypto Developers Seize on Coronavirus for New, Morbid Token.
Introducing HoloWallets.io — unique 3D-like recovery phrase wallets and QR cards.
Vitalik Buterin & Joe Lubin on stage at EthLondon:
Upcoming events
Mar 3–5 — EthCC (Paris)
Mar 14 — Augur v1 cutoff
Mar 29-Apr4 — EthLagos
Apr 3–6 — NonCon (Vienna)
Apr 13 — Deadline to apply for 50k euro for blockchain startups in Europe
Apr 24–26 — EthTurin
Apr 29–30 — SoliditySummit (Berlin)
May 7 — SmartCon0 (NYC)
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
