Ethereum Report: zk-proofs on Ethereum mainnet by AZTEC, sandbox for playing with minimum viable DAO, Plasma world map Paradigm Follow Dec 5, 2018 · 19 min read

20th November-4th December

Development

GitHub metrics

Developer activity (from Coinlib.io)

Protocol updates

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #50 [2018–11–23]:

Document being mentioned on Coindesk;

Testing;

Client Updates;

Research Updates;

Constantinople/Ropsten HF, hardfork timing;

ProgPoW Update.

Notes.

In this call there was a long discussion over the controversy of an article published at Coindesk . According to the article, Ethereum developers are secretly meeting to work on improving the Ethereum network. Read more about the discussion between developers on Gitter.

A write up on Ethereum 1 dot X: a half-baked roadmap for mainnet improvements is published for public reference. Martin Köppelmann’s tweetstorm.

Ewasm community hangout #7 [2018/11/15]. Notes.

Wasm on the Blockchain: The Lesser Evil by Jack Fransham.

Eth2.0 Implementers Call #7 [11/29/2018]:

Client Updates Research Updates p2p discovery protocol

Current state of discv5

Does it meet our needs?

What implementations exist?

Complexity of implementing from scratch

Any alternatives being considered?

4. Validator privacy and roles

5. libp2p 2019 roadmap

Ethereum 2.0 Development Update #17 — Prysmatic Labs: biweekly updates written by the entire Prysmatic Labs team on the Ethereum 2.0 Serenity roadmap.

Latest Research Updates

Encumbents: Instant Cross-Shard Payments

STARK-friendly Hash Functions

Merged Code, Pull Requests, and Issues

Refactoring Serenity to Use a Single State

Beacon Node P2P Bootnodes & Relay Nodes

Initial Beacon Node Sync

BLS Implementation Completed

Running Validator Shuffling Tests Using E2E Test Runner

Upcoming Work

Validator Client Refactor

Validator Registration Contract Updates

E2E Tests for Running the Beacon Chain / Validator System

Simple Serialize vs. Protobufs Revisited

Encumberments: instant cross-shard payments over slow cross-shard base-layer communication as a layer 2: Vitalik Buterin on sharding.

A minimal state execution proposal: Vitalik Buterin on sharding.

Casper Standup 72, Casper Standup 73 and Casper Standup 74: videos.

The series of Ethereum 2.0 explainers from Status now includes an article on the beacon chain.

Two Point Oh: The Tale of Two Ethers.

Ethereum chain pruning for long term 1.0 scalability and viability by Péter Szilágyi.

Ewasm working group proposal for Eth 1.x by Lane Rettig.

Ethereum’s New Serenity Protocol Lowers the Cost of Running Staking Nodes: Ethereum’s new Serenity update, which will enable the network to transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus model, has been generating a lot of hype in 2018. Apart from addressing the problem of scalability, the new chain also drastically reduces the cost for running a staking node in Ethereum 2.0.

Plasma World Map — The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Plasma by Aiden Park.

A sketch for a STARK-based accumulator: Vitalik Buterin on Plasma.

OmiseGo Plasma Update #9 — December 3, 2018.

Plasma Prime PoC client.

Ethereum 2.0 Data Model: Actors and Assets: Bryant Eisenbach on EVM/eWASM.

Short RSA exclusion proofs for Plasma Prime.

State Channel Researchers Call #6 and State Channel Researchers Call #7 videos.

Game channels from DAO Casinos: state channels with randomness paper.

JSON-RPC Specifications and Testing Community Call Nov 27th, 2018.

Raiden v0.17.

POANetwork’s ERC20 to ERC20 bridge.

BLS DAG sidechain idea.

Reducing Mainnet Transactions with a Sidechain: Kauri’s dive into how to use sidechains.

SNARK based Side-Chain for ERC20 tokens,

Development tools

v2.5.0 — Constantinople, Consensus, StateManager.

Blockchain educational resources curated by the Zeppelin team: An awesome compilation of resources by the ZeppelinOS team — from the history of cypherpunk movement to cryptoeconomics, design, and security.

Pantheon video tutorial: start a private blockchain in Java with Docker.

YAKINDU Solidity Language Server — made for all your favorite IDEs.

Waffle: a testing framework based on ethers.js and mocha.

Meadow: dev and testing framework written in cross-platform C# with .NET Core.

web3 React: build single-page dapps in React with hooks.

More on Parity’s light.js for building dapps on a light client.

