Open in app

Sign in

Write

Sign in

Ethereum Digest: Protocol and ecosystem development, research and debates

Paradigm
Paradigm
Published in
25 min readOct 24, 2018

9th October — 23rd October

Development

GitHub metrics

The number of commits changes every day (in some repositories — several times a day). In in some repositories there are commits for just one day. This prevents us from analyzing development dynamics and from generating relevant statistics.

Developer activity (from coinlib.io)

Protocol updates

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #48 [10/12/18]:

  1. Testing;
  2. Client Updates;
  3. Research Updates;
  4. Constantinople/Ropsten HF;
  5. ProgPoW.

GitHub Agenda Page. Audio/Video of the meeting. Notes.

Every client is Constantinople — compatible. Except: Trinity, ethereumJS, exthereum.

Next Core Dev meeting will be in four weeks (Nov 9, 2018).

An intermediate Constantinople special call in one week, to evaluate the fork on Ropsten, see if it’s going well, announce a preliminary block number for mainnet HF. If something goes wrong, it will be put on hold until January.

GitHub — Parity 2.0.8-stable (Critical Constantinople bug fix for Ropsten testnet).

Ethereum Testnet Bug Found and Fixed: A bug that chain-split ethereum’s Ropsten testnet has been identified and fixed within hours. As it was guessed, it had something to do with a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that adds efficiency gains to gas calculations with only Parity seemingly affected. “The bug has been fixed. It affects parity and aleth, which we had the same bug,” Wei Tang, a Rust developer at Parity told Trustnodes, with aleth being a C++ eth client.

Sit Down, Skeptics. Ropsten Testnet Consensus Issue Solved: By Sunday, October 14, a handful of core developers, including Alexey Akhunov, Martin Holst Swende, and Wei Tang, identified the issue and fixed it. As far as we know, the issue affected Parity Ethereum and Aleth but not Geth. It is unclear if the issue affected other clients. However, the issue was identified and addressed in an update of Parity Ethereum’s code, which can be found here. The updated Aleth code is also available.

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting Constantinople Session #2 [10/18/18]:

  • Ropsten issues.
  • When fork?

Constantinople Progress.

Per the notes, the fork is pushed to next year.

Issues we discovered in the Ropsten Constantinople hard fork: Lane Rettig’s writeup of the Ropsten testnet consensus failure for Constantinople.

Eth2.0 Implementers Call #5 [10/11/2018]:

  1. Client Updates;
  2. Research Updates;
  3. libp2p updates;
  4. Testing;
  5. Alternative tree storage structures;
  6. v2.1 Discussion;
  7. Open Discussion/Closing Remarks.

Ethereum 2.0 Implementers Call 5 Notes.

Ben Edgington’s Eth 2.0 slides for Paris talk. What’s New in Eth 2.0. What’s new in Eth 2.0 (15th October).

Ewasm Community Meetup SF [10/4/18].

Introduction to Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs): Intro to VDFs from Trail of Bits. Peter Robinson talk on randomness.

Comparison of Plasma designs by Eva Beylin.

Plasma Implementers Call #15: 🔀 Atomic Swaps!: atomic swaps in both Plasma Debit and Plasma Cash; different implementation details and greifing opportunities; some fun discussions around watch towers. Plasma Debit implementation from Georgios/Loom. Multi Exits.

RSA Accumulators for Plasma Cash history reduction: Vitalik Buterin on Plasma.

Plasma Cash defragmentation, take 3: Vitalik Buterin on Plasma.

Towards more efficient Plasma Cash constructions: Georgios Konstantopoulos on Plasma.

Optimizing sparse Merkle trees by Vitalik Buterin.

Twitter — Eric Conner’s economics of staking, with Vitalik adding some numbers on Reddit.

Suggested average-case improvements to reduce capital costs of being a Casper validator — Vitalik on Casper:

  1. Add a rule that the withdrawal delay is not a fixed number of seconds or slots; instead, it is linearly proportional to the number of ETH that was in the active validator set at the time that you join (eg. 3 months if it’s 10 million, 9 months if it’s 30 million, but only ~3 weeks if it’s 2.5 million). Alternatively, we can add a cap at eg. ~3 months.
  2. Instead of having a hard ~3 month withdrawal time, when a validator withdraws put them at the end of a withdrawal queue, and if one period has length equal to 3 months * k (eg. k = 0.001), each period process a maximum k * active_validator_set_size validators from the front of the queue.

(1) ensures that under conditions of lower security demand, the total validator count does not decrease as much since more validators would be willing to participate with a lower withdrawal time, thereby spreading out the security loss evenly between reducing the cost of a 51% attack and reducing the maximum safe offline period. (2) ensures that validators can withdraw very quickly in “the normal case” but not during attacks. (1) and (2) can be combined by making the number of withdrawals processed per period be a fixed number.

Ethereum 2.0 Casper+Sharding Development Update #15: biweekly updates written by the entire Prysmatic Labs team on Ethereum 2.0.

