News and Links
Layer 1
[eth2] What’s new in eth2
[eth2] Notes from last Eth2 call
[eth2] Vitalik wants feedback on Eth2 materials
[eth2] Code for Artemis, the Beacon chain Java client from PegaSys
[eth2] ELI5: randomness in Eth2 using a VDF
[eth2] Combining Avalanche RANDAO and VDFs
[eth1] Backwards-Forwards sync of Ethereum clients through requesting reverse diffs
[eth1] On raising the gas limit (and storage management fees). Also a hypothetical on how many magnitudes more throughput we can get from the PoW chain
Mustafa Al-Bassam: Towards on-chain non-interactive data availability proofs
Vitalik: discouragement attacks
Layer 2
Raiden is live on mainnet! (see ahem, the live on mainnet section)
Economics of Loom Networks’ PlasmaChain validators
Plasma Winter account model Plasma with with zkSNARK proved state transitions
Payment channel protocol for light client server incentivization
Stuff for developers
Truffle v5 is out of beta
Solidity v0.5.2
ZeppelinOS and OpenZeppelin v2.1 releases candidates with Truffle 5 and Solidity 0.5.x
State of Zeppelin’s EVM packages
Optimistic contracts: assume data submission is legit until proven false, verified through bonding/slashing
Piñata: the power of IPFS as an on-demand CDN
Walkthrough of 0x Instant and 0x Launch Kit
Austin Griffith Burner Wallets 2.0 in action to buy beer at blockchain meetup
Steve Mark: security issues in meta transactions
Bingen Eguzkitza’s suggestions to becoming a Solidity dev
Ocean Protocol’s Squid Libraries in JavaScript or Python to make it easier to build front ends or data pipelines on Ocean. Neat example of app using the Squid libraries and Orbit db from Outlier Ventures
Clients
PegaSys 0.8.3 - hard fork ready
Progress on the Mana client in Elixir
Eth on ARMbian. Geth and Parity images now hard fork ready (I got it wrong last week, sorry!)
Ecosystem
EthGlobal 2018 in review. 3,800 hackers (1000+ new to Solidity) from 65 countries. >500 projects submitted.
Ethereum Foundation’s call to identify impactful Eth dapps
Amberdata’s Eth 2018 in review data viz.
Alethio on miners choosing empty blocks for profit
The VB Foundation donated 1k eth to Prysmatic Labs, Chainsafe and SigmaPrime for their eth2 clients.
zkDAI: private Dai transactions with SNARKs
Status proposal for PRBS Whisper alternative
Radical Address: simple ENS name purchasing
ENS: Plans for 3-6 character name auction starting at end of q1
Argent: no more seed phrases, instead a recovery account/multisig that does not have access to your assets. You can use a hardware wallet, a trusted friend or their Argent Guard service
Universal Logins update. It has a live demo
Live on mainnet
Raiden is live on mainnet in alpha testing. ie, break it, get bug bounty
Enterprise
Societe Generale processed the first letter of credit on Komgo
Bloomberg says Facebook is developing a Whatsapp stablecoin. My guess is that they eventually just give up and use a centralized database because they won’t be able to stomach giving up control.
Blythe Masters exits Digital Asset for “personal reasons”
LiquidShare’s pilot platform for European SME post-trade infrastructure opens on Euronext’s markets
In January, Brazilian National Social Development Bank to launch trial of collateralized real stablecoin on Eth mainnet
Tyler Smith: blockchain as industry data commons
Governance and Standards
The dxDAO to launch on April 4th to govern the DutchX protocol, with 50% of tokens going to those who trade on DutchX.
Maker stability fee at 0.5%, winning in a narrow vote
All the links for the Gangnam ProgPOW testnet
ERC820 is in last call
ERC1667: standard Plasma MVP
Application layer
The state of Gnosis: how it all ties together
DDEX is forking 0x as the Hydro Protocol. 0x responds and officially rebrands to 0x.
0x ecosystem acceleration grants
Uport and Ethense educational certificates on your self-sovereign identity
Update on insurance giant AXA’s Fizzy flight insurance app: 70% flights covered, 10k transactions, mostly “from a B2B deal.”
Atari games RollerCoaster Tycoon and Goon Squad coming to Ethereum in second half of 2019
Exploring the emerging crypto debt markets
MakerScan is pretty slick.
DecryptMedia profiles Grid+
Qoo10 builds ecommerce platform where you can only use their token for purchases and listings.
Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks
Martin Holst Swende on Zero Knowledge
St Louis Fed Reserve’s David Andolfatto on Epicenter
Amir Taaki with Arthur Falls
Afri Schoedon on 51Percent
Latest Görli testnet call
Storj’s Shawn Wilkinson and JT Olio on Hashing It Out
Georgios Konstantoploulos on Hashing It Out
Liam Horne on Into the Ether
Tokens / Business / Regulation
Melonomics in a nutshell. I wouldn’t be surprised if many future token models look like this.
Exploring bonding curve collateral
Kyle Samani’s questions from the idea maze
Scott Locklin explains the Fisher equation of exchange and says crypto has velocity all wrong
Should be interesting to watch Cashbet fraud lawsuit. Charlie Shrem was an advisor and they paid ArsenalFC for an ad.
Token Taxonomy Act: 3 Rs and 1 D in the US House intro a crypto bill during a lame duck session. Despite what crypto clickbait media may tell you, this does not augur particularly well for the US becoming more crypto friendly any time soon
Coinbase head lawyer Brian Brooks in NYT: America Could Lead the Transition to a Digital Currency Reserve.
Jurisdictional arbitrage in action: Swiss government wants to become more crypto friendly
General
Cosmos Game of Stakes testnet goes live
Substrate 1.0 beta is out. AdEx released payment channels on Substrate
Reducing shielded proving time in Zcash Sapling
Jarvis and Friday vulnerabilities found. Crypto peer review in action
Swingby: hash timelocked BTC but minted as ERC20 token with collateralized ETH
wBTC update. First wrapped BTC minted
Bloomberg thinks Tether has the money it says it does
Coinbase Earn launches. Gain ZRX by learning 0x
Facebook gave Spotify, Netflix and the New York Times access to all sorts of user data, apparently including private messages
Donate Eth to Heifer International (a longtime Nick Johnson favorite) and get an NFT
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
Jan 10 - Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends
Jan 10-Feb7 - 0x and Coinlist virtual hackathon
Jan ~15 - Constantinople hard fork at block 7080000
Jan 17 - Aragon vote on funding original AragonOne team
Jan 29-30 - AraCon (Berlin)
Feb 7-8 - Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)
Feb 15-17 - ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal) next hacker application round closes December 31st
Feb 23-25 - EthAustin (EthUniversal)
Mar 4 - Ethereum Magicians (Paris)
Mar 5-7 - EthCC (Paris)
Mar 8-10 - ETHParis (ETHGlobal)
Mar 27 - Infura end of legacy key support (Jan 23 begins Project ID prioritization)
Apr 19-21 - ETHCapetown (ETHGlobal)
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