CryptoZombies lesson #9: ERC721x.

Kyber trading API.

Kyokan’s chaind: caching layer in front of any Ethereum JSON-RPC endpoint.

OneClickDapp.

Austin Griffith’s sandbox for playing with MolochDAO.

How to query Ether supply in BigQuery and plot the number of Ethereum addresses.

Getting started with Eventeum.

Truffle v5.0.0-beta.2 — Solidity v0.5, Vyper support, and update to Web3.js 1.0.0-beta.36.

Samuel Furter: my first 3 months maintaining web3.js.

How to use Mythril Classic to find bugs.

LevelK discovers a potential exploit of exchanges if they were not using best practices.

Panvala’s token grants for making Ethereum safer will start in the next 2 months.

AirSwap’s Keyspace: e2e encrypted messages with Ethereum and IPFS.

Palladino: the transparent proxy pattern in Zeppelin.

PubSub pattern using Solidity 0.5.0.

Whisper in Embark tutorial.

Quick Formality update from Victor Maia.

Compound releases documentation for devs to earn interest on eth/tokens.

Comparing GUN, OrbitDB and Scuttlebutt.

AragonOS 4: refining framework for production.

Import Ethereum state to use on local chain.

Elixir implementation of Ethereum’s RLP encoding.

Ahken: Eth aware automatic IPFS pinning PoC.

Writing a Truebit task in Rust.

Octopus security analysis tool for wasm, EVM and some centralized chains.

Native Meta Transactions: signed message recovery integrated in contracts.

Remix 0.7.5 released with solidity 0.5 support.

Governance and new standards proposals

ERC820 pseudo-introspection registry in last call.

ERC875 better NFTs to last call.

ERC1592: Address and ERC20-compliant transfer rules.

ERC1616: Attribute registry standard.

ERC1621: Referral interface.

ERC1620: Money streaming continuous payments over time.

EIP1601: only full blocks get full mining reward.

ERC1630: hashed time-lock standard.

ERC1586: Risk Redistribution Standard for Stable Cryptocurrency Payment.

EIP-1581: Non-wallet usage of keys derived from BIP-32 trees. Initial discussion.

EIP1577 — Multiaddr support for ENS.

Ethereum Dispute Resolution Alliance, joint work on research and standards by Bounties Network, Aragon, and ENS.

Polkadot: Never fork again.

Giveth’s Unicorn DAC non-hierarchical governance experiment.

Ecosystem updates

EEA Opens New Regional Headquarters In Seoul: On November 19, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) announced the opening of its new regional office in Seoul, South Korea.

Announcing EDRA: The Ethereum Dispute Resolution Alliance: This effort was started together by the Bounties Network and ENS teams after realizing that we were doubling our efforts to solve the same issues in designing dispute resolution systems. Since then, the Aragon One team has also decided to officially join us as a member of the alliance.

Joe Lubin’s tweetstorm overview of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, discusses the Blockchain Ecosystem and the structure of ConsenSys: video.

The mission and practices of Ethereum Magicians.

A working proposal for permanent ENS register and why there will not be Harberger taxes in ENS.

Safe zero confirmation payments in Ethereum.

ConsenSys Monthly Report — November 2018: Ethereum dApps, enterprise blockchain solutions, most popular articles, upcoming events, and more.

MetaMask’s Mustekala light client that also shares pieces of the chain over libp2p.

VIPNode releases a demo to incentivize full nodes serving light clients.

An overview of the Gnosis Safe’s features.

Security considerations for Shamir’s secret sharing in Dark Crystals.

Stureby POW testnet to test Constantinople changes and how to help test.

Görli testnet explorer and their bounties initiative.

Chart over time of Eth locked up in DeFi.

MyCrypto is doing an Advent-style calendar of security tips with prizes.

Projects updates

0x:

Relayer Report #14 — EtherDelta Ruling, Permissioned Liquidity Pools, and ERC dEX Interview: The latest updates from the 0x ecosystem: November 19th, 2018.

8x Protocol:

Protocol Weekly #17.

Welcome to Protocol Weekly: POA.

Augur:

Augur App v1.8 Release.

Augur Weekly Report — November 21st.

Augur Weekly Report — November 28th.

Coinbase:

ZEC is now available to trade on Coinbase Pro (Updated).

Coinbase at AWS re:Invent 2018.

Notice of blockchain movements.

New ways to learn about the crypto market.