Merged Code, Pull Requests, and Issues:

  • Minimal Viable RANDAO Implementation
  • New Special Record Object
  • Validator Rotation
  • Refactor Crystallized State

Upcoming Work:

  • Implementing SSZ
  • Implement Private Key Management
  • BLS Signature Aggregation
  • GHOST Fork Choice Rule

Casper Standup 71.

Video — Live from Mevo at Ethereum Engineering Group youtube channel.

Account Abstraction Radically Simplified: Daniel A Nagy, EVM/eWASM.

State Channel Researchers Call #5: video.

State Channel Researchers Call #4:

- Lucian Boca presenting “Threshold Signature: Improving the security of layer-2 protocols”
- Discussion & QA around that

So what exactly is Vlad’s Sharding PoC doing?: Vlad’s sharding PoC that won at EthSF was a joint project with NEAR. Vlad’s viz. The NEAR also published TxFlow: Towards faster cross-shard transactions by rerouting transactions bypassing the beacon chain.

CoinFund Live: Crypto Talks with Ewasm’s Lane Rettig (Crypto NYC) and Alex Beregszaszi: Alex Beregszaszi and Lane Rettig talk ewasm with Jake Brukhman.

Development tools

GitHub — EthSecurity resources.

Discovering Signature Verification Bugs in Ethereum Smart Contracts: Discovering signature verification bugs.

Interface for aggregating on-chain data to avoid incessant Infura calls.

Maker’s code for market making and arb bots.

web3x — a Typescript port of web3JS.

Introducing Cent Wallet: Cent Wallet’s tradeoffs between usability and trustlessness.

3 Proposals For Making Web3 A Better Experience — Ronan Sandford: The case for automated origin checks, non-interactive signatures, and non-interactive decryption.

shadowlands — a Python, text UI platform to use dApps in terminal without a web browser.

Prepare your dapp for optional web3 injection (eip1102).

Ethers.js v4.0 — rewritten in TypeScript; better ENS support, events emitter, event filters, etc.

EtherLime using ether.js v4 and solc v.0.4.25; 40% code coverage on CLI and 100% on API.

Buidler — first Ethereum task runner.

Sweet updates about Truffle on Azure.

web3x v1.1 — web3js in Typescript. Also, EVM in Typescript.

Poor man’s DecodeABI in Solidity from Austin Griffith.

Pixura’s GraphQL API for NFTs.

Multicall — group multiple calls into a single call and aggregate results.

Connext’s post-mortem on the SpankChain hack, plus Docker imagesof their hubs.

Messaging in Raiden and why they chose Matrix. Also testnet v0.14.

Mind Breed — a Brainfuck interpreter where you have to sacrifice a CryptoKitty to add an instruction.

Matryx wrote its code in Yul/Julia to save on gas.

Preview of Formality language featuring formal proofs from Victor Maia.

Deprecation of v0.5 Aragon DAOs on Rinkeby.

web3j Gradle plugin for Java, Kotlin and Android devs.

Get server-side rendering benefits without building SSR logic.

Zeppelin on EVM packages: re-usable, upgradeable, on-chain code. available in ZeppelinOS and AragonOS.

Slither — Solidity static analysis framework from Trail of Bits.

Governance and new standards proposals

EIP1482: Define a maximum block timestamp drift.

ERC1480: Access Control Standard.

ERC1483: Digital Identity Aggregator.

ERC1155 gas benchmarking.

ERC1497: Evidence standard.

ERC1484: Digital identity aggregator.

ERC1511: Manager token standard.

ERC1504: Upgradeable standard.

ERC1505: Token forwarding.

ERC1513: Refungible ERC721 Asset with Fungible ERC20.

Talk of a KEVM client for consensus tests to build on the JelloPaper of the EVM in K.

AGP1 — vote on Aragon’s governance process on November 15th.

Why Autonomy Matters: Luke Duncan’s response and Vitalik’s response (mutability is not feasible) to Vlad’s governance posts.

Ecosystem updates

Ethereum blog:

Ethereum Foundation Grants Update — Wave IV:

Scalability:

  • Non-Custodial Payment Channel Hub​​ — $420K. Payment upon delivery for the open source SDK release built by Spankchain, Kyokan, and Connext at Devcon 4.
  • Prototypal​​ — $375K. Front-end state channel research and development.
  • Finality Labs​​ ​​– $250K. Development of Forward-Time Locked Contracts (FTLC).
  • Kyokan​​ ​​– $250K. Development of production ready mainnet Plasma Cash & Debit plugins.
  • Atomic Cross-Chain Transactions — $65K. Research led by Maurice Herlihy of Brown University.
  • EthSnarks​​ ​​– $40K. Development of a cross-compatible SDK for zkSNARKS to be viable on Ethereum.

Security:

  • Flintstones — $120K. Further development of the Flint Language including a security focused IDE by Susan Eisenbach of Imperial College London.

