Ethereum biweekly vol.45: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, development tools and research articles
26th May — 9th June. Eth2 Witti multi-client testnet goes live, the State of Eth2 by Danny Ryan, Devcon VI announced, OMG Network launches, Loopring Pay is live, Raiden v1 is on mainnet, 1inch introduces Chi, Brave passes 15M monthly active users, and much more!
Greetings, fellow Ethereans! It is time for our biweekly summary of all things from the Ethereum ecosystem: development progress, project updates, events, conversations and all the other stuff that we’ve been up to these weeks. Let’s dig into what’s new with Paradigm!
Firstly, shortly after starting the Schlesi network, the team broke it. Ivan gives some of the detail in the latest update from Prysmatic Labs. They could have recovered Schlesi, as been said, the team is at a stage where testnets should be seen as pretty disposable and iterated rapidly. So, within a few days, Afri began work on the Witti testnet. This one was started with three clients at genesis (Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku) rather than the two for Schlesi. Getting started was a bit bumpy: there were some client disagreements over genesis time and fork versions that needed some swift fixes, but at midnight UTC on May 26th, Witti went live. Afri live streamed the event on Twitch. Witti has been running sweetly since, although Afri encouraged everyone to try to break it on the recent devs call. Check on progress at witti.beaconcha.in, and Eth2Stats.
Meanwhile, the Topaz network running the Prysm client just keeps on chugging, with an amazing number of validators now. Single client testnets are definitely easier than multi-client; nonetheless, Topaz has been an amazing success. The Prysm team is gathering feedback from users of the Prysm client. Hop on over and fill out the survey if you joined Topaz or Sapphire.
And it was a pretty significant time for the ecosystem. A lot has happened! OMG goes live with their More Viable Plasma implementation (running POA for now); Bitfinex integrated USDT on OMG. Loopring’s zkRollup now supports not just trading, but transfers as well. Raiden v1 is live on mainnet for DAI and WETH, with some token limits. RenVM mainnet is now live: this launch means anyone can now use real Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash or Zcash on Ethereum by using the RenBridge to swap it for tokenized versions on Ethereum. Dharma and Interstate open-source their Tiramisu optimistic rollup for token transfers. StarkWare released demo of onboarding 1.3m Reddit accounts onto Eth using Validium. Synthetix adds liquidations. Maker adds TUSD and USDC-B (a second set of collateralization parameters for USDC aimed at emergency situations). Enjin plugin for Minecraft to tokenize Minecraft items on your server is out. 1inch releases Chi, an optimized gastoken. mStable basket of stablecoins live on mainnet, includes yield from Compound/Aave plus swap fees — there’s a zero slippage stablecoin trade with 30 basis points of fees. Centrifuge’s Tinlake asset factoring is on mainnet, with factoring for freight shipping and Spotify payments. Brave hits 15 million monthly active users and 5 million daily. Aave integrates Uniswap LP tokens. Compound releases details on COMP distribution. Aztec launches PLONK Cafe. Rocket Pool 2.5 announced. Tornado.cash launches compliance tool. Gitcoin Grants round 6 is scheduled for June 15th. And much more!
Have a great week everyone and stay sharp!
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #88 [2020–05–29]
Discussion of EIPs for inclusion in Berlin hard fork, whether or not to include 2046 (static call to precompile gas reduction) and 2565 (modexp reprice). Working toward an ephemeral testnet for Berlin.
EIP-1559 Implementers’ Call #2
Notes from the EIP1559 call.
Discussion thread on meta transactions, oil, opcode repricing.
Snap sync mainnet benchmarking, single peer on AWS:
Expectations and limitations of upcoming Turbogeth release.
Compilation of the history of account abstraction work.
YOLO testnet is live — an ephemeral testnet to try to break EIPs for the upcoming hardfork:
Eth2.0 Call #40 [2020/5/27]
The State of Eth2, June 2020 by Danny Ryan:
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #51 — v0.12 testnet on the horizon: v0.12 testnet restart coming, results from the community feedback survey, open support for eth1 clients and more in PryLabs’ bi-weekly updates.
Prysm Eth2 Client Feedback: The PryLabs team are collecting feedback from anyone who has used their Prysm software to connect to the various eth2 testnets. You can fill out that form here.
Teku: an Eth2 client for enterprise.
The new multi-client testnet is Witti. Here’s a guide to staking.
A guide to testnet staking with Nethermind and LighthouseCross-shard transaction simulation.