Ethereum Classic on Coinbase Wallet.

CryptoKitties:

Our first (and only first) annipurrsary Set Challenge: Celebrate one year of CryptoKitties by collecting a Set of six Kitties and earning not one but TWO badges.

The next generation begins as the Kitty Clock ends: CryptoKitties is, and will continue to be, where the future of blockchain is showcased.

You raised Lil BUB’s helping paw, and the results are magical: CryptoKitties and Lil BUB raise 99.675 ETH for special needs cats.

How to breed Draco Junior: A step-by-step guide to breeding a Fancy Cat in CryptoKitties.

Bad day to be a bug: The CryptoKitties Offers Bug Bounty is complete.

The Kitty Clock is preggo with Dreggo.

Doc Purr is getting catty about retiring genes.

Decentraland:

Decentraland to Accept Dai and MKR in the LAND Auction: Decentraland is partnering with MakerDAO to accept both MKR and Dai for LAND purchased in the upcoming auction.

Decentraland Partners with Binance: Use BNB + Trust Wallet in the LAND Auction.

Dether:

Token Spotlight: BAT from Brave.

Token Spotlight: SNT from Status.

Token Spotlight: SWT from Swarm City.

Dether Now Available on Opera dApp Store.

Blockchain on Tour Latin America: Five Cities in One Week: Dether is excited to be participating in the BotLatAm tour spanning five Latin American cities, November 26-December 3.

Dether Partners with Kyber.

district0x:

The District Weekly — December 1st, 2018: News and updates from the district0x Network.

The District Weekly — November 24th, 2018.

district0x Dev Update — November 27th, 2018: Development progress and product changes from district0x.

Gitcoin:

Open Source Financial Freedom: roadmap towards the financial sustainability of open source.

Native Meta Transactions: integrate signed message recovery directly in your contracts.

Moloch Rises: Sandbox dApp for experimenting with Moloch DAO mechanics.

Giveth:

Open Source Blockchain Explorers Call #17.

Announcing the Winners of the Giveth Social Coding Blockternship.

The Future of Work: Distributed Teams & Decentralized Workspaces.

The Unicorn DAC, a non-hierarchical decentralized governance experiment.

It Takes a Village: The Story of Giveth’s Wall of Fame.

Gnosis:

The Gnosis Safe is live on mainnet.

Formal Verification of the Gnosis Safe Contracts: An Update to the Mainnet Release.

Gnosis’ Season of Announcements.

We are moving our open Gnosis community chat to Matrix!

Reddit — What makes the Gnosis Safe different (and better) than other crypto wallets.

Keep:

DApps, DAO’s, and Apartment Hunting: Everyday Blockchain Privacy Solutions: Use cases for Keep from partners, advisors, and daily life.

Getting to Know the Keep Team: Piotr — Getting to Know the Keep Team series with a member of development team — Piotr Dyraga.

Kyber Network:

Kyber Network Bounties For ETH Singapore.

Introducing The Kyber Trading API.

Loom Network:

Loom SDK Projects: Coins & Steel — A Fantasy Multiplayer Role-Playing Game (Like You’ve Never Seen Before).

Loom SDK Projects: CryptoWars Announces First Tournament — $2,500 in Prizes.

Shepherding the Blockchain Ecosystem with Industry Chains.

Understanding ERC721x Token Standard.

Crypto Open Source Ecosystem 1.0.

PlasmaChain Validators: Next-Level Security with HSMs.

MakerDAO:

Stablecoins: Use Cases.

Making Maker — Nov 2018.

Cryptocup Integrates Dai to Offer a Stable Prize Pool.

Melonport:

Management and Performance Fees in a Melon Fund.

MetaMask:

MetaMask Labs presents Mustekala — the Light Client that seeds data.

MetaMask Monthly: November: Announcements and product updates from the MetaMask core team.

Ocean Protocol:

Milestone Announcement: Meet Trilobite, Testnet V0.2 Release — Ocean Protocol’s v0.2 Trilobite testnet release — data access control, secure compute via fitchain.

A Driving Force in Scaling up AI for Good: Announcing Amir Banifatemi as an Advisor to Ocean Protocol.

Technology * Society: Making the Conversation Happen: Announcing Azeem Azhar as an Advisor to Ocean Protocol.

Curation Thinking in Data Markets & Data Commons: Announcing Simon de la Rouviere as an Advisor to Ocean Protocol.

Ocean Protocol Asian Roadshow — December, 2018.

