Annotated edition for Week in Ethereum News Feb 9

There’s too much going on in Ethereum for Substack!

This edition was so massive that I found out that Substack (my email provider) has a character limit, because it started giving me warnings when I wasn’t even done. So to make space, I cut out some of the default language in the bottom sections that few people read. Probably should switch some of that language up anyway.

Link for standard version of Week in Ethereum News without my commentary.

Eth1

On the core devs call, they’re going over what makes sense to include in the next fork. The second EIP1962 implementation is the link in here, important because it’s the alternative to the MatterLabs implementation for the generalized precompile.

Nethermind continues to improve with constant releases. Parity kicked off their “OpenEthereum” transition of the client to the community. Apparently the DAO idea is on the backburner - if reports on Twitter are to be believed, they would have held the majority of the tokens. That’s crazy, presumably the idea was that they’d be giving them out over time to the contributors. It would have been nice to have a better writeup somewhere

Headsup: at some point there is going to be (another) fight over ProgPoW. It’s an odd beast where both sides are convinced that they have already won - meaning that anger and disgruntled ragequits are almost guaranteed.

If you’re the sort of person who ragequits because you didn’t get your way, then there’s a reason why forks of Ethereum exist.

Eth2

Rocketpool is currently the 3rd most clicked of this week’s issue. I’ve been of the opinion that CLI is fine for staking - most people who are willing to stake their ETH at the start can handle a CLI, I think. Rocketpool is conservatively estimating to go live in Q4 - I imagine that the staking rewards will be substantially higher in q3 pre-rocketpool, and then will go down again around q1 2021 when exchanges/custody services start staking for their customers.

Nimbus mobile testnet is neat. The idea has always been that you can run a validator on a mobile phone. It’s happening!

Layer2

A relatively straightforward section this week.

Stuff for developers

I like to highlight the zk stuff as it’s clearly the future.

Sam Sun just keeps finding bugs.

Checkout the EthVigil tutorials. They look pretty slick!

Though it’s still early days (the standard thing to say on every panel at every crypto conference), a sign of maturity is that things like Microsoft’s Eth dev kit being generally available isn’t an earth shattering headline anymore. Everyone now knows that all the world’s biggest companies are experimenting with this technology, almost always on Ethereum, yet they’re also often quiet about it.

It’s usually safe to just replace “blockchain” with “Ethereum” in most MSM headlines.

Ecosystem

Matt Leising has identified…the best way to sell a book by claiming that he has identified the DAO hacker. He’s been teasing it for a bit. I sure hope this holds up better than the Newsweek “scoop” identifying Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi. After it was clearly debunked, the Newsweek authors kept claiming that their “forensic analysis” was correct. Embarrassing. Let’s see the evidence.

The zk naming schemes are great. Zero knowledge is one of those things that is exploding because of blockchain.



ConsenSys had a round of layoffs this week, though as you see below, it also acquired a municipal bond broker-dealer. Coverage was actually reasonable - it’s another sign that perhaps this industry is (sometimes) growing up a bit.





Enterprise

ConsenSys acquires Heritage Financial Systems, a municipal bond broker-dealer, to tokenize them on Codefi

Governance and standards

Live on mainnet

I love the idea of Colony and want to get a chance to test it.

I had to break up the app layer section this week because there were just too many things. Obviously a DeFi heavy list, and many of the things in the next “application layer” section are also on mainnet. Things are shipping! The distinction between the two sections was a bit arbitrary, as is always the case.

Application layer

DeFi hitting $1b USD is definitely the story of the week. Of course there are criticisms you can make (it’s risky, the risks are cascading, there will likely be some kind of crisis at some point, oracles are centralized, etc etc) but as Josh Stark and I wrote in our Year in Ethereum 2019 piece, DeFi is an alternative financial system and in many ways a remarkably better one. Way less paperwork, much less settlement times, better transparency, not to count the various improvements on censorship-resistance, trustlessness, permissionlessness, etc.

I liked Avichal’s tweet:







Imagine a Fintech startup tweeted:

“We launched two years ago. Today we have $1 Billion in collateral and have given out a cumulative of $1B in loans!”



Every VC in the world would want to know what the hell the startup does and how it works.



2020 is going to be wild for crypto. pic.twitter.com/yb8gfISSoX — Avichal Garg (Electric Capital) ⚡ (@avichal) February 7, 2020





One thing we linked in the Year in Eth piece was a story about a Turkish football star who is now driving for Uber because Erdogan froze his bank accounts in Turkey. I take the story with a small grain of salt, but it’s a reminder than any wealth you save is…sometimes not really yours if it resides in a bank.



Unsecured/undercollateralized loans is definitely becoming an area of experimentation, with multiple projects on Ethereum.







Tokens/Business/Regulation

The SEC should have figured out some kind of safe harbor in 2016, and then we wouldn’t have had the mania and fraud and misallocation of capital that occurred in 2017 that set the space back. But still, better late than never - though certainly some things have happened outside of the US because of the SEC. Decentralization in action!

Kames’s article calling for more entrepreneurs is an interesting one. Is more devs the bottleneck or is it better entrepreneurs?

I’ve never liked the “monetary premium” angle. What I do find amusing is how many Bitcoiners point to something written at the peak of BTC’s 2017 bubble where a legacy finance guy tries to get his friends to buy BTC (I hope they ignored him then!) and not ETH with the argument that ETH is intrinsically valuable, but BTC is not, therefore all the value will accrue to BTC.

Only in crypto, folks.

General

It’s impressive how much fake news is created about Ethereum by Bitcoin maximalists. I’m convinced that a decent chunk of Bitcoin holders actually think that Ethereum runs on Infura, and another chunk think that an Eth full node needs 10 TB. A bunch of the crypto clickbait media feeds these falsehoods because they can get cheap clicks from Bitcoiners.

If you don’t know what a Merkle tree is, check out the intro.

See you next week. Somehow I’ll try to get an issue out in the midst of EthDenver.