Ecosystem and Projects’ Updates, Opinion and Research Articles

0x:

Contract-fillable Liquidity Made Simple: Swap tokens at the best prices with Asset Swapper

Augur:

v2 Transition Update: What to Expect Moving Forward.

Coinbase:

The 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education.

Use dapps on any desktop browser with Coinbase Wallet’s WalletLink.

Decentraland:

Introducing the Decentraland SDK Tutorial Series: This is the first installment of a series of video tutorials that will teach you the basics of using the Decentraland SDK.

Creating a Sprite Fire: Using a classic technique for the newest wave in gaming.

Adding Functionality to a Builder Scene: Learn how to add basic interactivity to an existing Builder scene.

Save your Scenes to the Cloud: All your creations in one place, accessible from any device.

Dether:

Exclusive Sign-up for New Dether App Testing, Bug Bounty: The team is soon launching the new Dether app on mainnet, and they want to hear from you! Sign-up to be a Dether app tester to find bugs and improve the app.

district0x:

district0x Quarterly Report — Q2 2019: A summary of events and financials from the most recent quarter.

The District Weekly — August 31st, 2019: News and updates from the district0x Network.

The District Weekly — August 24th, 2019.

district0x Dev Update — August 20th, 2019: Development progress and product changes from district0x.

Gnosis:

September 2019 — The Gnosis Monthly Development Update: Keeping up with the Gnosis developers.

So you want to build with Gnosis but just don’t know exactly what?

DappCon 2019 is here: And here are some tracks from the conference you should be sure to check out.

Golem:

Team Updates: CGI (Computer Generated Imagery).

Community Update: headed to Berlin and Japan!

Keep Network:

What’s Needed Now in Interoperability Infrastructure: A look back at the first Cross-Chain Summit and DeFi BTC.

Bridging Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum: Announcing tBTC, the first DApp built on the Keep Network.

Building Bridges Between Blockchains With t-ECDSA Keeps: Privacy makes interoperability possible.

Maker DAO:

Executive Vote: Lower the Stability fee by 2% to a total of 16.5% per year.

Making Maker — August 2019.

Governance Poll: Stability Fee Adjustment — August 26, 2019.

MyEtherWallet:

How Do I Cash Out? (aka Sell My Funds, Swap for ETH, Exchange for Bitcoin, Exit to Fiat)

The Essential Wallet Guide, Part 2: Hardware and Hardware-like Wallets

Raiden Network:

Hack with Raiden at ETHBerlin.

Status:

Ethereal Blocks — Status & The Virtual Hackathon.

Nimbus Status Update — Berlin, Priorities and AMA.

Bonding Philosophies.

Streamr:

DAO’s And The Data Economy.

How to build your own smart fridge: Streamr in a cognitive IoT architecture with RuuviTags, Node-RED, IBM Cloud Watson Studio.

Trinity protocol:

Trinity Biweekly Report — Late August.

Zilliqa:

Technical Update 27 August 2019.

Community Update 20 August 2019 — Meet Ocean Rumble, and enjoy a glimpse into our new website.

Other projects updates:

Parity v2.6.2-beta and v2.5.7-stable to fix a DoS attack of publicly exposed RPCs. Kudos to Amberdata for reporting.

Pantheon v1.2.2

Pantheon becomes Hyperledger Besu — the first public chain client in Hyperledger.

Where will I be able to use v2.0?: Connext V2 Launch Partners Announced. Launch partners include wallets (MetaMask, Mosendo, Portis + more), infrastructure partners such as Infura and app partners like Civil, Relevant and dTok.

Introducing Web3 Permissions: the MetaMask team introduces a new web3 permissions system that aims to do away with the dreaded ‘repeated confirmations’ that MetaMask users frequently experience.

Million-Daily-Active-User WeChat and Facebook Games Migrate to Celer Network Platform: This week Celer Network announced that they had formed a strategic partnership with SkyDream Technology, a multi-million-daily-active-user mobile mini game studio on platforms such as WeChat, Facebook and more.