Introducing the Ocean Protocol Service Agreements.

Exploring the SEA: Service Execution Agreements: This blogpost expands on the technical architecture of Ocean Protocol. SEAs glue together services providers, consumers and verifiers in the Ocean Protocol Network.

How Ocean Can Benefit Data Scientists: More data, crypto-secured provenance, new income avenues.

The Web3 Data Economy: Towards a Transparent, Permissionless Ecosystem to Spread the Benefits of AI.

Origin protocol:

Welcome to the Origin Family! Anna Wang Joins Origin to Expand Our Community in China and Greater Asia.

Parity:

Light.js: How to Build Your Dapp on a Light Client.

Parity Ethereum v2.2.2 beta — lower the uncle rate allowing higher gas limit. warp sync reuses local info to reduce required data to sync. And 2.1.7 stable.

Polkadot:

Never fork again.

A Tale of Two Technologies Presentation Transcript: Gavin Wood recently presented “A Tale of Two Technologies” at Web3 Summit in Berlin. In an effort to make the ideas presented more digestible, the team has transcribed the video, included the slides, and edited down the text to its core ideas.

Raiden Network:

Raiden v0.18 — Farnsworth.

Status:

v0.9.31 Release — Introducing browser privacy mode.

Community Competition winning vote announcement.

Why has Korea fallen in love with Status?

Give Freely: The Philosophy of Merry Merkle 2018.

On Apoliticism, Social Movements & Coercion.

Status.im Townhall 11–26–2018.

Vote! Name our Hardwallet.

Streamr:

Dev Update November 2018 (+ Open Sourcing the Marketplace).

20 Years of Open Source — What’s in it For Me/Them/Us?

Trinity protocol:

Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.17 “RBG”.

Trinity Monthly Report — Late November.

Trinity-ETH and Raiden Network.

Community Governance Tool — vote and feedback!

ZeppelinOS:

Introducing ZeppelinOS 2.0.

Toward a secure code ecosystem.

The transparent proxy pattern.

Announcing the ZEP Token Private Beta.

Zilliqa:

Announcing Testnet v3.0 — Codename: Mao Shan Wang.

Public mining on Zilliqa Testnet v3 is now available.

Zilliqa Project Update #22 — Upcoming Testnet v3 and Public Mining.

Also check biweekly updates by Paradigm:

Aragon biweekly update 20th November — 4th December.

OmiseGo biweekly update 20th November — 4th December.

Other projects:

Pantheon v0.8.2.

Lighthouse Update #04: Alex Stokes joins, spec updates, etc.

Geth v1.8.19 trie read cache for 15% faster full-sync speed and 30% faster in-sync processing and Swarm v0.3.7. Also, Swarm’s Kubernetes setup is now open source.

POA Network Announces ERC20-To-ERC20 TokenBridge: POA has announced its ERC20-to-ERC20 TokenBridge. The POA Bridge, although an important first step toward cross-chain interoperability, only allows individuals to swap tokens native to POA with POA20 tokens native to Ethereum. However, the new TokenBridge works with any Ethereum-based ERC20 token, thus enabling networks built on Ethereum to interact with one another.

Ethereum’s Cross-Client Proof-of-Authority Görli Testnet Ready for Experimentation.

Snark.art Launches Blockchain Laboratory for Tokenizing Artworks.

New Truffle v5 beta release: v5.0.0-beta.2 (Bento Box of Candy).

Quantstamp Community Update Nov. 29, 2018.

Writing a Truebit Task in Rust.

KeySpace: End-to-End Encryption Using Ethereum and IPFS. KeySpace is a trustless end-to-end encryption protocol that launched as part of AirSwap Spaces.

A look under the hood of a decentralised VPN Application: Mysterium.

Devcon UX winner Argent launches first smart wallet — Two big updates at Argent.

Panvala Token Grants.

Upbloc: curated periodic publishing platform, live on Ropsten.

AXA’s Fizzy flight delay insurance expands to cover 80% of all flights.

FedEx to work with XYO to build out proof of location.

GiveCrypto’s November Monthly Report.

Uniswap — A Unique Exchange.

Guidelines on importing markdown content into Kauri. You can now import your articles into Kauri.

More on Etherisc, Aon and Oxfam’s crop insurance for Sri Lankan rice farmers.

New Projects:

Buy worlds with Ethereum — interesting gaming concept and just starting: Microverse — a game created by one of the brains behind Decentraland.