Usability (DevEx):

  • TrueBlocks ​​– $120K. Open source block explorer.
  • Gitcoin​​ — $100K. Funding bounties on Gitcoin.
  • VulcanizeDB ​​– $75K. “Community sourced” block explorer.
  • Buidler ​​– $50K. Development of modular alternative to Truffle based on Ethers.js.
  • Ethdoc​​ — $25K. Open source tool for organization and interaction of smart contract codebases.
  • Ethers.js​​ — $25K. Support for ricmoo to continue development and maintenance of Ethers.js.
  • Kauri​​ — $25K. Funding documentation bounties on Kauri.

(#BUIDL):

  • Magic Money Tree (Dark Crystal) — $50K. Tool for securely storing and recovering keys and secrets through a multisig design by the Secure Scuttlebutt Team.

Hackternships:

Client Diversity:

  • Sigma Prime​​ — $150K. Lighthouse Eth 2.0 client in Rust.
  • Prysmatic Labs — $500K. Eth 2.0 Prysm client.
  • Status ​​– $500K. Eth 2.0 client in Nim.

Announcing Our dc⟠ıv Sponsors and Supporters:

Devcon IV Premier Sponsors:

Scholarship And Grant Supporters:

Olympic Community Sponsors:

Devcon4 Team Reddit AMA.

Website — devcon4.ethereum.org

Devcon4 Local Guide to Prague.

Agenda Sneak Peak.

A Guide To Devcon4 Afterparties.

What the EEA and Hyperledger Collaboration Means for Enterprise Blockchain Development in Consensys blog: A point of view from one engineer who participated in both communities.

Introducing Helena: The Future of Advisory Research in Consensys blog: How Helena is solving the research gap in the blockchain space.

Improving Web3 Market Research and Token Data: TruSet is running competitions on their beta platform to help the community build the dataset our ecosystem needs.

11 Ways Ethereum Can Benefit Enterprise: Here’s how Ethereum blockchain solutions can future-proof business networks.

The Biggest Challenge to Enterprise Ethereum Isn’t Tech: It’s not scalability. It’s not interoperability. The biggest hurdle to blockchain adoption in the enterprise space is “sharing.”

ConsenSys Solutions Takes on Dublin, Ireland: ConsenSys Solutions works with enterprises, governments, non-profits, and partners to promote and build the Ethereum ecosystem. ConsenSys Solutions has co-created 40+ new ventures, consortia, and alliances across the globe, delivered 20+ enterprise projects, and is a founding member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Blockscout — open source block explorer from POANetwork/EthPrize.

There are some hiccups with the Ropsten hardfork, first with a lack of miners and then with a consensus error where Parity and Geth charged a different amount of gas for a transaction. This could possibly push back the Constantinople hard fork.

Aragon Nest Update — Evolution of the grants program: How Aragon’s grants program is evolving.

All the ETHSanFrancisco submissions. List of winners and runner-ups. Kyle Samani’s favorites.

Some clues about what Blockchains LLC is up to in their 67000 acres in Reno.

Mastering Ethereum by Andreas Antonopoulos to start shipping end of November.

Looking at ownership in the EVM by Kelvin Fichter.

Lessons learned squatting ENS domains.

Print your NFT onto schwag.

Mixeth — paper on trustless coinmixing service.

Projects updates

Augur:

Augur Weekly Report — October 10th.

Augur Weekly Report — October 17th.

The Long Shot: the inside story of Augur.

The Civil Foundation:

Forbes x Civil: A Major Milestone for Blockchain-Based Journalism: Forbes is officially joining the Civil network. With this news, Forbes becomes the first major media organization to commit to regularly publishing content to the blockchain.

The Civil Token Sale’s Eleventh Hour.

What’s Next for Civil: A setback, and the path forward — on October 15, Civil’s token sale came to an end without reaching its soft cap of $8 million. By the end of the sale, Civil had raised less than $1.5 million. Today, the company’s CEO and founder, Matthew Iles, published a statement on Medium: “We’re disappointed,” he wrote, “but we’re as committed as ever to seeing Civil out in the world.”

Getting a MetaMask wallet.

Coinbase:

ZRX is now available to trade on Coinbase Pro (Updated): ZRX trading on Coinbase Pro is now fully live. ZRX–USD, ZRX–BTC and ZRX–EUR order books are now in full trading mode. Limit, market and stop orders are all now available.

Buy and Sell ZRX on Coinbase: Coinbase supports ZRX at Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now buy, sell, send, receive, or store ZRX, along with Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin.

Coinbase Opens Office in Ireland as Part of Brexit Contingency Plan: San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has opened a new office in Dublin, Ireland, according to an announcement published Oct. 15. In addition to helping expand its operations in Europe, the new Irish offices are reportedly part of a contingency plan for when the U.K. leaves the E.U.

CryptoKitties:

CryptoKitties is more than a game — it’s a platform: the KittyVerse with updated terms of service, an open-source license, and a program to invest in creators.

How to get started and stay up to date on CryptoKitties

Empowering the next wave of blockchain creators.

