Hello, Ethereum lovers! We have a lot of essential news for you! During these weeks, the Ethereum team was working assiduously so they made significant progress with current development as usual! Community calls took place: Core Devs Meeting, Eth2 implementers call, Plasma implementers call, ETH Organizers Monthly Call and TCR Call. Ethereum 2.0 development updates were published: Lighthouse, Prysmatic Labs. Parity v2.6.0-beta and v2.5.5-stable, Truffle v5.0.25, ZeppelinOS v2.4.0, Embark v4.1 beta4 released. For those who are a little behind of times, Justin Drake, an Eth 2.0 researcher at the Ethereum Foundation mentioned that the phase zero of Ethereum 2.0, which enables Proof of Stake, is targeted to launch on the 3rd of January 2020, only seven months from now! Also, Ethereum planning to reduce issuance by 10x in two years according to him. The ecosystem is impressive and it continues to flourish! New projects appear constantly! Developers have been working extremely hard over the period of the last two weeks so many updates appeared: Celer’s alpha-mainnet, Cygnus, launched. Dai Stability Fee back up to 17.5% and under a vote to go to 18.5%. Colony’s Glider released on mainnet. Decentraland closed beta for web-based client. Golem became two entities: Golem Foundation and Golem Factory. Dharma now offers instant interest to lenders. RNDR genesis mainnet released. Ethereum Name Service 3–6 character name reservation starts July 11th. NASA discusses Ethereum in their Hyperledger blockchain tests. Opera launches native Eth wallet and browser on iPhone. And worth to mention, Ethereum is back over a million transactions in a day! These weeks research and opinion articles by Vitalik Buterin were published: “Layer 2 state schemes”, “Minimal fully generalized S*ARK-based plasma” and “Near-instant transaction confirmation via staggered shard block production”. Protolambda made amazing Eth2 graphical explanations. The History of Ethereum website launched. To keep track on roadmap updates check out renewed Istanbul hard fork wiki! The year is well underway, cherry blossoms have fallen, and Devcon is quickly approaching! The conference fifth incarnation returns to East Asia later this year! Save the date — Osaka — October 8th-11th, 2019, and stay sharp! Ticket sales to begin in mid-July! Ether is more than tangible and serenity is just a matter of time. Stay tuned! 🦄✨
Development
The technical side of Ethereum’s efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise
- Vitalik Buterin
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #64 [2019–07–05]
- Review previous decisions made and action items
- EIPs
a) EIP 2124: Fork identifier for chain compatibility checks
b) EIP 1962 Update
c) EIP 2025
d) EIP 1679: Hardfork Meta: Istanbul
See also the dependency map by James Hancock and the EIP readiness spreadsheet. - Working Group Updates
- Testing Updates
- Client Update: a) Geth, b) Parity Ethereum, c) Aleth/eth, d) Trinity/PyEVM, e) EthereumJS, f) EthereumJ/Harmony, g) Pantheon, h) Turbo Geth, i) Nimbus, j) web3j, k) Mana/Exthereum, l) Mantis, m) Nethermind
- EWASM & Research Updates
Eth2.0 Implementers Call #20 [2019/6/27]
The original livestream failed due to technical difficulties. This was recorded locally and uploaded later.
- Testing Updates
- Client Updates
- Research Updates
- Network
- Move to discord
- Graffiti in testing
- Spec discussion
Ben Edgington’s tweetstorm notes.
Ethereum 2.0 Development Update #29 — Prysmatic Labs: biweekly updates written by the entire Prysmatic Labs team on the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap.
Lighthouse Update #13: Lighthouse targets its first release, introduces node discovery using discv5 and adds a new, experimental fork-choice algorithm
Quite a few exciting developments have occurred these past weeks. As a simple summary, they have:
- Lighthouse is targeting it’s first release v0.0.1 with a tentative release date of 15/7
- An initial discovery v5 libp2p module has been built and integrated into lighthouse. Nodes now discover each other using this protocol.
- Implemented a new reduced-tree fork choice algorithm, which (with current testing) has shown ~5x speed improvements (without additional overheads) to previous implementations.