Fizzy: Smart insurance. Automatic compensation.

Krab: An encrypted IPFS Keystore Manager.

The AZTEC protocol enables confidential transactions on the Ethereum network, with a working implementation live on the Ethereum mainnet.

Roll: the protocol for social money.

Ethermat: Ethereum blockchain state importer.

Ethertify: Leading the path to a decentralized web. Security, privacy, data integrity, authenticity, transparency, auditability, fault tolereance, immutability and time-stamping.

Mintable: easily mint and manage your ERC721 nfty tokens.

Neufund: Neufund is an equity fundraising platform on the Blockchain.

Octopus: Security Analysis tool for WebAssembly module and Blockchain Smart Contracts (BTC/ETH/NEO/EOS).

Opinion and research articles

Central Planning As Overfitting by Vitalik Buterin and E. Glen Weyl.

Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin says IBM’s corporate blockchain is missing the point on Quartz.

Imperial College with Vitalik Buterin: videos.

Ethereum 2.0 Q&A write-up and resources: Demystifying the road to Ethereum 2.0 — Serenity Q&A session at ETHMagicians.

Participants: Danny Ryan (EF), Vitalik Buterin (EF), Afri Schoedon (Parity), Paul Hauner (Sigma Prime — Lighthouse) , Greg Colvin (ETHMagicians), Jacek Sieka (Status — Nimbus), Bryant Eisenbach (SecurETH), Casey Detrio (EF/Ewasm), Lane Rettig (EF/Ewasm).

Facilitated by Lane Rettig, Boris Mann, Jamie Pitts, María Paula Fernández, Chelsea Palmer.

Reddit — Vitalik discusses where the 32 Eth number for staking comes from and other topics around Ethereum 2.0 design.

Shard chains specification: Vitalik is very pleased with this commit that simplifies shard block handling by fixing the block size at 16KBytes. By comparison, the current PoW Mainnet block size is generally between 15 and 30KB; shards will produce blocks more than twice as rapidly, so a single shard’s capacity ought to exceed current Mainnet capacity by a factor of at least two (all else being equal).

Videos of the Prague DeFi Summit.

Zero Knowledge Pocast Episode 52: Vlad and Gavin go head-to-head on blockchain governance.

Get to know a Core Dev, with Péter Szilágyi: Parity CTO Fredrik Harrysson interviews Geth lead dev Péter Szilágyi for Zero Knowledge.

Blockchain Could Work for Luxury, Too — Joe Lubin at New York Times.

Martin Lundfall — Practical Formal Verification: Maker’s Martin Lundfall on Smartest Contract.

Prysmatic Labs’s Preston Van Loon on Penn Blockchain podcast.

#263 Justin Drake: Ethereum’s Audacious Roadmap to Build a True World Computer: Justin Drake on Epicenter.

Parity: Blockchain Infrastructure with Gavin Wood.

MakerDAO President on the Boom in ‘Stablecoins’.

Luke Mulks AMA on Brave Ads.

Pokt Network’s Michael O’Rourke & Luis C. de Leon on Hashing It Out.

Hudson Jameson on the inaugural edition of Eric Conner’s podcast.

How the Airbnb of Data Storage Plans to Take on Amazon S3 — Interview with Shawn Wilkinson on Storj’s current approach to decentralized storage.

Latest Open Block Explorers community call.

First Görli testnet contributors call.

The Third Web #11 — Scuttlebutt & Cypherspace: Scuttlebutt’s Dominic Tarr with Arthur Falls.

Smart Contracts May Have Weaknesses. This Tool Helps Find Them: NRI Secure Technologies released a blockchain security monitoring service that includes a tool by ConsenSys Diligence allowing users to scan smart contracts for vulnerabilities.

New Internet: Blockchain Technology Could Help Us Take Back Our Data from Facebook, Google and Amazon: Newsweek does an Ethereum profile.

Ethereum Adoption in Developing Countries Rising Exponentially: Lubin on Newsbtc.com.

EthBerlin: Oh shit, they are back (pst. save the date!).

EthCC : Balancing the Budget of a Community Conference.

DevCon4 Lattice Demo: Karl gives a longer overview of the Lattice1 and Grid+ from DevCon4 in Prague.

ConsenSys Israel Pitch Week in Retro: The ConsenSys Labs team left Tel Aviv after a week of listening to pitches, meeting entrepreneurs, and diving into the blockchain community in Israel.