Yolorekt: A 3 minute ETHUSD price prediction game using Abridged.

You can now tip BAT on Reddit and Vimeo with Brave desktop:

Escrow and arbitration on OpenLaw.

Introducing the ETH 50 Day Moving Average Set: The ETH50SMACO Set is now live on TokenSets.

Dharma V2, now in Beta, built on Compound for fixed rates with fiat on/offramps.

Pool DAI, a no-loss donation protocol enabling people to pool money together, lend it out, and donate the interest to a cause. It does this by pooling DAI and lending it out via Compound and then donating the interest earned to different causes.

Compound Finance audit summary, by OpenZeppelin.

PoolTogether v2: Auto re-entry, interest is immediate, can join or leave pool at any time.

LSDai: tokenized interest rate swaps.

Torque: indefinite, fixed rate loans borrowed from bZx’s Fulcrum lending pools.

Clovers Network is live on mainnet. “mine” clover and then buy your collectibles with the in-game currency on a bonding curve.

Panvala is live on mainnet.

RequestNetwork v2 is on mainnet. IPFS storage with Eth hash, and invoicing features.

Centrifuge’s Tinlake is live on mainnet. 180k USD in tokenized real world assets like invoice factoring and mortgages.

Erasure Protocol: Numerai’s Erasure Protocol is now live on the Ethereum mainnet allowing users to interact with Erasure with real skin in the game.

The Dawn of Hybrid Layer 2 Protocols by Vitalik Buterin.

Quadratic voting with sortition: Vitalik on economics.

Ethereum Smart Contracts in L2: Optimistic Rollup by Karl Floersch. This post outlines optimistic rollup: a construction which enables autonomous smart contracts on layer 2 (L2) using the OVM. The construction borrows heavily from both plasma and zkRollup designs, and builds on shadow chains as described by Vitalik. This construction resembles plasma but trades off some scalability to enable running fully general (eg. Solidity) smart contracts in layer 2, secured by layer 1. Scalability is proportional to the bandwidth of data availability oracles which include Eth1, Eth2, or even Bitcoin Cash or ETC — providing a near term scalable EVM-like chain in layer 2.

Low-overhead secret single-leader election by Justin Drake. Secret single-leader election with per block overhead of one SNARK plus 32 bytes.

Empirically Analyzing Ethereum’s Gas Mechanism by Renlord Yang, Toby Murray, Paul Rimba, Udaya Parampalli: Ethereum’s Gas mechanism attempts to set transaction fees in accordance with the computational cost of transaction execution: a cost borne by default by every node on the network to ensure correct smart contract execution. Gas encourages users to author transactions that are efficient to execute and in so doing encourages node diversity, allowing modestly resourced nodes to join and contribute to the security of the network. However, the effectiveness of this scheme relies on Gas costs being correctly aligned with observed computational costs in reality. In this work, the authors performed the first large scale empirical study to understand to what degree this alignment exists in practice, by collecting and analyzing Tera-bytes worth of nanosecond-precision transaction execution traces. Besides confirming potential denial-of-service vectors, their results also shed light on the role of I/O in transaction costs which remains poorly captured by the current Gas cost model. Finally, their results suggest that under the current Gas cost model, nodes with modest computational resources are disadvantaged compared to their better resourced peers, which they identify as an ongoing threat to node diversity and network decentralization.

