Week in Ethereum News, September 1, 2019
Pantheon becomes Hyperledger Besu - first public chain client for Hyperledger
Eth News and Links
Eth1
There’s an ongoing debate as to how much Eth1 should make breaking changes. In this instance, it’s about opcode repricing which might break code deployed on the chain, even though it is a bad practice to rely on static gas pricing. Sorpaas says no breaking changes please, though that’s opposed to the original sustainability movement which got mislabeled "eth1x." It’s not an easy debate in a decentralized ecosystem, though we have repriced opcodes before, because that’s necessary to avoid DoS attacks.
Swende’s 1884 security considerations
ChainSecurity’s Hubert Ritzdorf analysis of deployed code potentially affected by EIP1884
Swende 2046 benchmarking in Geth. 2046 reduces cost of calls to precompiles
an EVM backend for LLVM from ETC Labs Core
evmone: fast EVM implementation in c++
Péter Szilágyi: “we have an experimental Geth full node weighing 139GB on #Ethereum mainnet: 94GB on HDD and 45GB on SSD. It's in sync”
Parity v2.6.2-beta and v2.5.7-stable to fix a DoS attack of publicly exposed RPCs. Kudos to Amberdata for reporting.
Eth2
Latest What’s New in Eth2
Latest Eth2 implementers call. Mamy and Ben both took notes.
Nimbus client update - working on launch mechanics and interoperability.
Lodestar client update - BLS optimization, disc v5, and Eric Tu wrote the fastest JavaScript SHA256 implementation
Spec v0.8.3 came out a week ago. updates to tests and networking.
phase 1 spec has Sep 30th target date for completeness
Some privacy proposals: Privacy-Preserving Casper FFG using Traceable Ring Signatures and ZKP to remove the mapping ip address / wallet’s public key of a validator
EF released a list of Eth2 grants, focused on client teams and interop/networking, as well as some R&D for light clients and also for phase1 proof of custody. There are also 3 open bounties: phase 0 consensus, Legendre PRF, and STARK friendly hash
Danny Ryan talks Eth2 on Into the Ether
Rocketpool’s second beta to test out decentralized Eth2 staking pools
Vitalik’s list of things that will change for app devs in Eth2. This is not short-term planning but things to keep in mind for the future.
Layer 2
FunFair founder Jeremy Longley with a detailed walkthrough of their state channel architecture and code
“A unified state channel specification for Ethereum” to lay “the foundation for a fully interoperable ecosystem” so that building on channels is as easy as possible for app devs
AdEx: How we built the largest payment channel network on Ethereum. 9 million transactions with only 13k USD onchain because they trigger a payment via channel for every ad impression. 10 cents in gas paid for millions of unidirectional, one-to-many payments. A good example of programmatic micropayments made possible by state channels.
Raiden light client v0.1
Vitalik: the dawn of hybrid layer 2
Optimistic rollup. Bonds/challenges to ensure valid transactions, instead of zk proofs, but easier to generalize for all applications and not just payments.
Stuff for developers
Building holographic consensus on Aragon tutorial
Airscript v0.5.4 - performance speedups for STARKs, approaching single thread limits
Truffle v5.0.34 now supports Node12
Rapid dapp prototyping with Austin Griffith
EthFS, a Unix-like filesystem, check it out on testnet
Making a Remix plugin tutorial
Build a smart fridge with Streamr, RuuviTags, Node-RED, IBM Cloud Watson Studio tutorial
You can now view and export Etherscan’s verified source codes with a license
Vyper v0.1 beta12. Also: a Kauri collection of articles on getting started with Vyper
Ecosystem
How to participate in the ENS shortname auction. Starts Sep 1
Videos from the Swarm Summit
AZTEC’s Ignition Ceremony starts in October, you can apply now to be part of it. This multi-party computation ceremony will likely get used in many future zk implementations.
Enterprise
Pantheon becomes Hyperledger Besu - the first public chain client in Hyperledger. “Besu” is Japanese for base.
EEA telecom use cases report (PDF)
Oxfam, Sempo and ConsenSys in Vanuatu for direct transfers of humanitarian aid to citizens, rather than indirectly through leaky governments
Governance and Standards
EIP2253: Add wallet_getAddressBook JSON-RPC method
EIP2256: Add wallet_getOwnedTokens JSON-RPC method
EIP2250: Gas Price Range
EIPxxxx: Web3 Login Permissions. And MetaMask’s intro to web3 permissions
ENS Login: open standard for wallet integration
Mike Goldin on the state of DAOs in the TCR call
SelloutDAO: sell your vote in any MolochDAO fork
A proposal failed that would have given back some of the DigixDAO’s ETH, and there were lots of unhappy people
Live on mainnet
Erasure Protocol live on mainnet with ErasureBay. “Open marketplace for information,” publish, create reputation, profit. Get griefed if wrong.
Official Star Trek collectible ships for sale live on mainnet. These collectible tokens will later be playable in Lucid Sight’s game
Application layer
Dharma v2 in beta, built on Compound for fixed rates with fiat on/offramps
PoolTogether v2: auto re-entry, interest is immediate, can join or leave pool at any time
You can play the Prisoner’s Dilemma onchain (caveat emptor)
LSDai: tokenized interest rate swaps
TokenSet’s 50 day moving average automated trading strategy. I think these are super cool and bought a few.
Torque: indefinite, fixed rate loans borrowed from bZx’s Fulcrum lending pools. “Torque did not require substantial smart contract development — the tools were already there”
Tokens / Business / Regulation
Synthetix: we were “dead wrong” in trying to develop on centralized chains like EOS because Eth network effects are real. As Robert Leshner notes, “there are now more developers building on Compound Finance than there are developers building on either EOS or Tron.”
Another Flippening: Tether active addresses is multiples higher on Eth than on BTC
General
Three DeFi newsletters worth tracking: Ryan Sean Adams’ Bankless, Camila Russo’s The Defiant, and Nodar Janashia’s DeFi tutorials. Moar competition.
ETH DKG: distributed key generation from onchain code
Vitalik: quadratic voting with sortition
For Week in Ethereum News’ 3 year anniversary, I did an annotated version of this week’s issue. Using Unlock Protocol, you can view it by purchasing a limited edition collectible NFT for the 3rd anniversary. Proceeds will be donated to things within the Ethereum ecosystem.
🎂 3 year anniversary 🎂
Just to repeat the advertisement immediately above: you can buy the limited edition NFT for 0.11 Eth which will unlock the annotated edition.
All proceeds will be back into Ethereum somehow, likely donated to a public good, at my discretion. And who knows, maybe there will be future benefits for the 200 NFT holders?
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
Sep 1 - ENS 3-6 character auction starts
Sep 2-16 - Decentraland SDK virtual hackathon (250k USD in prizes. There’s a referral code on that link that gets both you and me something extra)
Sep 3 - Deadline to apply for EU Horizon Prize. 1m € each to 5 "Blockchains for Social Good" projects
Sep 6-8 - ETHBoston
Sep 10-11 - DeFi Summit (London)
Sep 15 - Augur v1 cutoff
Sep 15 - Ethereal Tel Aviv
Sep 16 - Tachyon accelerator application deadline
Sep 15-16 - StarkWare sessions (Tel Aviv)
Sep 22 - IDEO virtual hackathon ends
Sep 27 - ErasureCon (password: information) (SF)
Oct 7 - ENS workshop (Osaka)
Oct 8-11 - DeVcon (Osaka) and Devcon social events calendar
Oct 19-20 - Crosslink (Taipei)
Nov 8-10 - ETHWaterloo
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