How the CryptoKitties team plays the game they helped build: updating policies on how the team members can play CryptoKitties.

All great games need to be fair in order to be fun: CryptoKitties releases a new Code of Ethics.

Will you help real cats find furever homes?: CryptoKitties’ is partnering with non-profit Cat Town to use blockchain Kitties to help real cats.

Sheila Warren has been Kitty-fied: This blockchain leader knows everyone should have access to life-changing tech, and she’s telling the world.

Decentraland:

Buy and Sell LAND Estates: You can now buy and sell your LAND Estates in the Decentraland Marketplace.

Chainbreakers Joins Decentraland Partner Program.

Integrating Sprites into Decentraland Scenes: Learn how to add sprites to your Decentraland scenes in this quick developer tutorial.

Dether:

How Blockchain Tech Could Change Haiti: Sitting Down with Michelet Romulus: Could blockchain technology be the answer to Haiti’s recent difficulties?

Dharma:

Dharma Community Update: 8 October 2018: Recapping #DeFi Summit — San Francisco, ETHSanFrancisco Submissions, and introducing #DeFi Summit — Prague.

district0x:

Introduction to Blockchain Governance: A Lesson on Governance With Practical Examples.

The District Weekly — October 13th, 2018: News and updates from the district0x Network.

The District Weekly — October 20th, 2018: News and updates from the district0x Network.

district0x Dev Update — October 16th, 2018: Development progress and product changes from district0x.

Gitcoin:

Gitcoin’s Sprint To The Holidays: Updates from our summer, the road to Devcon, and Q4 Objectives.

Setting your OSS repo’s monetary policy: Specifying what contributions you’ll pay for and which you won’t helps avoid confusion & hurt feelings.

Increasing Action On Your Gitcoin Bounty: How to put your Gitcoin contributors to productive use.

Giveth:

Where are we NOW? Status of the Giveth DApp: Giveth is live on mainnet in closed beta, using Rinkeby and a bridge. Plans to change to POA Network when their new bridge is live. They’re looking for beta testers.

The story of Giveth’s new Matrix chatbot.

Gnosis:

Could Prediction Markets Prevent Wars?: A retrospective on the road to the Iraq war

Golem Project:

The first glimpse into Golem Unlimited.

Golem Unlimited — Demo Video.

ICONOMI:

Development Overview: Q3 2018.

eICN Frequently Asked Questions, Part I.

Keep:

Getting to Know the Keep Team: Nik: Keep continues “Getting to Know the Keep Team” series with one of developers, Nik Grinkevich.

What Makes a Community Great: Transitioning from enthusiastic community member to joining the Keep team.

Random Beacon Alpha API Demo Part 2: Digging into the random beacon contract’s methods and events.

Kyber Network:

Kyber Network <> Melon: Melon funds can now trade on Kyber as integration between Melon and Kyber network is complete.

Datum, Quarkchain and Republic Protocol are now available on Kyber Network: the Kyber reserve has added support for 3 new tokens: Datum (DAT), Quarkchain (QKC), and Republic Protocol (REN).

CoinGecko Integrates KyberWidget to Enable Instant Decentralized Token Swaps.

A Recap of ETHSanFrancisco.

Loom Network:

🧟 CryptoZombies Goes Global! 🌎 Meetups Around the World, Coming to a City Near You.

How You Can Become a PlasmaChain Delegator, and Help Put the ‘D’ in ‘DPoS’ 😎: To make highly scalable DApps possible, Loom has been building out a network of high-throughput Layer 2 sidechains linked to Ethereum as the backbone. These sidechains use Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) as a consensus mechanism. This means they use a limited number of high-performance validator nodes to secure the network, which in turn enables sub-second confirmation times at scale.

Loom SDK Projects: CryptoWars — A Strategy Game that Lets you Build a Village, Summon an Army, and Fight Enemies on the Blockchain: Experimental — the creators of an incredible blockchain-based strategy game called CryptoWars — will be building their game on top of the Loom SDK.

MetaMask:

EIP-1102: How to prepare your dapp.

Ocean Protocol:

Envoys of the New Data Economy: Ocean Protocol Ambassadors.

A Dive Into the Ocean Testnet: Getting Started with Ocean Protocol as a Developer.

Ocean Protocol contributes $1 million to the MOBI Grand Challenge: MOBI, Trusted IoT Alliance, and BMW Group kick-off the MOBI Grand Challenge, a 3 year initiative to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle technology and data sharing, supported by Ocean Protocol.

Adrift in Open (Bounty) Waters.

Ocean Protocol Advisor — Adam Drake: Operationalizing Ocean for data scientists and managers.

Ocean Protocol Advisor — Chris Ballinger: 30+ leaders are bringing their capabilities and expertise to help launch a Data Economy around Ocean.

Origin protocol:

Origin Launches Beta on Mainnet: Origin Protocol beta live on mainnet. Buy and sell on a Craigslist-like marketplace with ETH.

ETHBerlin and Berlin Blockchain Week Takeaways.