ETHDKG: Distributed Key Generation with Ethereum Smart Contracts by Philipp Schindler and Aljosha Judmayer and Nicholas Stifter and Edgar Weippl: Distributed key generation (DKG) is a fundamental building block for a variety of cryptographic schemes and protocols, such as threshold cryptography, multi-party coin tossing schemes, public randomness beacons and consensus protocols. More recently, the surge in interest for blockchain technologies, and in particular the quest for developing scalable protocol designs, has renewed and strengthened the need for efficient and practical DKG schemes. Surprisingly, given the broad range of applications and available body of research, fully functional and readily available DKG protocol implementations still remain limited. The authors hereby aim to close this gap by presenting an open source, fully functional, well documented, and economically viable DKG implementation that employs Ethereum’s smart contract platform as a communication layer. The efficiency and practicability of our protocol is demonstrated through the deployment and successful execution of a DKG contract in the Ropsten testnet. Given the current Ethereum block gas limit, it is possible to support up to 256 participants, while still ensuring that the key generation process can be verified at smart contract level. Further, they present a generalization of our underlying DKG protocol that is suitable for distributed generation of keys for discrete logarithm based cryptosystems.

A Survey on Ethereum Systems Security: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Defenses by Huashan Chen, Marcus Pendleton, Laurent Njilla, and Shouhuai Xu: The blockchain technology is believed by many to be a game changer in many application domains, especially financial applications. While the first generation of blockchain technology (i.e., Blockchain 1.0) is almost exclusively used for cryptocurrency purposes, the second generation (i.e., Blockchain 2.0), as represented by Ethereum, is an open and decentralized

platform enabling a new paradigm of computing — DApps running on top of blockchains. The rich applications and semantics of DApps inevitably introduce many security vulnerabilities, which have no counterparts in pure cryptocurrency systems like Bitcoin. Since Ethereum is a new, yet complex, system, it is imperative to have a systematic and comprehensive understanding on its security from a holistic perspective, which is unavailable. To the best of our knowledge, the present survey, which can also be used as a tutorial, fills this void. In particular, the authors systematize three aspects of Ethereum systems security: vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses. They draw insights into, among other things, vulnerability root causes, attack consequences, and defense capabilities, which shed light on future research directions.

Versionless Ethereum Virtual Machine by Wei Tang.

Some privacy proposals:

Anonymity: a ZKP to remove the mapping ip address / wallet’s public key of a validator.

Privacy-Preserving Casper FFG using Traceable Ring Signatures.

Multimillionaire 25-year-old crypto king Vitalik Buterin speaks to the Star about the future of Ethereum: Toronto Star Q&A with Vitalik.

Talking Ethereum 2.0 with Danny Ryan: Danny Ryan, core researcher for the Ethereum Foundation who works on Ethereum 2.0 joins the podcast. For those wanting a deep dive and update on the status of Ethereum 2.0 this episode is for you. They talk about why Ethereum 2.0 is needed and why some of the original design decisions were made. From there they discuss the phased approach and what each phase will bring. Then they move onto discussing early staking and how much ETH he’s expecting to be staked in Phase 0. Finally they wrap up with some general talk about Ethereum including dapps and contributing to the ecosystem.

EthHub — Ethereum Education and the Quest for Ether Dominance:

An episode with Eric Conner and Anthony Sassano, founders of EthHub. Started in January of 2019, EthHub’s goal is to provide a trusted, objective source of information for the Ethereum ecosystem. The platform is made up of an open-source documentation website, a weekly newsletter, and a podcast, “Into the Ether” hosted by Eric and Anthony. Both active and vocal members of the Ethereum community, they are known to embody what some consider to be Ethereum Maximalism.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• What is EthHub and why they decided to start the organization
• Eric and Anthony’s view on the current state of the Ethereum community
• The different cliques, factions, and sub-groups in Ethereum
• The role of the Foundation and Vitalik Buterin as they see it
• A close look into project funding in Ethereum and the emergence of DAOs for funding
• Reflections on Anthony’s “Why Ether is Valuable” piece
• The state of Ethereum 2.0 research and the different parties involved
• Their views on where the crypto space is heading in the next 5 years

Understanding the Decentralized Finance Movement and Ethereum Through Blockchain Data: Christian Crowley, CEO of Alethio answers questions about Defi, Ethereum data, product development and the need for more robust blockchain data.