More eth2 validator agent based simulations in CadCAD.
8 things you should consider before staking.
RocketPool is going to wrap the ETH locked up in Eth2 staking, thus giving liquidity to eth2 stakers.
Stats from crawling Eth2 testnets:
Layer2:
Alderaan Mainnet Released: Last week, the Raiden Network Alderaan release went live on the Ethereum mainnet. The Alderaan release is the first full suite version of Raiden and it introduces a bunch of exciting new features including monitoring services, pathfinding services and mediation fees, compared to the Red Eyes release.
OMG Network V1 Public Mainnet Beta Now Live: This new public beta is a fully trustless, low cost, high throughput way to transfer value at the same level of security as Ethereum. The OMG Network uses the More Viable Plasma (MoreVP) specification to increase the processing capacity of Ethereum.
Loopring Pay is Live: zkRollup Transfers on Ethereum: Loopring Pay is live! Loopring’s zkRollup now supports not just trading, but transfers as well. You can send ETH and ERC20 tokens instantly, for free, and with the same 100% Ethereum security guarantees Loopring always upholds. Ethereum scales with Loopring. It scales exchanges, and it scales payments — it does so today, and it does so securely. Loopring Monthly Update: Lots of updates from the team last week including a recap of the Loopring Protocol 3.5 release, Loopring’s DEX settled over 1M trades and has a new key management system with the Loopring Wallet being audited and entering beta soon.
StarkWare Reddit Onboarding Demo: Using StarkEx, the StarkWare team trustlessly onboarded to Ethereum Mainnet 1.3M accounts with initial balances, effectively demonstrating how an entire subreddit the size of r/FortNiteBR (with its Brick tokens) could be brought onto Mainnet. The amortized price per transfer: 600 gas. The team created no network congestion in the process. They did it over a ~12 hour period while using 2.5% of the network. We paid gas prices that were on average 30% below the average block gas price during this time.
Deconstructing a state channel app and how a dev interacts with a state channel wallet
A zk-rollups to scale blockchain explainer.
Understanding optimistic rollups by building one.
Dharma and Interstate open-source their Tiramisu optimistic rollup for token transfers.
Offchain data with zk proofs is now being called Validium.
What is the difference between zk rollup (data onchain) and Deversifi’s Validium (data offchain)?
An attack illustrating Validium trust assumptions.
What’s New in Eth2–30 May 2020: Ben update us on where we’re at with phase 0, provides a post-mortem on the recent testnets (Topaz and Schlesi), explains whats next (Witti), and provides the usual resources and research updates.
TXRX Team Update: Updates on the eth1 <> eth2 merge, the eth2 network monitor, the results of a cross-shard transaction simulation and more.
Development tools
Solidity v0.6.9 adds SMT-checking to solc-js, allows calldata for all variables and provides a mechanism to specify an import directory.
Array slices in Solidity v0.6
Testing the effects of a call in Waffle
Truffle v5.1.27 — debugger support for Solidity inline assembly
Buidler v1.3.6 adds Solidity v0.6.x
Sourcify decentralized automated contract verifying service
Covalent’s DeFi SDK for historical data
VS Code extension to write DeFi applications in NodeJS
Using Dapphero for your frontend
How Aragon minimized gas costs for Aragon Court
Loredana’s Taylor lisp-like language is on four testnets
Austin Griffith’s tutorial on buidling a simple decentralized exchange
Tornado Cash integrates Chainlink gas price oracles for TOR users
Verifying merkle multiproofs in Solidity
Trail of Bits found 20 bugs fuzzing the Solidity compiler
Upgradeable contracts using diamond standard
Typescript types for Solidity AST
i18n translation strings for Defi, available as npm package
Build your first Harberger tax app tutorial
eth95: retro UI for calling contract functions
BLS12–381 pairing-friendly curve in JavaScript
Governance and new standards proposals
Summoning the spirit of DAO ops
Democracy Mars: a DAO to fund Mars-related projects
ERC2680: eth2 standard wallet layout and naming format
ERC2678: EthPM v3
EIP2681: Limit account nonce to 2⁶⁴-1
EIP2677: Limit initcode size
ERC2696: JavaScript ‘request’ method RPC transport
ERC2700: JavaScript Provider Event Emitter
Follow the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
Ethereum by the Numbers — May 2020:
Devcon6 Announced: The next Devcon will be taking place in Bogotá, Colombia in 2021! Unfortunately, there won’t be a Devcon in 2020 (due to obvious reasons) but there are plans for more Ethereum Foundation run online events — stay tuned.
