February 22, 2019
It's time for Constantinople
News and Links
Constantinople upgrade fork this week - update your clients!
Constantinople’s network upgrade is scheduled to happen around Feb 28th at block 7280000. Update your clients so you don’t get left behind. Here’s the Foundation’s FAQ if you’re curious about what this means for you. The link also has links to the most recent client versions.
Layer 1
[eth1] part 4, part 5 and part 6 of Alexey’s eth1 workshop retrospective. Click part 6 for an overview of each different part to understand what was discussed at the eth1 workshop.
[eth1] Ewasm 1.x precompiles, part 1
[eth2] Buterin: Maximally simple account abstraction without gas refunds
ZK/privacy
Zether and Sigmabullets for confidential/anonymous transactions. 7m gas now, but could be lowered to 1.7m with EIP1108 and 1109. Paper by Bünz, Agrawal, Zamani and Boneh.
Starkware on STARK math, pt2
Barry WhiteHat: Semaphore, rate limiting with SNARKs to fight spam
WASM-compatible Miximus in Rust POC
Plasma and sidechains
Staking for Loom’s PlasmaCash client is live
Streamr opensourced Monoplasma for one to many payments
At EthDenver, Hoard’s Plasma Dog did 28.5k transactions on OmiseGo’s MoreViablePlasma implementation which saved ~$2300 in transaction fees by not putting them on the mainchain.
a Plasma watchtower built at EthDenver by Will Villanueva and Matt Garnett
Why Ocean Protocol chose to launch on a PoA chain
Getting started with SKALE sidechain network (testnet launched at EthDenver)
Liquidity Network paper on NOCUST with SNARKs for checkpoints
Gluon Plasma goes live with Leverj’s exchange on mainnet.
State channels
FunFair is planning to opensource a more generalized version of its FateChannels
“I just closed a mainnet Raiden Network channel. Through it I received or mediated 6600 payments and sent 430 payments with 1 wei being the smallest amount. It cost ~$0.30 in tx fees to open, close and settle the channel.” - Jacob Czepluch.
New Raiden release: v0.100.2 - webUI, bugfixes, and now you can run Raiden on Raspberry Pi
Celer continues to run a weekly Gomoku contest where the top 64 scores get Eth. (Disclosure: I’ve won both weeks so far)
Stuff for developers
Solhint v2 - Solidity linter
Building a decentralized Reddit, pt3. Embark tutorial.
Getting started with the Buidler task runner
Etherlime v1.0.2 adds a flattener and React shape
Truffle v5.0.5
Brownie: a Python framework for testing, deploying and interacting with your EVM code
Philippe Castonguay on why Create2
How Ronan Sandford (ex-EtherPlay) architected his new game The Sandbox
MythX security plugin for Truffle. MythX to give 25% of revenue to MythX tool plugins
Finding all underflows with eveem and BigQuery
Ecosystem
Grants: Ethereum Foundation released a group of grantees (Matter’s rollup, LeapDAO Plasma, Shadowlands, py-libp2p, DeepSea, Eth on Arm, and Görli testnet), and Gnosis released its first group. Also Maker gave a grant to DexPay point of sale terminal
Outcomes of the recent Status, web3foundation, and Validity labs messaging protocol workshop
Proposed short ENS auction reservation process
Main event of the week: Afri quit the Ethereum community in response to social media trolls. Many signed a letter in response. Afri is an Ethereum hero; that will never change. It’s a sad reminder that social attacks by outsiders can be effective. The only countermeasure is to frequently say thank you to the many people who go above and beyond.
ETHGlobal announced upcoming hackathons through 2019: Paris, Cape Town, New York, India, Boston, Waterloo
EthDenver finalists. Winners of sponsor prizes. All the submissions, as there were many great submissions.
Most core Ethereum devs strongly prefer Eth to other crypto and are incentive aligned with Eth holders.
Live on mainnet
Augur frontend Guesser is live. It’s got some prediction markets about the Oscars.
Convergent: personal tokens on a pre-set price curve. “Invest in your friends.”