- Passing all v0.6.3 tests. Intend to skip v0.7.x and go straight to the frozen spec, once released.
Counterfactual Development Update #9–07.05.2019: better wallet UI for devs, ERC20 support.
Plasma Implementers Call #22: Standards and Adoption
After great implementation updates from the teams, they discuss difficulties with plasma wallet on-boarding, implementation fragmentation, and standardization.
Question regarding ETH 2.0 scaling: Do you believe that L2 scaling solutions will still be relevant upon the release of ETH 2.0?
Vitalik on layer2 networks that only push offchain 1 or 2 of:
State Providers, Relayers — Bring Back the Mempool: Thread on the latest in Eth2 fee market.
Protolambda’s Eth2 graphical explanations:
Diagrams:
- Basic timeline example: Blocks, Slots and Epochs
- BeaconState transition for Phase-0
- Justification and Finalization
- Rewards and penalties table
- SSZ hash-tree-root and merkleization
- SSZ encoding
- Shuffling
Ying Tong’s succinct proofs for scaling Ethereum slide deck.
StarkDEX Deep Dive: Contracts & Statement Part 2 of 4: This is the second part of the StarkDEX deep dive, explaining the various components of the StarkDEX Alpha. In the first part they gave an overview of the system and discussed user flows and batching. In this post they describes in detail their smart contracts, their system-specific terminology and how it translates into the statement of a valid state transition they are proving.
Loopring 3.0 Overview: From A to zkSNARKs: This post is meant to provide a quick overview of how Loopring 3.0 works, and how they use zkSNARKs to enable scalable, secure DEXs. For a deep dive, you can check out the full design doc on GitHub.
Development tools
Solidity Storage Array Bugs: Storage array bugs in Solidity that got fixed in v0.5.10.
Remix IDE v0.8.2: New Etherscan verification, Mythx plugins.
Truffle v5.0.25
Practical Advice for Solidity Developers: Smart Contract Best Practices.
Getting return values from a Solidity transaction.
Making Smart Contracts Simpler: Learn How to Delegate Smart Contract Calls with OpenLaw.
On Efficient Ethereum Transactions & Introducing HomeWork.
Intro to Solidity linting and formatting.
The case against using inheritance in Solidity.
Deploy to a public testnet using ZeppelinOS 2.4: Quick start and deploy to testnet with latest ZeppelinOS version.
Go Lessons from Writing a Serialization Library for Ethereum.
Blockchain search engine — real-time data for decentralized applications (DApps): SecondState’s search engine for deployed mainnet contracts.
The Fact Registry — Proofs, DApps, and Economies of Scale: StarkWare’s batching proofs for dapps into a single proof.
Trueblocks on its API that delivers the location of the data on your own node.
Edgeware’s lockdrop contract had a bug allowing a griefing attack.
Tutorial: creating a flexible NFT.
A Deep Dive into the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — part 1: Introduction:
This is the first article of a 4-part series on the EVM
- Part 1: Introduction to the EVM
- Part 2: Memory and Storage on the EVM
- Part 3: Execution Model of the EVM
- Part 4: Relationship of the EVM with High-level contract-oriented languages
Governance and new standards proposals
ERC2135: Consumable interface.
ERC2157: dType Storage Extension for EVM.
EIP152: Blake2b f precompile.
Era of legally compliant DAOs with OpenLaw.
Discussion: EIP-1 — EIP Editor Criteria (process for new editors): Transparent process for EIP editors.
ChainId vs NetworkId? How do they differ on Ethereum? Pedro Gomes on the difference between chainID and networkID.
Aragon, DAOstack, Colony, Moloch: Which DAO is for you? Aragon, Colony, DAOstack and Moloch comparison.
Check out Istanbul hard fork wiki.
Proposals
Discussion thread for Hardfork Meta
The list of EIPs in 1679 are the canonical status of EIPs
This will be maintained as an overview page, can also view the Istanbul GitHub Project in the ECH repo to track progress.