ETHOnline Announced: ETHOnline is a new online-only hackathon from ETHGlobal that will take place from October 2nd to October 30th. Sign up here.
ETHGlobal’s HackMoney finalists:
And all sponsor prize winners.
Ethereum Cat Herders Update #22: Updates on the upcoming Berlin network upgrade, events and hackathons, EIP-1559 and much more.
Receive email notifications to renew your .eth names.
1inch releases Chi, an optimized gastoken.
Newly updated client specs for Enterprise Ethereum from the EEA.
Ethereum Co-Founder’s Firm Starts Compliance Service for Tokens: Headed by one of Ethereum’s co-founders, Joseph Lubin, the New York-based company is rolling out a product focused on the know-your-customer regulatory compliance requirements that have proved to be a headache for many cryptocurrency firms.
Federal Reserve Chairman says AMERIBOR (built on a private Eth chain) meets the benchmarks for a reference rate, though “it may not be a natural fit”.
First Central Bank Digital Currency public blockchain transaction is on Ethereum: Societe General issued €40m of covered bonds as security tokens and paid with Banque de France digital euros. While the press release does not make it clear, the transaction was on Ethereum mainnet.
The Ethereum Foundation is looking for auditors for the Python Eth2 deposit CLI. RFP here.
Why Ethereum is the Best Blockchain for Gaming Items.
Everything You Need to Know About Reddit’s New Blockchain-Based Community Points.
zkRollup vs. Validium (StarkEx).
Ethereum 2.0 Staking for Enterprise.
Starkware’s 4 Part Self-Custody Series.
Projects updates
0x:
Explore 0x with Dune Analytics: 0x metrics are now publicly available on Dune Analytics!
Aave:
HackMoney Hackathon: Bringing the HEAT.
May Update: New Uniswap Market, Better Rates for Borrowers, and Hackathons Galore.
The Uniswap Market is Live on Aave Protocol!
Rage against the (EV)Machine part 2: gas costs and optimizations: In part 2 of his blog post series, Bingen Eguzkitza discusses challenges optimizing gas costs and how we solved them when developing Aragon Court.
Aragon Chain development update is out: public testnet coming soon!
Augur v2 Deployment Update:
The Augur team has teamed up with the 0Project. 0x team to give the Augur community exclusive early access to Matcha during the closed beta.
More on Augur:
- Augur v2 Deployment Details — Launching v2 and REP migration
- Augur App Release v1.16.11 — Cutoff for v1 moved to May 15th
- Augur v2: A Tour of the Prediction Protocol’s First Major Upgrade
- The Ultimate Guide to Decentralized Prediction Markets
- Augur Master Plan
Unlocking Single-Token Exposure in Automated Market Maker Pools:
- Until now, automated market maker (AMM) pools have required liquidity providers to be exposed to every token in an AMM.
- With Bancor V2, users will be able to provide liquidity to AMMs while maintaining 100% exposure to a single token.
- This removes a major point of friction for token teams and holders who want to provide liquidity, but don’t want to give up their long position on the token.
Incident Post Mortem: June 1, 2020.
Maker (MKR) is launching on Coinbase Pro.
Coinbase launches staking rewards for customers in the UK, France, Spain and The Netherlands.
Making ‘money moves’ on Coinbase.
Coinbase to acquire leading institutional crypto brokerage, Tagomi.
COMP Distribution, Hack Money Recap, Constant Q&A:
COMP Token Distribution:
Since the announcement of Compound’s governance token, the most frequently asked question has been: how will COMP be distributed to the community?
The answer is now fully detailed in this blog post: Expanding Compound Governance.
To summarize, a portion of all COMP tokens will be moved into a reservoir contract. From there, they’ll be automatically distributed to each user of Compound, based on proportional use of the protocol by supplying and borrowing. Over time, users will accumulate more and more COMP, and increase their ability to participate in protocol governance.
Once the distribution begins, you can track the progress on the COMP Distribution dashboard.
Guardian Functionality Abdicated:
Since October 2019, the protocol’s new Governance system has been tested with the ability to revert to manual administration in an emergency. As of June 1st, 2020, this functionality, known as Pause Guardian, was disabled. This is one of the last steps towards full decentralization of Compound — complete control of the protocol has been handed over to COMP token holders and their delegates.