New Territories Podcast — Ep 6: What The Pocketful Of Quarters, INC. No-Action Means for Crypto. Learn about the similarities and differences between the Quarters no-action letter and the TurnKey Jet no-action letter.

On July 25, 2019, SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance issued its second-ever blockchain token related no-action letter to Pocketful of Quarters, Inc.(Quarters). Hosts spoke with Lewis Cohen, the attorney who represented Quarters in obtaining this no-action relief for the Quarters’ platform which uses an ERC 20 token. They discussed the 13-year-old founder’s vision for this company, the process they went through to obtain the no-action letter and why he believes that this no-action relief is meaningful despite some critics’ sentiment that the facts were clearly beyond the scope of SEC’s jurisdiction.

In this episode, Joyce and Lewis discuss:

• What is the Pocketful of Quarters platform for video gamers?
• What the founding father and son team is like.
• The process and steps in obtaining no-action relief from the SEC staff.
• The similarities and differences between the Quarters no-action letter and the TurnKey Jet no-action letter.
• Whether the Quarters no-action letter expanded the scope of no-action relief currently afforded by the SEC’s staff.
• Why Lewis believes that this no-action relief is meaningful despite some critics’ sentiment that the facts were obviously beyond the scope of SEC’s jurisdiction.

Episode 92: Jorge Izquierdo talks Aragon and DAOs on Zero Knowledge: In this episode, Anna catches up with Jorge Izquierdo from Aragon Oneto talk about the beginning of the Aragon project, the history of DAOs, as well as the challenges and potential in these new organisational entities.

Here are some links they mentioned:

74 — Rebuilding the Web, Restructuring Social Organizations, With Dan Finlay on POV Crypto:

Dan Finlay is one of the Big Brains behind MetaMask, a browser extension that represents the core interface for interacting with Ethereum and Web 3.0. Dan has a lot of great thoughts to share, about how the web experience should be turned inside out, in order to produce a user-centric experience.

Topics discussed:

– Traditional Web 2.0 Login System doesn’t make sense on a blockchain

– Providing User empowerment and control on the internet

– Design decisions for Metamask

– Making websites ask for permission from the user, rather than the user asking permission from the website.

– The intersection of Identity and Wallets

– MetaMask roadmap; supporting all the things!

– MetaMask development process; The MetaMask team

– Ethereum as a court/legal system

– Blockchains taking responsibilities away from Governments

– Keeping trivial transactions off the main chain

– 1 year blocktimes??

– Hyper-tokenization

Social media activity:

Social media dynamics:

The Ethereum community continues to grow. There is constant slight growth in Ethereum social media channels.

Facebook — Official announcement channel. Recent publications — about Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, Conferences (20–100 likes per publication).

Twitter (Ethereum) — Official announcement channel. Duplicates news from Facebook page (250–500 likes per publication, 30–50 comments). Average number of shares is 100–200 for one post.

Twitter (Ethereum Network) — News from DApps (10–20 likes per publication, 1–5 comments, 1–10 shares).

Twitter (Ethereum Report) — Retweets from official announcement channel and team members’ pages.

Reddit — News about projects and blockchain, links to interviews, podcasts, upcoming events. The longest thread has 161 comments (Welcome to r/ethereum — the Reddit frontpage of the Web 3.0).

YouTube (Ethereum) — Last video on July 27th, 2017 (5000–20 000 views per video).

YouTube (Ethereum Foundation) — Videos from conferences, meetups, Ethereum Core Devs Meetings.

Ethereum Community Forum. Recent Discussions: Forum has been hacked, Security alert, Forums Database Compromised, Help Stop Forum Spam, Developing Guidelines for acceptable Promotion and Marketing on the Ethereum Forum.

See also Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forum.

Highlights from two weeks of Gitter channel (from What’s New in Eth2–31 August 2019 by Ben Edgington)

There is a constant slight growth in Ethereum community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Ethereum Reddit subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook likes. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.