James Hancock has created an automated Google Sheet that covers additional milestones
Proposed
The deadline for EIP proposals for Istanbul was May 17th. All of these EIPs intend to prepare for inclusion in Istanbul, but Core Dev acceptance, implementation, testing, audits, and other work needs to be done to prepare them. Each EIP has a “discussion-to” link where you can find more information, usually on the EthMagicians Core EIPs forum.
- EIP 615: Subroutines and Static Jumps for the EVM
- EIP 1057: ProgPoW, a Programmatic Proof-of-Work (contingent on positive audit results) — @IfDefElse
- EIP 1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs — @zac-williamson
- EIP 1283: Net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps @sorpass
- EIP 1344: Add ChainID opcode — @fubuloubu
- EIP 1352: Specify restricted address range for precompiles/system contracts
- EIP 1380: Reduced gas cost for call to self — @axic @jacqueswww
- EIP 1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain
- EIP 1965: Method to check if a chainID is valid at a specific block Number
- EIP 1702: Generalized account versioning scheme — @sorpaas
- EIP 1706: Disable SSTORE with gasleft lower than call stipend
- EIP 1803: Rename opcodes for clarity — @axic
- EIP 1829: Precompile for Elliptic Curve Linear Combinations @remco
- EIP 1884: Reprice Opcodes + optional new opcode, @holiman — Discuss
- EIP 1930: CALLs with strict gas semantic. Revert if not enough gas available
- EIP 2028: Calldata gas cost reduction
Follow along All Core Dev calls and the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
Devcon V ticket sales to begin in mid-July!
𝚍𝚎𝚟𝚊 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝐯𝚌𝚘𝚗 𝚞𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚘𝚛𝚗 @EFDevcon 10h:
The speaker page on devcon.org won’t be coming back, but you can submit at devcon5.exordo.com
Stuck transaction? Here’s how to unstick it: User guide.
Swarm Architecture — (30,000 feet): An overview of Swarm architecture.
Introducing Heiswap — An Ethereum Mixer (Live on Ropsten!)
Ethereum Leaders Are Slowly Courting Persian Gulf Royals and Investors: Coindesk covers Virgil Griffith’s efforts to get a ruling that Eth is compliant with Islamic finance.
Validity Labs’ demo video of HOPR, p2p messaging with incentivization layer running on testnet:
Announcing the ENS 3–6 Character .Eth Name Reservation Process The ENS 3–6 character .eth name reservation process starts July 11, 2019. This post explains how to submit a reservation request.
ConsenSys Monthly Report — June 2019: Ethereum dapps, enterprise blockchain solutions, most popular articles, upcoming events, and more.
Case Study: Real World Supply Chain with Enterprise Ethereum: Industry leaders are recognizing the transformative impact of blockchain technology on supply chain management.
20 Blockchain Projects with the Most Dev Activity on Github — June, 2019: Congrats to Status, Storj, Metamask, MakerDAO, Gnosis, Augur, and Origin Protocol for all the hard work!
Projects updates
Check updates by Paradigm:
- 0x biweekly update 20th June — 4th July
- Aragon biweekly update 18th June — 2nd July
- Basic Attention Token biweekly update 20th June — 4th July
- Decentraland biweekly update 19th June — 3rd July
- Enigma biweekly update 18th June — 1st July
- Enjin biweekly update 20th June — 4th July
- FunFair biweekly update 21th June — 5th July
- Loom biweekly update 20th June — 4th July
- Orbs biweekly update 19th June — 3rd July
- OmiseGo biweekly update 24th June — 8th July
Augur Weekly Report — July 3rd.
Augur Weekly Report — June 26th.
Glider has launched: Colony’s Glider release on mainnet.
The United States of Crypto: Celebrating Independence Day and Ideals such as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Economic Freedom.
Chainlink (LINK) is now available on Coinbase.
Say hello to Decentraland Avatars! The Metaverse just got personal.
Decentraland World Explorer’s closed Beta and Next Steps: World Explorer is coming! Read about the infrastructure, challenges, and the invaluable help from the community that helped bring it to life.
How to Make Money Selling Crypto with Dether During Your Summer Vacation (in five easy steps): Looking to earn some crypto while you’re on the move this summer? Become a human crypto ATM, with Dether!