ETHGlobal’s Hack Money Conclusion:
The team saw 27 Ethereum projects that integrated the Compound protocol. It was very difficult for the judges to select winners from the set of fantastic submissions.
The co-winners of the 2000 cUSDC Compound borrow bounty are:
- cChannels — A crypto “bar-tab” type of payment system that uses the Compound protocol for interest and borrowing with ETH and DAI.
- Atomic Ninja — An atomic Ethereum transaction batcher with a drag-and-drop user interface for aggregating various DeFi systems.
Congratulations buidlers! Here are some of our favorite runner-up submissions:
- Medici — An interest-earning wallet for digital cash.
- Maximus — A community owned/governed version of MakerDAO that enables supplying/borrowing with Compound.
- tCDP — Automated movement of assets amongst DeFi protocols to avoid liquidation fears in over-collateralized borrowing.
- Defido2 — Hardware wallet CLI that has functions for DeFi, which include supplying ETH and DAI to Compound, as well as borrowing.
- NFWallets — A browser based wallet that enables users to utilize much of DeFi.
- Suicide Kings — A no-loss ERC1155 game where players vote to win interest generated with Compound.
Other hackathon submissions that used the Compound protocol can be further explored on the ETHGlobal website.
Over the last two months, the Dharma team has collaborated closely with Interstate on developing a practical layer-two system for scaling peer-to-peer payments on Ethereum. Last week, they open-sourced Tiramisu — their implementation of this system.
Dharma users can natively buy & sell ETH from their Dharma balance.
Gitcoin Grants round 6 is scheduled for June 15th.
The Golem team announced their latest research: the Proof-of-Device (PoD) mechanism proves that the user has physical access to the given device. It is another take on 2FA or U2F authentication methods:
Solving Challenges in Golem with gWASM: Take a deep dive into the inner workings of gWASM!
Keep’s Stakedrop Event Started on Monday.
1 Million KEEP Awarded as Playing for Keeps Wraps Up Its First Month.
Kyber partners with Protofire to allow anyone to operate a trustless KyberDAO Pool.
Stake Capital partners with Kyber to provide convenient KNC staking and delegation services.
Quant Network (QNT) is now available on Kyber Network.
Binance USD (BUSD) is now available on Kyber Network.
Executive Vote: Raise the ETH Debt Ceiling: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.
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.
TUSD and USDC-B Approved by Maker Governance as Collateral Types in the Maker Protocol: MKR holders have accepted TUSD (TrueUSD) and USDC-B (the USDC token with different risk parameters) as new collateral assets in the Maker Protocol.
Dai Gaming Initiative Update: The First MakerDAO Game Bounty Winners: The first MakerDAO game bounties have been awarded. Bounties are still available in other categories, including Best PvP Experience and Best PvE experience.
Maker Governance Review: May 2020: A series of monthly recaps of all Governance activity, from Governance Cycle progress and polling and voting history to blog posts focused on community decision-making
Governance Polls: Adjustments to Base Rate and more: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents adjustments to the Base Rate, and asks if Monetary Policy votes should use Ranked Choice voting.
Making Maker: May 2020: A recap of Maker’s activities in May.
Executive Vote: Add USDC-B and TUSD as New Collateral Types.
The Dai Backstop Syndicate: Decentralization at Work: The Dai Backstop Syndicate was a powerful community-driven initiative that fostered confidence in Maker and proved decentralized organizing can be effective.
Web3 Data Economy Builders: Building a business as DAO: Alex Svanevik, Data Scientist and Founder of D5 and Nansen AI, on the crossroad of DAOs and Data.
Ocean Compute-to-Data in JupyterLab: A demo of remote execution of compute algorithms on datasets.
How Does Ocean Compute-to-Data Relate to Other Privacy-Preserving Approaches?: A survey spanning Federated Learning, Homomorphic Encryption, Multiparty Compute, and more.
Alderaan Mainnet Released: Last week, the Raiden Network Alderaan release went live on the Ethereum mainnet. The Alderaan release is the first full suite version of Raiden and it introduces a bunch of exciting new features including monitoring services, pathfinding services and mediation fees, compared to the Red Eyes release.
Set Community Update #11 — May 2020.
Introducing Jesse Livermore, Professional Asset Manager — Set Social Trader Spotlight.
Argent — Set Social Trader AMA Series.
