Week in Ethereum News - June 7, 2018

News and Links

Protocol

• Core devs call.  Lane’s notes.
• Latest Casper standup
• Fichter: Simple Fast Plasma Withdrawals
• Two implementations I didn’t have time to read but seemed interesting: 1) Lucidity’s yellow paper for Plasma chain for programmatic ads and 2) Levj’s Plasma Gluon which says it is on testnet
• PlasmaBits: Esteban Ordano’s proposal aimed more at generalized state
• Pysmatic’s sharding implementation call
• Buterin: A proposal for structuring committees, cross-links, etc
• Drake: Registrations, shard count and shuffling
• Charging rent for testnet storage discussion

Stuff for developers

• gnarly optimistic UI library is in alpha.
• Drizzle v1.2 
• Connext v0.3 - virtual channels live on Rinkeby
• OpenZeppelin v1.10 release
• Solidity graphical debugger, somewhat similar to Mythril
• Mocha reporter for Truffle.  Not new, but Andy Tudhope says most devs don’t know it exists in the Ethprize developer interviews
• Turning smart contracts into gastoken factories 
• EthereumJS May recap
• Options for fixing the missing return value bug  affecting ~100 tokens
• Loom releases SDK for dappchains for Cocos gaming platform (supposedly one of the largest in Asia?)
• Gas golfing fun: converting quicksort in Java to Solidity 
• Malicious backdoors in Ethereum proxies

Ecosystem

• Josh Stark: making sense of web3
• Loom: Ethereum Will Be the Backbone of the New Internet
• Zeppelin: Introducing the Transaction Permission Layer
• A primer on light clients
• EthBerlin is aiming for 500-700 hackers
• 6 principles for UX dapp design 
• Raw responses from the EIP0 values survey

Live on mainnet

• Aragon launches its survey app on mainnet
• Status latest release enables mainnet as a test option.  After writing that, they had a hotfix release.

Client Release

• Parity 1.11.3 (beta) or 1.10.6 (stable). Upgrade ASAP because of an issue with unsigned transactions when EIP86 disabled

Governance and Standards

• ERC1132: Extending ERC20 with token locking capability
• Dicussion on ERC1081 bounties standard
• Discussion on ERC1098 cross-client encrypt/decrypt
• ERC1138: URI Format for Calling Functions
• ERC1133: Nesting token standard

Project Updates

• A profile of Althea’s NW Oregon meshnet in operation.  Also, Althea governance model: subnet DAOs with TCRs for subnet discovery.  
• Margin trading protocol dYdX launches on Kovan testnet
• Golem beta v0.16: requesters can set minimums for provider machines. Non-backward compatible.
• Creating easy onboarding for Raiden with Plasma payment hubs
• New 2 minute Streamr promo vid
• Funfair update on their closed beta
• TheGraph decentralized query protocol:  use GraphQL to build Eth/IPFS dapps
• Fig acquires Ownage to publish blockchain games
• Very interesting future of online video stack Twitter thread from Paratii

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks 

• Amrit Kumar and Ilya Sergey talk Zilliqa’s formally verified Scilla language on Epicenter
• Colony’s Alex Rea on Smartest Contract
• EthBuenosAires episode of Zero Knowledge
• Gavin Wood’s recent talk on Substrate and Energy Web Foundation
• More talks and short interviews from EthBuenosAires
• DAOstack on Epicenter
• Christian Reitwiessner on Smartest Contract
• Nadav Hollander talks Dharma Protocol on Token Talks
• Raul Jordan and Preston Van Loon on Software Engineering Daily

Tokens 

• NYT: “In the World of Cryptocurrency, Even Good Projects Can Go Bad.”  This was not particularly close to being a “good project” and I barely remember it.  But good on NYT for calling them out on exaggerating the amount raised. That’s normally the case unless you can verify on-chain the amount raised.
• Interesting ideas for extensible and composable NFTs
• Copyright in a time of Cryptokitty abundance
• Enigma proposes encrypted secret voting for TCRs
• EthBuenosAires winner Crypto against Humanity will be an interesting experiment of TCRs and bonding curves

General

• South African Reserve Bank demos Quorum with IBFT consensus that can process all daily SA payments in 2 hours with privacy
• NYT on SIG’s crypto desk. Interesting bit: they built their own custody
• Coinbase: we’re going to do a regulated security token exchange; acquires broker-dealer, ATS and RIA licenses
• Sequoia’s Matt Huang to start crypto fund with Fred Ehrsam
• Binance announces $1 billion fund
• Guide to joining the Cosmos testnet
• Zooko’s notes from a call with Jihan Wu
• 5 ways the Catholic church should use blockchain
• Lots of NYT this week: “When Crypto Meets Conceptual Art, Things Get Weird”
• SEC names Valerie Szczepanik its crypto czar.  She comes from enforcement, but she’s also known for understanding the tech
• IMF: Monetary policy in the digital age.  They’re taking this seriously.

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note:

• June 14 -- CryptoCup deadline to enter.  Link contains referral code, price goes up June 11
• June 24 -- Colony online hackathon finishes
• June 25 -- Etherisc token sale starts
• June 28 -- BuildEth (San Francisco)
• June 30 -- Solidity Gas Golfing challenge deadline
• June 30-July1 -- Off the chain state channel workshop (Berlin)
• July 6-7 -- TechCrunch blockchain and Ethereum events (Zug) 
• July 9 -- Augur scheduled to launch
• July 12-18 -- IC3 Eth Bootcamp (Ithaca, NY)
• July 14-15 -- FEM governance meetings in Berlin
• July 19-20 -- DappCon (Berlin)
• August 3-4 -- Discon (Boulder, CO)
• August 10-12 -- EthIndia hackathon (Bangalore)
• September 6 -- Security unconference (Berlin)
• September 7-9 -- EthBerlin hackathon
• September 7-9 -- WyoHackathon (Wyoming)
• Oct 5-7 -- TruffleCon in Portland
• Oct 5-7 -- EthSanFrancisco hackathon
• Oct 22-24 -- Web3Summit (Berlin)
• Oct 30 - Nov 2 -- Devcon4 (Prague)
• December -- EthSingapore hackathon

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