The District Weekly — July 6th, 2019: News and updates from the district0x Network.
The District Weekly — June 29th, 2019.
Meme Factory So Far: A data-driven retrospective of our latest district.
Watch your money grow in real time: Earn interest instantly with Dharma.
July 2019 — The Gnosis Monthly Development Update: Keeping up with the Gnosis developers.
How to Submit Proposals and Vote in the dxDAO.
gWasm in answers — some things you need to know about our latest use-case.
The transformation towards a stronger Golem.
Keep Network June Roundup: Conferences, team additions, Proof of Work newsletter, and mor
Governance Poll: Stability Fee Adjustment Poll — July 8.
Executive Vote: Raise the Stability Fee by 1% to a total of 18.5% per year.
Governance Poll: Stability Fee Adjustment Poll — July 1.
Multi-Collateral Dai: Collateral Types.
Multi-Collateral Dai: Milestones Roadmap.
MEW Security Stats Report: June 2019.
MakerDAO’s CDP Protocol: Benefits of Decentralized Loans: The Toned-Down Vernacular Crypto Spectacular Collateral Loan Explainer.
Announcing Pacific Network: Use your OCEAN tokens on the PoA network.
sgCarMart builds Singapore’s first Know-Your-Vehicle data marketplace, powered by Ocean Protocol: Empowering car buyers to make better decisions.
Sustainable Development & Scaling AI for Good: Insights from the 3rd Annual AI for Good Summit.
Roadmap Update || Summer 2019: What’s New and What to Expect Next.
Protocol Details: Decentralized Identifiers: Give your dataset a unique ID without needing a central ID provider.
Raiden light client SDK implementation on testnet.
Raiden Pulse #6: News from May and June.
Town Hall #37 Monday June 24, 2019.
Town Hall #38 Monday July 08, 2019.
Integrating Streamr with Apache Spark.
Trinity Biweekly Report — Late June.
Zilliqa Technical Update — 2 July 2019.
Zilliqa Community Update 25 June, 2019 — Celebrating New Collaborations.
Other projects updates:
New Parity releases: v2.6.0-beta — v2.5.5-stable.
Celer Network Alpha-Mainnet: Play to Earn, Build to Monetize.
MetaMask’s “bridge to the decentralized web” is finally coming to mobile.
Major Milestone: 500,000 BloomIDs: Bloom says it has hit 500k IDs.
Aon, Oxfam, and Etherisc launch first blockchain-based agricultural insurance policies for smallholder farmers in Sri Lanka: More on Oxfam, Aon, Etherisc Sri Lankan agricultural insurance.
Welcome to uPortlandia: uPortlandia smart city demo with uPort.
Synthetix Response to Oracle Incident: Synthetix’s response to a massive oracle failure and a bot took advantage, though the owner has agreed to reverse.
Compound crosses 50m USD in supply.
Developer details for α-Mainnet! — Matic Network Blog: Alpha release of Matic’s chain.
Limit Orders — New feature on KyberSwap: KyberSwap announces limit orders — fully decentralized, no deposits, and first of its kind. Full release on July 12th!
Liquidity’s atomic Eth, BTC and DAI cross-chain swap live on mainnet.
MPX (Market Protocol) live on mainnet. Trade BTC on margin with Dai.
Pool Together, a “no loss lottery.” You enter the pool to win a lottery for the returns from Compound.
Betoken live on mainnet, a type of decentralized hedge fund built using Kyber, bZx, Compound and Dai.
¢ @Cent on Twitter:
Opinion and research articles
Layer 2 state schemes by Vitalik Buterin.
Minimal fully generalized S*ARK-based plasma: Vitalik on Plasma.
Near-instant transaction confirmation via staggered shard block production: Vitalik on sharding.
Vitalik Non-giver of Ether @VitalikButerin on twitter 5 hours ago
Some quite ranty but in places interesting criticism of quadratic voting here. Attempting to summarize/translate… — Twitter thread.