Status Core Dev Call #31 — June 01, 2020: Status Core Dev Call #31 — June 01, 2020. The team catches up on the topics ranging from progress for Images support, Keycard, Network spamming, Specs & much more.
Usernames in the Status Messenger: Naming is a challenging part of infosec and privacy tech.
Getting Started With Tardigrade.
Liquidation FAQ’s: Some questions and answers about how the new liquidation mechanism works.
Balancer SNX/USDC liquidity trial: Details on the new trial to incentivise SNX/USDC liquidity on Balancer.
Halite product release: All the info you need about this week’s front-end updates!
The Altair release: Everything you need to know about our upcoming Altair release.
A³: Altair, Acrux and Aldebaran: An overview of our next three system releases.
A guide to claiming SNX staking rewards cheaply: Here’s a guide to using a delegated wallet to claim SNX staking rewards cheaply!
Uniswap V2 sXAU/USDC liquidity incentive trial: Details about the new liquidity trial for sXAU/USDC on Uniswap V2.
What you need to know before staking SNX for the first time: Everything you should know before staking.
The Uniswap Market is Live on Aave: Users can now use Uniswap LP shares as collateral with Aave’s lending protocol.
Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — May 2020.
Get $ZIL, Send Goodwill: SocialPay 2.0 Corporate Social Responsibility campaign.
Other project’s updates:
mStable Now Live on Mainnet: mStable is a protocol that unites stablecoins, lending and swapping into one robust and easy to use standard. The first mStable features (Mint, Save and Swap) are live on their website.
RenVM Mainnet Released: RenVM Mainnet is now live. This launch means anyone can now use real Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash or Zcash on Ethereum by using the RenBridge to swap it for tokenized versions on Ethereum.
Aztec Launches PLONK Cafe: PLONK Cafe is a forum for technical discussion and collaboration on TurboPLONK, Plookup, and other cutting-edge Universal SNARK technologies.
Matic Network Updates: Matic holders will be able to stake from many mobile wallets (Coinbase Wallet, Frontier, imToken etc), Ispolink has joined the Matic ecosystem, and Matic announced their support for ETHIndia’s Online hackathon Chain Runner.
Centrifuge Goes Live: The team launched two products this week — Tinlake, their securitization app which lets investors and borrowers finance their own asset pools and Centrifuge Chain, their Proof-of-Stake blockchain.
EnjinCraft Plugin for Minecraft Introduced: EnjinCraft brings the power of blockchain to Minecraft, making it easy to tokenize Minecraft items and integrate them with your server.
Fortmatic Raises $4mil and Rebrands: Formatic has raised $4mil in a seed round led by Placeholder with participation from Lightspeed Ventures, SV Angel, Social Capital and more. Fortmatic also rebranded to ‘Magic’ to better reflect the service that they offer.
Simplified pricing for Nexus Mutual.
View keys for Tornado Cash to show origin of funds.
Introducing Pool Pipes: Pool Pipes are a feature released by the ZapperFi team that aims to help reduce liquidity fragmentation throughout DeFi.
Rocket Pool 2.5 Announced: Major features include the introduction of tokenized staking deposits, continous staking, extra deposit safety and updated RPL tokenomics.
Numerai Riases $3m: The round had participation from Union Square Ventures, placeholder, CoinFund, Dragonfly Capital and Numerai founder Richard Craib.
Strike Protocol Monthly Update: The Strike Protocol team provide an update on everything that’s happened since they exited stealth mode at the beginning of May.
Towards the First Release of Turbo-Geth: Alexey gives an update on when the much-anticipated Turbo-Geth eth1 client will be released and runs through all the progress that’s been made over the last 2 years.
Introducing DeFi777: DeFi777 simplifies existing DeFi systems by turning common DeFi actions into simple token transfers. The goal is to be able to take advantage of these protocols from any crypto wallet, without requiring Dapp browsers like Metamask.
YOLOv1 Launched: YOLOv1 is a temporary Ethereum testnet that’s been spun up to test the JUMPSUB and BLS EIPs that are slated to go into the next eth1 network upgrade. Geth v1.9.15 was also released.
Haven App Adds ETH Support: You can now use ETH as part of the buy and sell flow on the Haven App on iOS and Android.
Introducing Umbra: Umra is a privacy preserving stealth payments implementation built on Ethereum (and created at HackMoney 2020). You can learn how it works by watching this video.