Our First Virtual Conference — Presenting Our Innovative Use of IPFS to China.

Welcome to Origin’s Engineering Team, Tom Linton!: Tom Linton is joining the Origin engineering team full-time.

Parity:

Parity Signer v2.0 Beta: New features and improved security.

Parity Ethereum 2.1.2-beta: Constantinople coming to Kovan and Ropsten: Parity v2.12 and 2.0.7 stable — hard fork ready.

Parity 2.0.8 stable and 2.13 beta — with Constantinople bug fix.

Polkadot/web3:

Polkadot Hello World #2: Get Ready to Be Nominated as Official Validator: The tutorial is based on Polkadot POC2.

Raiden Network:

v0.13.0 — Gypsy Mushroom: Latest testnet release.

Raiden Transport Explained: In this blog post, The team has a closer look at how the message transport currently works in the Raiden Network and which criteria need to be taken into account when choosing the right communication protocol for a payment channel network.

Status:

Nimbus for Newbies.

Status Nimbus recipients of the Ethereum Foundation Scalability Research and Development Subsidy Program.

TestFairy Issue Report.

Whisper — PSS comparison.

Prague: The Agenda.

Taipei sharding meetup reflections.

Status Hackathon #CryptoLife Agenda.

#CryptoLife Ground Floor Activities: Registration, Sponsors, & More.

#Cryptolife as Kinship.

#CryptoLife Floor 1 Activities: Hacking, Hacking, and more Hacking.

Principles Seminar — Session 1: Openness.

Principles Seminar — Session 2: Inclusivity.

Principles Seminar — Session 3: Censorship Resistance.

Principles Seminar — Session 4: Security.

Principles Seminar — Session 5: Decentralization (people).

Principles Seminar — Session 6: Decentralization (computers).

Principles Seminar — Session 7: Privacy.

Principles Seminar — Session 8: Transparency.

Principles Seminar — Session 10: Resourcefulness.

Principles Seminar — Session 11: Liberty.

Status Nimbus Receives $500K Grant from Ethereum Foundation for the ETH 2.0 Client R&D.

Status Core Devs Call 2018–10–15.

Streamr:

News: Streamr Partners With Daisy AI to Enhance Artificial Intelligence data supply: Crypto analytics firm CRYPTICS also becomes Streamr Marketplace vendor.

Spankchain:

We Got Spanked: What We Know So Far: SpankChain got hacked with a reentrancy bug from an ERC20 call, but for less than a security audit would cost. A walkthrough of the hack. Subsequently the hacker gave the money back and received a smaller bounty, but also offered a ~free MolochDAO audit.

Trinity protocol:

A Letter to the Community.

Aragon biweekly update: 9th October — 23rd October.

Basic Attention Token biweekly update: 9th October — 23rd October.

OmiseGo biweekly update: 9th October — 23rd October.

Other projects:

Geth v1.8.17 — hard fork ready.

Geth is the 5th fastest growing open source project on GitHub.

A First Look at the Grid+ Lattice1 Hardware Wallet: Medium post.

A First Look at the Grid+ Lattice1 Hardware Wallet: video.

Nethermind v0.9 — a new .NET core client.

Introducing reLease by Meridio: Meridio’s reLease dapp lets you lease and rent daily workspaces. For now, at ConsenSys, CryptoNYC and in the DC burbs.

Lighthouse Update #01: progress on our Ethereum 2.0 implementation over the past weeks.

  • Block pre-processing implemented.
  • BLS aggregate signatures implemented (but still unsafe).
  • SimpleSerialize (SSZ) implemented.
  • Draft SSZ specification produced by SigP and merged in to the ethereum/eth2.0-specsrepo.

POA Network Launches the First Full Featured Open-Source Ethereum Explorer BlockScout: Explorer tool expands functionality and features for Ethereum developers.

POA Network partners with MakerDAO on xDai Chain, the first ever USD-Stable Blockchain.

Gods Unchained: The Ultimate Competitive Trading Card Game on the Blockchain: Gods Unchained is Taking on Magic: The Gathering with Ethereum-Based Ownership of Cards.

Crypto’s Next Catalyst: Gaming — Part 1 by Chris Gonsalves.

Ethereum-Based Adult Entertainment Platform SpankChain Suffers $38,000 Hack: SpankChain has suffered a security breach that resulted in a loss of around $38,000 in ethereum.

CasinoFair now live in Japan, South Korea, China, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, New Zealand. Up to 14 countries.

ERC-20 Point of Sale: Dappos point of sale register adds ERC20 starting with DAI.

Quorum v2.1.1.

Rocket Pool 2.0 — The Next Generation: RocketPool’s plans for its Eth2.0 staking pool.

1000X acceleration for Ethereum, 4817 Off-chain Games Played!: Celer on lessons learned at EthSF testing its Gomoku dapp running on its state channels.

CryptoCup’s NFL prediction game is live.

MyCrypto v1.4.

