News and Links
Layer 1 - Eth PoW
Lane’s notes on the Ethereum 1.0 improvements call -- the nomenclature Eth1.x is deprecated
Péter Szilágyi: chain pruning for long term 1.0 viability
A rough proposal for storage management fees. Discussion at FEM and two at Ethresearch: one and two
Layer 1 - Eth2
Eth2 implementers call. in lieu of notes, agenda
Prysmatic’s biweekly update - explanations of both new cross-shard approach and STARK-friendly hash functions, refactoring to single state, BLS implementation and much more
Lighthouse fortnightly update: Alex Stokes joins, spec updates, etc
Encumberments: instant cross-shard payments over slow cross-shard
A Tale of Two Ethers explainer.
Notes from Eth 2.0 Q&A in Prague
An ELI5 on how Eth2 landed on 32 ETH to be a validator
Layer 2
Latest state channel call. Penultimate state channels call
Plasma Prime PoC client
A sketch for a STARK-based accumulator. Or Vitalik’s ELI5 on Reddit
Stuff for developers
Use Whisper in Embark tutorial
Quick Formality update from Victor Maia. [Formality is kin to Haskell.]
Compound releases documentation for devs to earn interest on eth/tokens
Comparing GUN, OrbitDB and Scuttlebutt
AragonOS 4: refining our framework for production
Import Ethereum state to use on local chain
Ahken: Eth aware automatic IPFS pinning PoC
Writing a Truebit task in Rust
Octopus security analysis tool for wasm, EVM and some centralized chains
Native Meta Transactions: signed message recovery integrated in contracts
Remix 0.7.5 released with solidity 0.5 support, plus some cool plugins
Ecosystem
Chart over time of Eth locked up in DeFi (note: Maker off by default)
MyCrypto is doing an Advent-style calendar of security tips with prizes
How to easily import your Medium articles into Kauri
Interview with Shawn Wilkinson on Storj’s current approach to decentralized storage
Joe Lubin’s tweetstorm overview of the Ethereum ecosystem
Two great client releases. Update now
Geth v1.8.19 trie read cache for 15% faster full-sync speed and 30% faster in-sync processing and Swarm v0.3.7. Also, Swarm’s Kubernetes setup is now open source
Parity Ethereum v2.2.2 beta - lower the uncle rate allowing higher gas limit. warp sync reuses local info to reduce required data to sync. and 2.1.7 stable
Parity CTO Fredrik Harrysson interviews Geth lead dev Péter Szilágyi for Zero Knowledge
Live on mainnet
Gnosis Safe is on mainnet - Android app (download link. iOS coming soon). Big step forward in UX and multi-sig availability, though obviously you should wait for it to be battle tested before committing large sums. (RuntimeVerification’s formal verification is in process)
Mintable: easily mint and manage your ERC721 nfty tokens
Ethertify: certification platform for IP rights and document signing
Aztec: working zero knowledge proof for confidential transactions on mainnet. Send Maker’s Dai to a contract, then withdraw to another address. The addresses are public, but the amounts are not. Roadmap includes: anonymous voting for governence mechanics, anonymous identity schemes and zero knowledge exchange
Enterprise
Amazon announces QLDB (one party owns the chain/database) and Managed Blockchain (multiple nodes) for Ethereum and Fabric
At same event, Kaleido announced consortium plans
Governance and Standards
Polkadot: never fork again
Giveth’s Unicorn DAC non-hierarchical governance experiment
ERC1630: hashed time-lock standard
Application layer
Ocean Protocol’s v0.2 Trilobite testnet release - data access control, secure compute via fitchain
Capbridge and ConsenSys working on a Singaporean security token exchange
Management and performance fees in a Melon fund
A look under the hood of Mysterium’s decentralized VPN
Streamr open sources their front end, Solidity code and event watcher
upbloc: curated periodic publishing platform, live on Ropsten
FedEx to work with XYO to build out proof of location
More on Etherisc, Aon and Oxfam’s crop insurance for Sri Lankan rice farmers
Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks
Justin Drake on Epicenter
Luke Mulks AMA on Brave Ads and he tells us about all the ways we’re being tracked
Pokt Network’s Michael O’Rourke & Luis C. de Leon on Hashing It Out
Hudson Jameson on the inaugural edition of Eric Conner’s podcast
Tokens / Business / Regulation
Sina Habibian: tokenizing real estate
Harbor’s security token platform launched with 20m equity in South Carolina student housing
Chris Burniske reports that SEC Chair Clayton confirmed that ETH and BTC are not securities, but refused to comment about Ripple.
SEC announced settlements with Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled for touting shady sales and not disclosing it
US Treasury sanctions 2 Bitcoin addresses associated with ransomware in Iran
General
NEAR Protocol open sources its client, uses Typescript for its smart contracts. IDE live. (headsup: I’m an investor)
Zilliqa’s v3 testnet is live in advance of targeted Jan 31 mainnet launch. (As said before, I own some)
Trail of Bits: 10 Rules for Hardware Wallets
Buterin/Weyl: Central planning as overfitting
Jerome de Tychey’s recap and lessons learned of last year’s EthCC has me pumped for 2019.
University of Basel gives Vitalik Buterin an honorary doctorate
Scuttlebutt’s Dominic Tarr statement on a hack that happened because he had transferred control of a widely-used module to an attacker who inserted code to steal crypto. Always check your dependencies.
The above highlighted lack of incentive for open source maintainers, which is part of what Gitcoin highlights in their roadmap for financial open source sustainability. A different approach: the ZeppelinOS ecosystem of secure code
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note:
Dec 7-9 - ETHSingapore hackathon (ETHGlobal)
Dec 9 - Neufund equity token offering (closes after a week)
Jan 10 - Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends
Jan 29-30 - AraCon (Berlin)
Feb 7-8 - Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)
Feb 15-17 - ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal)
Feb 23-25 - EthAustin hackathon (EthUniversal)
Mar 5-7 - EthCC (Paris)
Mar 27 - Infura end of legacy key support (Jan 23 begins Project ID prioritization)
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