Alacrity: A DSL for Simple, Formally-Verified DApps by Jay McCarthy, Head of Research, Alacris Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Ethereum Experts Share Their Facebook Libra Insights: Developers on Facebook’s Libra blockchain, the white paper, and how to get testnet Libra coins.
Safety Without Silos: Why Businesses Will Learn to Love Public Ethereum by John Wolpert, Web3Studio, a unit of ConsenSys. Before joining ConsenSys in 2017, he served as the global product executive for IBM Blockchain and co-founder of Hyperledger.
Ethereum Researcher: Ethereum to Reduce Issuance Ten-Fold by 2021:
Ethereum (ETH) might decrease issuance ten-fold by 2021, said Justin Drake, an Ethereum 2.0 researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, as technology-focused news outlet Trustnodes reported on July 5. Drake reportedly set out a possible timeline, saying:
“Here’s a possible timeline (dates likely totally wrong!) highlighting the key milestones: January 2020: beacon chain launch. June 2020: eth2 light clients production-ready. November 2020: eth1 fork #1 to have its fork choice rule honour eth2 finality (conservatively, no issuance reduced). March 2021: eth1 fork #2 to reduce issuance by 10x.”
Drake further stressed that there are several non-technical issues which are harder for him to predict. Specifically, these are “how fast we will get 2 million ETH (65,000 validators) for the beacon chain launch,” and “how fast eth1 governance is willing to move with the two hard forks.”
Press and podcasts
TEEs, SGX and the Graphene project on Zero Knowledge: In this episode hosts chat with two of the people behind the Graphene project, Chia-Che Tsai of Texas A&M University and Golem developer Lukasz Glen, about TEEs, Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), and the way the Graphene project aims to make it easier for devs to interact with these hardware enclaves. Graphene started as a research project at Stony Brook University, led by Chia-Che Tsai and Don Porter, about emerging hardware platforms. In 2015, Intel Labs recognized the potential for Graphene to be an open-source compatibility layer for Intel® SGX, and has contributed to Graphene development since. With Golem and Invisible Things Lab (ITL), the Graphene project has also been now used within a decentralised blockchain context. The security around TEEs is a hotly debated topic and they delve into the questions around these with the guests.
Coin Metrics: Understanding the Value and Use of Crypto Networks on Into the Ether: Jacob Franek and Antoine Le Calvez of Coin Metrics join Into the Ether to talk about blockchain data and the trends they are seeing in the space. Coin Metrics is a provider of crypto asset market and network data which helps people better understand the value and use of crypto networks. They start with the demand for crypto data and how it can be productized. They then dive deep into certain subjects like data manipulation, comparing different chains, measuring dapp usage, concerns around base chain privacy for data and much more.
EthHub Weekly #68: Eth2.0 Phase 0 spec freeze, dYdX and 0x team up, multi-collateral DAI updates, PoolTogether launched and much more!
Market Protocol: Bring Any Market to Ethereum Using Synthetic Assets — with Seth Rubin, Co-Founder, and CEO on WyreTalks.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need custody to secure price exposure to a given asset. In fact, the launch of a new crypto product allows you to pair a reference asset like Bitcoin with a collateral token like DAI to gain synthetic exposure to Bitcoin, without having to buy or store any BTC. These so-called position tokens open up a world of possibilities for accessing exposure to cross-chain and traditional assets — or creating brand new ones.
Seth Rubin is the cofounder and CEO of MARKET Protocol, a framework for creating synthetic assets represented as tokens that allows users to gain exposure to a variety of assets without leaving the Ethereum network.He joins the podcast to discuss the launch of the MARKET Protocol Exchange (MPX) and minting platform, explaining the role of the MKT token in onboarding and educating new users. Seth shares the benefit to putting a cap on risk and the UX tradeoffs associated with this unique approach Seth also weighs in on why his team has written their own oracle for initial implementation and how time to resolution impacts the user experience. Listen in to understand how Seth’s team is educating users around the pricing and trading of market position tokens and learn how asset exposure, a defined downside and accessible leverage differentiate MARKET Protocol from its competitors.