Supporting Musicians: Introducing Digital, Collectible, Patronage Badges: Ujo officially debuts collectible patronage badges for musicians.

Brave releases new Chromium based version that is 20% faster.

Intel SGX and Blockchain: The iExec End-to-End Solution.

Dapp of the Week #06: SLAM Robots by Shanghai Tech.

Peepeth is now free.

Colony Q3 update — all the stuff they’re working on; Q4 launch planned

New Projects:

Crypt-ON — a multiservice financial p2p platform for secure transactions based on smart contracts.

BlockScout — Full Featured Open-Source Ethereum Explorer.

web3x — Typescript port of web3JS.

shadowlands — A Python3 based, TextUI Dapp platform for Ethereum.

Opinion and research articles

Vitalik Buterin: I Quite Regret Adopting The Term ‘smart Contracts’ For Ethereum: Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin revealed his regret for adopting the popular term ‘smart contracts’ — a term that has become almost synonymous with Ethereum.

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Throws Shade at Bitcoin Bashing Economist: Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin has thrown shade on prominent economist and cryptocurrency skeptic Nouriel Roubini, in response to Roubini’s earlier statements calling him a “dictator” and describing decentralization in Crypto as a “myth”. In a tweet, Buterin subtly hinted that Roubini has no idea what he is talking about and as such he should not comment on cryptocurrency.

Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon and Karl Floersch at SF Blockchain Week (October 10, 2018): Vitalik Buterin (Creator, Ethereum), Joseph Poon (Handshake, Plasma, and Lightning Network), and Karl Floersch (Ethereum Foundation) sat down and talked about the CryptoEconomics Mental Model. The panel presentation took place at the Crypto Economics Security Conference (CESC) during San Francisco Blockchain Week on October 10, 2018.

Deep Dive into Futarchy: Vitalik Buterin published a post in 2014 where he discussed how decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO’s) would require a governance model that would be more fluid and generalized so that it could use the ability of people and their desires to contribute to decision making. He suggested that there could be various models of governance which could prove advantageous to the DAO’s and help them improve transparency and efficiency, but he believes Futarchy suits the best.

The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust: Inside the ongoing argument over whether Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the blockchain are transforming the world — The New Yorker on the early days of Ethereum.

Ethereum Co-founder Set To Take The Stage For SXSW Keynote on Forbes.com: Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin has been announced as the keynote speaker at the legendary Texas conglomerate festival SXSW, something likely to give ethereum and cryptocurrency a sizable exposure boost.

Ethereum Co-founder Joseph Lubin on why the crypto platform is headed for a grand future: Lubin said Ethereum’s strengths lie in its large collaborative developer community.

Always Be Shipping: Maurycy Pietrzak of Infura: What does it take to bring one of Ethereum’s most important API tools to market?

EthereumJS Javascript Ecosystem/Sharding by Holger Drewes, Ethereum Meetup Vienna, October 2018: Talk by Holger from EthereumJS at Ethereum Meetup Vienna with an overview on the current Ethereum JavaScript ecosystem and an outlook on what new tools are being developed and how things might change on the way towards a future sharded Ethereum 2.0.

Raul Jordan — Ethereum 2.0 Demystified: Raul Jordan on Smartest Contract.

Gavin Wood on Polkadot, Sharding and Substrate: Gavin Wood on Polkadot and sharding on Zero Knowledge.

Crypto Stories: ETH as Money, Generalized Mining, and an Exploration of Web3 with Dan Zuller and Ryan Sean Adams: Dan Zuller and Ryan Sean Adams on Venture Stories.

Hashing It Out #26: NuFHE — Michael Egorov and John “Tux” Pacific: Nucypher comes back to Hashing It Out for fully homomorphic encryption.

CoinFund — Crypto-Investing by Community Building: Coinfund on Epicenter.

#8 — Open Source Web3Design Livestream: Latest web3 design call.

Decentralize This! — Episode 3: Richard Craib: Richard Craib on Enigma’s Decentralize This.

Episode 12: John Wolpert on ConsenSys and the Future of Blockchain: John Wolpert on Masters of Blockchain.

Print Q&A with Brave’s Yan Zhu.

Latest Open Source Block Explorers call.

Around the Block, episode 3.

Infura’s Michael Wuehler talk on scaling Eth to 11b requests a day.

Glen Weyl on Hashing It Out.

MyCrypto’s Jordan Spence on Boost podcast.

Celer Network’s Mo Dong layer 2 mechanism design talk.

Liquidity Network’s Arthur Gervais on Smartest Contract.

New 51% podcast. Recent episodes with Rune Christenesen and Andrew Keys.

Starkware’s Michael Riabzev’s talk on STARKs.

Numerai’s Richard Craib on Zero Knowledge.

Gitcoin’s Kevin Owocki on Epicenter.

ETHSanFrancisco main stage videos, including Vitalik and Balaji.

“People don’t realize how close the tech is to being ready” — Panel with Vitalik & Balaji Srinivasan at ETHSanFrancisco.