Leverj’s exchange went live as mentioned above in Plasma section.
NuoNetwork’s non-custodial margin trading to leverage up 2x
MolochDAO deployed to main net, and thus is now accepting membership and grant requests. Whitepaper on using a grants DAO to fund public goods.
Enterprise
Pegasys: Why IBFT 2.0’s privacy improvements are good for enterprises and consortia
iExec gets 900k euros from French government to adapt their computing platform to enterprise
Update on Parity’s collaboration with World Food Programme to bring cash payments to Syrian refugees. Now 10x bigger: 100k transfers every month
Governance and Standards
Given that 55-60% of miners are voting for ProgPow, I think we can assume a lower limit on what % of hashpower is GPUs.
ERC1761: Scoped Approval Interface
ERC1756: Practical Randomness via Dual Contract
ERC1757: Reputation Mechanism to Claim Issuers
ERC1767: GraphQL interface to Ethereum node data
Application layer
Digix targets March 30th for governance launch, also storing gold in Canada as well as Singapore
Aragon Agent - an account owned by an Aragon org to interact trustlessly with other web3 apps
Golem v0.19.0 - new provider marketplace and migration to Docker for Windows
Request Protocol v2 alpha release
FunFair 2019 roadmap: no 3rd party KYC app, more third party titles, and launching white label casinos.
Maker raises stability fee to 1.5%
Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks
Justin Drake indepth Eth2 walkthrough on NEAR's Whiteboard Series
Justin Drake VDF talk and more from VDF Day including Dan Boneh, Ben Wesolowski, and Filecoin
Bounties Network Mark Beylin and Simona Pop on Into the Ether
Austin Griffith and Igor Barinov talk xDai on Zero Knowledge
Tokens / Business / Regulation
Breaker (formerly SingularDTV) to put proceeds from the Trust Machine movie into a token they’ll give to their tokenholders as of ~March 13
Dan Elitzer on the inevitable financial engineering future of open finance
Monegro: Cryptonetwork governance as capital
Responses to the CFTC’s request for comments
Institutional investor consultant Cambridge Associates published a report arguing that funds should take a crypto position. Bloomberg article.
Brian Armstrong op-ed on custody is worth a read if you hold crypto. He says they have $500 million under custody from institutions.
General
MetaMask passes 1m installs in the Chrome Store
CasperLabs is funding Vlad Zamfir’s CBC Casper research, which seems like a win for Vlad, Ethereum, CBC, and CasperLabs.
“the Bitcoin structure was quite brilliant, it seems like there’s some merit to Ethereum as well, and maybe some of the others” - Elon Musk in an interview this week
Tweetstorm: what are BLS sigs?
Paper: new instantiation of a VDF
There were some crazy transaction fees this week, presumably due to forgetting a decimal point on the gas price.
Lots of speculation about Samsung including Ethereum wallets on phone. Only confirmation I can find is this line from a press release: “Galaxy S10 is built with defense-grade Samsung Knox, as well as a secure storage backed by hardware, which houses your private keys for blockchain-enabled mobile services.”
Results for Gitcoin’s 25k “Liberal Radicalism” matching grants
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
Feb ~28 - Constantinople (block 7280000)
Mar 4 - Ethereum Magicians (Paris)
Mar 5-7 - EthCC (Paris)
Mar 8-10 - ETHParis
Mar 8-10 - EthUToronto
Mar 22 - Zero Knowledge Summit 0x03 (Berlin)
Mar 27 - Infura end of legacy key support
April 4-5 - Deconomy (Seoul)
April 8-14 - Edcon hackathon and conference (Sydney)
Apr 19-21 - ETHCapetown
Apr 24-26 - Truffle Elevate (Dublin)
May 9 - Fluidity Summit (NYC)
May 10-11 - Ethereal (NYC)
May 17-19 - ETHNewYork
May 17 - Deadline to accept proposals for Instanbul upgrade fork
June 22-24 - Zcon1 (Split, Croatia)
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