Foundation Announced: Foundation is a new platform that claims the power of the stock exchange and reinvents it for independent artists, designers, and brands. It’s similar to other projects like Zora.
Satellite — sign data with your Eth address, with data distribution on IPFS and BitTorrent.
Enter the Ether Announced: Enter the Ether is a new social governance experience for Ethereans — you can sign up here to be notified when it launches.
Podcasts
dYdX: Taking a Decentralized Exchange Mainstream on Into the Ether.
Sergey Nazarov Talks Chainlink on The Defiant.
Talking Opyn with Alex Gauba on The Defiant.
ETH is Undervalued on Bankless.
How to Decentralize a Crypto Project Without Harming Security on Unchained.
Data, DAOs, and Beyond with Alex Svanevik on Voices of Data Economy.
Videos
HackMoney Finale:
Multi-scalar multiplication ZK study club video:
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io (June 9th, 2020):
Defi will do to banks what the web did to newspapers
Opyn put options as a trading strategy
Kaiko launches historical tick-by-tick order book data for Coinbase, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp
Roadmap
Vitaliks eth2 and beyond flow chart:
An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap.
To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.
Eth2 — Serenity
Serenity is the last stage of Ethereum development. It will introduce Eth2, the new Ethereum blockchain that will finally have Casper, a new Ethereum Virtual Machine, and much more. The goal of Serenity is to improve the scalability, security, and programmability of Ethereum. Instead of 15 TPS on a single chain, Eth2 will process thousands to tens of thousands of transactions per second without compromising on decentralization.
The majority of developers foresee these main phases of Eth1’s evolution to Eth2:
- Phase 0: Beacon Chain (Q1 2020)
- Phase 1: Shard Chains (2021)
- Phase 2: eWASM (New Ethereum Virtual Machine) (2021/early 2022)
- Continued Improvement (2022)
Phase 0 — Beacon Chain Shipping in late Q2/early Q3 of 2020
On the beacon chain, we will finally see Casper. The Beacon Chain will be a separate blockchain from the main Ethereum blockchain. This new chain will have a PoS consensus algorithm, and it will run in parallel to the main PoW Ethereum blockchain. Initially, the blockchain will be created for simplicity and will not support smart contracts or accounts.
Phase 1 — Sharding Shipping in 2021
Sharding will be introduced on the Beacon chain, and it will have initially 100 shards. Validators will validate transactions from their own shard, and in the first phase, they won’t approve any smart contract, account or asset.
While sharding will bring more scalability, there are a few setbacks to take into account. Validators have a small pool of transactions to validate, which makes it easier for a 51% attack, as they only need 51% computing power (or stake) of the shard they are in, instead of the whole network. This technique can also lead to higher centralization, as each shard can be validated with a small group of validators.
It will be fascinating to see how this stage is implemented, as it still needs thorough testing to ensure all validators are randomly selected to avoid centralization and any risk attack.
Phase 2 — State Execution Shipping in late 2021/early 2022
During Phase 2, the foundational aspects of the previous Eth2 releases will come together and provide functionality for the updated network. A new operational mechanism called Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) will be launched instead of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. eWASM will work much faster.
One of the main issues with the current EVM is that it processes transactions sequentially. With the PoS and Sharding changes, there’s a need to process transactions in parallel, and the current EVM won’t be suitable for this.
The new EVM called stands for Ethereum WebAssembly, an open standard defining a portable binary code format for executable programs. This new architecture for the EVM will allow for much better performance and will make it possible to support smart contracts, accounts, states and much more on the new blockchain. The current status of the eWASM development is at the very early stages, as it is planned to be released in 2021. There’s still a lot of research to do around this phase.
Continued Improvement
Continued Improvement is the code name to encompass all the future changes, fixes and improvements of the previous stages, and whatever comes along. The following technologies to be implemented:
- Cross-shard transactions
- Lightweight clients
- Super-square charting
- Closer ties
See the Eth2 Phase 2 Wiki for current progress, discussions, and definitions regarding this work. The Eth2 Project Management repo holds ongoing notes and meetings.
Other
Hundreds of thousands of Thai users switching to Minds, a Twitter/Facebook hybrid social network incentivized through an ERC20 token
Upcoming events
June 15 — Gitcoin CLR matching grants begins
June 16 — deadline to apply for Gitcoin’s Kernel incubator
Oct 2-Oct 30 — EthOnline hackathon
Check out Ethereum virtual events list.
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.
This is not financial advice.
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Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Reddit.
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