Brave & BAT at Founders Fund with Brendan Eich (CEO): Brave & BAT official meetup event graciously hosted at Founders Fund, featuring Brendan Eich. Brendan is the inventor of JavaScript, founder of Mozilla/Firefox and CEO of Brave.

“Not Just a Technology, This is a Societal Change,” Gartner’s Furlonger Says: David Furlonger of Gartner has peaked into the future and has seen a global transformation thanks to the code based invention of ethereum’s smart contracts.

Discovering Signature Verification Bugs in Ethereum Smart Contracts in Consensys blog.

Storage Taxes Tipped As Next Best Ethereum Blockchain Scalability Solution: While scaling solutions such as Sharding and Plasma are expected to raze down the scalability concerns of the distributed ledger technology (DLT), storage taxes are fast becoming the next best solution for scaling the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum [ETH] developer discusses the difference between existing clients and sharding clients: Holger, a Core Developer at the Ethereum Foundation, spoke about the characteristics of the current clients of Ethereum, during a talk at the Ethereum Meetup in Vienna. He also discussed the characteristics of upcoming sharding clients and how they are different from the existing ones.

Upcoming events:

Finance

[Question for game theory experts] Coalitions with and without a concentrated beneficiary: Vitalik Buterin on economics.

Log(coins)-sized proofs of inclusion and exclusion for RSA accumulators: Vitalik Buterin on economics.

Fidelity Digital Assets launches ETH/BTC custody and execution for institutions.

19th, October: Institutional Interest in Shorting Ethereum Dries Up.

Has Ethereum Bottomed Out? Report From Major Trading Firm Says So: According to Genesis Global Trading, a major cryptocurrency investment firm that targets institutional investors, short interest towards Ethereum (ETH) has declined substantially in the third quarter of 2018.

Forbes joined the Civil network, but also got some bad press about paltry fundraising, including from WSJ and CNN.

Token work profiles to understand users.

First Round’s case study on scaling at Coinbase. CoinbasePro lists ZRX, the first token on Coinbase.

13th October: Ethereum (ETH) Price Analysis: 5 Key Factors to Watch.

16th October: Ethereum Price Analysis: Entry of Fidelity a Game Changer, ETH up 2%: Straight from Fidelity Investment creation of a new crypto subsidiary to altcoins revival, odds are ETH are likely to edge higher. Though it is down six percent in the last week, the three percent gain in the last 24 hours at the back of high trading volumes could be the impetus bulls need to rally above $300.

Worker selection algos for work tokens.

Roadmap

Release Step 3.1: Metropolis phase 2: Constantinople, 2019.

Ethereum’s Next Blockchain Upgrade Faces Delay After Testing Failure on Coindesk.com: While a fixed date for implementation of Constantinople has yet to be set, Griff Green, ethereum community lead and founder of blockchain-based nonprofit Giveth, set mainnet activation for sometime in 2019. “I would expect it to get delayed to 2019, the blockchain doesn’t take holidays, but developers do,” Green said. “If I were to make a wager on a prediction market I would put my ETH on late January, early February.”

Ethereum Constantinople Blockchain Upgrade Delayed Until 2019.

Release Step Four: Serenity, TBA. Serenity is meant to move from consensus through Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.

Partnerships and team members

Forbes x Civil: A Major Milestone for Blockchain-Based Journalism: Forbes is officially joining the Civil network. With this news, Forbes becomes the first major media organization to commit to regularly publishing content to the blockchain.

Kyber Network <> Melon: Melon funds can now trade on Kyber as integration between Melon and Kyber network is complete.

Datum, Quarkchain and Republic Protocol are now available on Kyber Network: the Kyber reserve has added support for 3 new tokens: Datum (DAT), Quarkchain (QKC), and Republic Protocol (REN).

Ocean Protocol contributes $1 million to the MOBI Grand Challenge: MOBI, Trusted IoT Alliance, and BMW Group kick-off the MOBI Grand Challenge, a 3 year initiative to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle technology and data sharing, supported by Ocean Protocol.

POA Network partners with MakerDAO on xDai Chain, the first ever USD-Stable Blockchain: POA Network has launched the first ever blockchain where the native currency of the chain is USD-stable. xDai Chain, an Ethereum compatible sidechain with Dai as the native currency of the network, combines POA Network’s interoperability knowledge and technology with MakerDAO’s Dai, the permissionless, crypto-collateralized USD-stable coin.

Blockgeeks and WozU Announce Partnership: WozU, a tech-education startup created by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and, Blockgeeks have partnered together to further the spread of the blockchain revolution and education.

Pitbull, Ethereum founder and Wozniak converge for second DesTechAZ:

Vlad Martynov: Co-founder of Blockgeeks, Steve Wozniak, Founder of WozU and Vitalik Buterin Co-founder of Ethereum.

Silvana Rodriguez joined as Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Americas at ConsenSys.

Coinbase’s Adam White is joining Bakkt as its COO.