New In Flight podcast by Aragon One: In Flight by Aragon One touches the topics of governance, empowering individual freedom and avoiding global dystopia. The hosts, Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo, are the cofounders of the Aragon project, which creates tools to run organizations that are fully sovereign, global and transparent. The podcast tries to go far away from a serious, planned conversation, and instead focuses on the sporadic, genuine nature of a casual conversation. Check out first episodes!
Episode 9: Humanity DAO with Rich McAteer on Wizard of Dapps.
PegaSys — Enterprise-Grade Ethereum Protocol Engineering on Epicenter
They’re joined by Rob Dawson, Head of Product at PegaSys. PegaSys is the protocol engineering spoke of ConsenSys, and the team building Pantheon, a Java implementation of the Ethereum client. The Pantheon client was built from the ground up as both a mainnet, and consortium chain client. Written in Java with an Apache 2.0 license, it benefits from being easily accessible to enterprises, who predominantly use that language. The PegaSys team has built additional features into the Pantheon client like privacy, permissioning, and the ability to deploy chains on IBFT, a consensus algorithm better suited for consortium networks of up to 40 validators. Working closely with other protocol teams (Geth and Parity), and being a founding member of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, PegaSys is also working towards Ethereum 2.0.
Topics they discussed in this episode:
- Rob’s background as an enterprise Java developer and how he became involved in the blockchain space
- The role of PegaSys in the broader ConsenSys ecosystem
- The Pantheon client and why they chose to build a new Ethereum client
- The case for Java and why enterprise has a preference for this language
- Pantheon’s unique features of privacy, permissioning, and performance
- What is Istanbul BFT and how it differs from Parity POA and Tendermint BFT
- The types of applications which are better suited for IBFT
- The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) and PegaSys’ work on standards
- PegaSys’ work on Ethereum 1.x and Ethereum 2.0
- The team’s recently announced certification program
Videos
ETH Organizers Monthly Call — Flash Update #1:
In this month’s ETH organisers call they brought in a few projects to give updates on what they’re doing in the space to provide Organizers with new information and how theory is now being put into practice.
Jeff Emmet — Commons Stack 1:15
Peter Pan — Meta Cartel 12:40
Austin Griffith — Burner Wallet 23:50
James Young — Abridged SDK 36:30
TCR Call #9: FOAM has been live and kickin’, here’s how
1:20 Introductions from Members of call
6:54 FOAM Updates and Demo
9:15 Why FOAM is competitive with other open source maps
11:44 FOAM stats
14:30 Notification System
15:00 New Dashboard
15:30 Uniswap Integration
16:30 FOAM daily digest
17:00 Leaderboard & reputation/identity
18:05 FOAM Tools
20:25 Stories from the Map
28:40 External Incentives: Games and Treasure Hunts and NFT’s
32:40 Next Steps: Governance, Parameters, Smart Contract Changes?
34:40 Q & A
38:40 Vote Delegation? (ideas from CIVIL)
47:45 Update from HumanityDAO
52:46 Update from CIVIL
Upcoming events
July 10 — end of Gitcoin’s Beyond Blockchain virtual hackathon
July 11 — ENS 3–6 character name reservation process stars
July 19 — BuildETH (San Francisco)
July 19–21 — State of Scale (Los Angeles)
July 19–21 — ConsenSys Grants hackathon (Brooklyn)
July 22–23 — Buidl 2019 (Seoul)
Aug 2–4 — ETHIndia (Bangalore)
Aug 2–4 — TruffleCon (Redmond)
Aug 21–23 — Dappcon (Berlin)
Aug 23–25 — ETHBerlin
Sep 6–8 — EthBoston
Sep 15 — Augur v1 cutoff
Sep 15 — Ethereal Tel Aviv
Sep 15–16 — StarkWare sessions (Tel Aviv)
Oct 8–11 — DeVcon (Osaka)
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io (July 9th, 2019):
Ethereum is back over a million transactions in a day.
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Binance Will Change USDT Deposits & Withdrawals to be ERC20-based: Binance announced that they’d switch Tether to Ethereum instead of Bitcoin/Omni.
Lock-Harvest, a new token distribution mechanism: tokens issued per day to locked Eth.
