March 1, 2019
News and Links
Layer 1
[eth1] Constantinople is successful so far. Eth issuance now comparable to BTC.
[eth2] Eth2 spec v0.4
[eth2] phase 0 wire protocol from Matt Slipper
[eth2] Nimbus dev update - testnet expected in March, network sim running
[eth2] Prysmatic dev update - improving validator, attestation lifecycle, beacon node
[eth2] Lighthouse dev update - explains fork choice rules and some BLS basics
[eth2] Chainsafe dev update - “once merged all our state transitions will be implemented, this includes slot, block and epoch processing as well as the fork choice rule”
[eth2] eth2 implementers call. Agenda to follow along.
[eth2] Podcast: Danny Ryan walks through Eth2 on Zero Knowledge. Also, Trent’s notes are very useful
Client releases
Pantheon v1 released. Written in Java, Apache2 licensed, enterprise-grade with permissioning and IBFT v2
Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.23 "Theodora", includes Constantinople support
Plasma and sidechains
Plasma Group: toward a general purpose Plasma to make it much easier for devs to write plasma apps.
State channels
Magmo’s Nitro Protocol paper on n-party generalized state channel networks
Three part video series from Celer on how they solve the watchtower problem
Stuff for developers
Automate your Solidity workflow with Buidler
Truffle v5.0.6 major debugger update
Solidity implementation of elliptic curve secp256r1 / prime256v1 / p256
3box: profile hovers and email verification service
ConsenSysDiligence held a CTF, and samczun cracked it fast
Perez, Livshits paper confirming that the sensationalist “omg 21000 contracts are vulnerable” headline is nonsense
OpenLaw Elements - code to build and manage agreements for lending, IP, derivatives, etc
0x extensions for dutch auctions, whitelists, and forwarders
Easy way to claim .test ENS domains for testing
Ecosystem
Upcoming ENS root change for integration with 90% of TLDs. Given that most of the unsupported TLDs are long-tail, that means ENS will support 99.99%+ domains. Also, ENS rewrote their documentation
Alethio investigates the four figure ETH transaction fees from last week. They think it is some kind of automation gone awry.
User studies of Parity’s Fether wallet
More on the Ethereum Cat Herders
Public good funding: Moloch processing memberships and starting with funding proposal. There’s also the Gitcoin torch that has 14000 DAI pledged to match donations to Gitcoin grants
Step by step walkthrough of using Christian Lundkvist’s simple multi-sig
RicMoo: Ethereum can recover if quantum computing were to ever break Ethereum
Live on mainnet
Melon v1 released. capped at 5k/fund at UI level, bug bounties open.
Helena - prediction market platform built on Gnosis. Industry insiders and obsessives participate in crypto-focused prediction markets, rewarded from bounty pools and eventually from subscription revenue.
Enterprise
Pantheon released - see above in client releases section.
Video on i2i bank to bank transfers from UnionBank and ConsenSys in the Philippines
Alpine’s list of enterprise projects making news
Governance and Standards
Latest core devs call. Agenda to follow along.
Proposed: higher standards for EIPs
ERC1780: JSON-LD Contract Metadata for Semantic Web Ontologies
ERC1789: 20% of issuance dedicated to ecosystem development
ERC1803: Rename BALANCE, SHA3, GAS, NUMBER, GASLIMIT, and INVALID opcodes for clarity
EIP1805: Simple Streamable Serialize for network transport
ERC1775: App Keys, application specific wallet accounts. FEM discussion
ERC1776: Native meta transactions
On-chain governance is hard. Aragon One’s John Light on AGP1: "While the Aragon Network Token contract showed around 20,000 unique addresses holding ANT at the time of the vote, only around 60 unique addresses participated. All together these 60 addresses controlled at most 7.85% of the ANT supply"
ZEIP23 approved with 300 unique addresses voting.
Application layer
Tales from rural Oregon where Althea is using Eth for micropayments on mesh networking
Status 0.10.0 with blocking chats and better searching
DefiPulse - stats on all the open finance projects.
Games partnering with phone companies: Decentraland and HTC, Enjin and Samsung
SetProtocol’s Strategy Enabled Tokens: automatic on-chain trading strategies, including asset rebalancing
Vansa: the road ahead for OmiseGo
Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks
Elena Nadolinski on Digitally Rare
Aztec Protocol’s Paul Berg on Stories in Crypto
Cent on Into the Ether
Tokens / Business / Regulation
$750k in onchain factoring loans to Amazon merchants. Security tokens live on Ethereum.
Proposed ranking of apps in Status with SNT
TCRParty lessons learned and upcoming features
Beylin: TCRs 2.0 - Self curating lists
How cryptofunds show how early we are in the web3 tech cycle
Pat Berarducci on why state securities laws matter
General
Understanding sparse Merkle multiproofs
Flyclients: superlight POW clients from Bünz, Kiffer, Luu, Zamani. Proof size under 500KB for Ethereum through downloading “only a logarithmic number of block headers to synchronize and verify transactions while storing only a single block header between executions”
Zero knowledge for dexes from Bowe, Chiesa, et al
How the $7m EOS “hack” really happened. That is, it wasn’t a hack, just poor fundamental protocol design.
MyCrypto goes over the basics: why do we need transaction data?
WebAssembly 100x faster with Wasmer
Chromium broke Ledger support, which means Brave will likely break for Ledger too.
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
Mar 4 - Ethereum Magicians (Paris)
Mar 5-7 - EthCC (Paris)
Mar 8-10 - ETHParis
Mar 8-10 - EthUToronto
Mar 15 - Next core devs call
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 16 - Token Summit (NYC)
May 17-19 - ETHNewYork
May 17 - Deadline to accept proposals for Instanbul upgrade fork
May 23-25 - Swarm Orange Summit (Madrid)
June 22-24 - Zcon1 (Split, Croatia)
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