DocuSign Expands By Adding Ethereum (ETH) Support And Blockchain Integration: DocuSign, the San Francisco-based company that provides electronic signature services, announced on September 12 that it will be integrating with the popular Ethereum blockchain.

Bithumb Opens Ethereum-Based Decentralized Exchange: The new trading platform offers only tokens that use Ethereum technology, including Dent (DENT), aelf (ELF), and One Root Network (RNT).

Bitcoin Payment Processor BitPay Launches Stablecoin Settlement [Tether’s Not Invited]: Bitcoin Payment Processor BitPay Launches Stablecoin Settlement, running on Ethereum.

OKEx Lists Four ERC20 Stable Coins as Tether Implodes: One of the biggest crypto exchange by trading volumes has just announced they are to list four stable coins, all running on ethereum’s public blockchain as ERC20 tokens.

Rumors

Reddit — Constantinople Hard Fork Update Thread:

Cliff Notes:
Hard Fork is projected to be prior to February, 2019.
The hard fork will NOT be before 11/20/2019, or the next 30 days.
Details:
Piper: second end of November
Afri: If something goes wrong, we can put it on hold until January
Piper: Let’s take this offline

u/aznar: “I find it weird that Afri called off Constantinople for 2018 in a tweet just couple of hours after the consensus issue.”

u/TheRealDatapunk: “He also said there was no bug and it was just nobody mining.
I wish he’d be a bit more careful in his statements, as parity is one of the main clients.”

Global Tech Icon Steve Wozniak Becomes the Co-founder of EQUI Global: Steve Wozeniak is co-founding a new project, EQUI, using the Ethereum network.

Hackers Present Stock Trading Prototype on Ethereum Smart Contracts: The outdated stock market may be facing digitization through ethereum’s smart contracts if an unassuming team of developers is to take their idea forward. In a five second description, the project can be called as Dai, but for stocks. You basically put out an order for say 1 share of Tesla at market price with it paid by eth. Now whoever wants to buy your Tesla order needs to put down eth collateral.

Art world could help boost Ethereum to $500, says expert:Ethereum price could get a big boost from an unlikely source, with the art world potentially driving value to $500 by the end of the year. The predictions come from the leader of art-tech agency Thomas Crown Art, which uses blockchain to help fight forgeries in the art world.

Ethereum is Back on the Cryptoverse Spotlight, Drawing Attention of Both Developers and “Haters”: After being under the radar for a few weeks, Ethereum has regained the interest of the community. People say that any publicity is good publicity, and these words fit perfectly into the reality of this popular blockchain that grows day by day not only technologically but also socially.

One Thousand Applications Made for Devcon Speaking Slots.

True drone autonomy enabled by blockchain (Built on Ethereum by 5 previous ETH team members).

Annual Octoverse Github Report Highlights Explosion in Collaborative and Open-Source Software: Ethereum is the world’s 5th fastest-growing open source project.

Johnny Depp Teams Up With TaTaTu, An Ethereum Based Entertainment Dapp: Johnny Depp Inks Development Deal With Cryptocurrency Platform Reports Hollywoodreporter.Com. The Deal Is With TaTaTu, A Newly Formed Platform Founded By Andrea Iervolino, Who Co-Runs AMBI Media Group.

Brief outlook of Ethereum 2.0 — this is what the actual world computer should look like.

Ethereum dApp Roundup Part 1: Platforms.

Ethereum dApp Roundup Part 2: Essentials.

Social media activity

Social media activity

Facebook — official announcement channel. Recent publications — about Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, Conferences, Devcon4 — (20–100 likes per publication).

Twitter (Ethereum) — official announcement channel — duplicates news from Facebook page (250–500 likes per publication, 30–50 comments). Average number of shares is 100–200 for one post.

Twitter (Ethereum Network) — news from companies (10–20 likes per publication, 1–5 comments, 1–10 shares).

Twitter (Ethereum Report) — retweets from official announcement channel and team members’ pages.

Reddit — news about projects and blockchain, links to interviews, podcasts, upcoming events. The longest thread has 161 comments (Welcome to r/ethereum — the Reddit frontpage of the Web 3.0).

Information from Cryptocompare.com

There is a slight 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.

YouTube (Ethereum) — last video — 27th July 2017 (5000–20 000 views per video).

YouTube (Ethereum Foundation) — videos from conferences, meetups, Ethereum Core Devs Meetings. 2–3 videos / month.

Ethereum Community Forum — Recent Discussions: Forum has been hacked, Security alert, Forums Database Compromised, Help Stop Forum Spam, Developing Guidelines for acceptable Promotion and Marketing on the Ethereum Forum.

Gitter:

Social media dynamics
Social media dynamics

Subscribe on detailed companies’ updates by Paradigm! Medium. Twitter.

Blockchain
Eth
Ethereum
Ethereum Blockchain
Cryptocurrency

--

--

Paradigm
Paradigm

Written by Paradigm

3.7K Followers
Editor for

In chaos lies the truth

Help

Status

About

Careers

Press

Blog

Privacy

Terms

Text to speech

Teams