Centrifuge’s Tinlake, to tokenize real world assets so they can act as collateral in any DeFi liquidity pool.
Set now has a min volatility Eth set. Set and leverage with bZx expands the horizons of DeFi.
Partnerships
EY helps Bofrost Italia to build one of the first blockchain platforms to trace frozen foods in supply chains: Bofrost Italia tracing frozen foods in supply chain on Ethereum mainnet.
NASA Researches Ethereum Blockchain Tech for Deep Space Exploration: A research project funded and co-run by NASA is looking to leverage the Ethereum blockchain’s smart contracts technology to automate spacecraft maneuvering while avoiding space debris. In developments that could potentially have significant implications for deep space probes, NASA is putting resources behind a research project that fundamentally envisions the use of blockchain technology to enhance and make space communications and navigation more efficient and safer.
Opera launches first browser for iOS with Web 3 support and Crypto Wallet: Opera launches native Eth wallet and browser on Iphone.
The First Organic-Certified, US Hemp Crop Tracked on the Ethereum Blockchain: Verified Organic and ConsenSys-backed Treum collaborate to track and trace the first commercial hemp crop in Arizona.
Latin American social network Taringa! to pay content creators in DAI stablecoin.
Roadmap
When I came up with Ethereum, my first thought was, ‘Okay, this thing is too good to be true.’ As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good — fundamentally, completely sound.
- Vitalik Buterin
Constantinople is successful so far.
Istanbul
Istanbul is planned for Q4 of 2019. Planned date is October 16th, 2019, 12:00pm UTC. More details on the road to Istanbul.
Next Timelines
Cheesy Hardfork 6 Month Schedule
Current discussion is on moving towards a 6-month cycle. Danno is leading discussion on a Cheesy Hardfork Schedule
- “Asiago” April 2020
- “Brie” October 2020
Serenity / ETH2
Serenity is meant to move from consensus through Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.
See the ETH2 Specs Github Repo.
The ETH2 Project Management repo holds ongoing notes and meetings.
Rumors
Vitalik Non-giver of Ether @VitalikButerin 4 on Twitter:
“Just like Facebook removed pages linked to the Myanmar military, it can also freeze or restrict users’ ability to use Libra at any time, depending on the whims of a murky and unaccountable internal decision-making process out of cubicles in San Francisco”
‘We’ll Tokenize the House’: Mortgages Are Coming to Ethereum This Summer: The fintech startup Fluidity will announced plans for the first ethereum-powered mortgages in California and New York, CoinDesk has learned. Fluidity execs say the offering is slated for this summer, once all the licensing paperwork is finalized. “We’ll tokenize the house, which will effectively take the collateral that is the equity of the house,” said Fluidity chief architect Todd Lippiatt. “You’re pledging the house and you get an advanced rate back in terms of dollars.”
Deloitte Blockchain Boss Departs To Build Ethereum Supply Chain: The man who helped turn Deloitte’s global blockchain practice into a $50 million operation has left the company. After growing the Big Four accounting firm’s blockchain team from three people in 2012 to 1,200 people today, global blockchain lead Eric Piscini is striking out on his own, though he’s not exactly starting from scratch. After being approached by multiple Deloitte clients, Piscini earlier this year hitched his wagon to early-stage startup Citizens Reserve, which is currently raising $150 million to move the world’s fragmented supply chain networks to a blockchain.
Cyrus Younessi @cyounessi1: You can’t kill ETH Twitter thread.
CME Group release video explainer on Ether & Ethereum:
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Ethereum community continues to grow. There is constant slight growth in Ethereum social media channels these weeks.
Facebook — Official announcement channel. Recent publications — about Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, Conferences (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 DApps (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).
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.
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.
See also Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forum.
There is a constant 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.
Main sources:
- Ethereum official social media
- Ethereum subreddits
- Ethresear.ch
- Core Devs Meetings
- Eth2.0 Implementers Calls
- ConsenSys blog
- Week in Ethereum by Evan Van Ness
- What’s New in Eth2 by Ben Edgington
- Projects build on Ethereum official blogs
- Ethereum in news
- Crypto Twitter in general