Upcoming events:

Dec 7–9 — ETHSingapore hackathon (ETHGlobal)

Jan 10 — Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends

Jan 29–30 — AraCon (Berlin)

Feb 7–8 — Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)

Feb 15–17 — ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal)

Feb 23–25 — EthAustin hackathon (EthUniversal)

Mar 5–7 — EthCC (Paris)

Finance

A rough proposal for storage management fees and Ethereum State rent for Eth 1.x pre-EIP document by Alexey Akhunov.

Common classes of contracts and how they would handle ongoing storage maintenance fees (“rent”): Vitalik Buterin on economics.

Re-posting an old post: Metcalfe’s law, externalities and ecosystem splits by Vitalik Buterin.

Singapore’s CapBridge gets central bank approval to operate private exchange: Capbridge and ConsenSys working on a Singaporean security token exchange.

Token Identification in the Cryptomarkets: A rose by any other name in ConsenSys blog.

Initial Coin Offering’s Ethereum Balances Yet to Be Sold but Could Spark Another Drop for ETH Price: As per market data available on the internet, it appears as though there is still a lot of Ether tied with existing ICO projects. As a result of this, a fresh new fear of ‘mass liquidation’ is now in the air which could possibly send down the value of Ether even lower in the coming few days and weeks (with many analysts even suggesting that the digital currency could stoop to its early 2017 levels).

Introducing Personal Token Economies by Achill Rudolph: Personal Token Economics with your own bonding curve.

A bonding curve to decentralize how apps get listed in Status.

Bitfinex and Ethfinex list every major stablecoin in commitment to providing coin agnostic platforms.

Automatically roll one-week long/short contracts from Daxia (formerly DDA) using SetProtocol.

Fundamental questions to ask yourself about blockchain investing by Evan Van Ness.

The Tokenization of Real Estate — Sina Habibian.

Roadmap

Release Step 3.1: Metropolis phase 2: Constantinople, 2019.

Ethereum’s Next Blockchain Upgrade Faces Delay After Testing Failure on Coindesk.com: While a fixed date for implementation of Constantinople has yet to be set, Griff Green, ethereum community lead and founder of blockchain-based nonprofit Giveth, set mainnet activation for sometime in 2019. “I would expect it to get delayed to 2019, the blockchain doesn’t take holidays, but developers do,” Green said. “If I were to make a wager on a prediction market I would put my ETH on late January, early February.”

Ethereum Constantinople Blockchain Upgrade Delayed Until 2019.

Release Step Four: Serenity. Serenity is meant to move from consensus through Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.

Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap by Vitalik Buterin at Devcon 4 (31st October 2018, Prague):

The Ethereum 2.0 spec has been explicitly split out into two separate documents:

Partnerships

University of Tokyo Launches Blockchain Course with Ethereum Foundation Backing: The University of Tokyo began offering a blockchain course at its graduate engineering school, thanks to an $800,000 donation from a consortium that includes the Ethereum Foundation and Japanese banking juggernaut Sumitomo Mitsui. The class — called the “Blockсhain Innovation Donation Course” — was rolled out on November 1 and will run through October 2021. Other corporate donors included Good Luck Three, JSS Corp., Zipper Corp., Hotlink Co., and Money Forward Inc.

Stanford University officially established the blockchain research center — The Stanford Center for Blockchain Research this year. Its sponsors include OmisGo and others (Ethereum, Dfinity, Polychain Capital). The blockchain academic circle is definitely growing.

Chainlink And Cornell Researchers Team Up To Offer Decentralized Oracle Solution: MIT Technology Review is reporting that blockchain startup Chainlink has engineered a potential solution to blockchain’s oracle problem using a trusted hardware system, called Town Crier, developed by Cornell researchers.

Dether Partners with Kyber:

The Kyber on-chain liquidity protocol has been integrated into the Dether exchange feature. The Dether App will now use both Airswap and Kyber protocols to enable users to swap more token pairs.

You can now buy DTH on KyberSwap.

KNC (the Kyber Network Token) is now listed in the Dether wallet and in the exchange feature.

Decentraland to Accept Dai and MKR in the LAND Auction: Decentraland is partnering with MakerDAO to accept both MKR and Dai for LAND purchased in the upcoming auction. Also: Decentraland Partners with Binance.

Cryptocup Integrates Dai to Offer a Stable Prize Pool: Cryptocup, the successful prediction platform for sports, is bringing some certainty to their users by integrating Dai into their system. People can now make their predictions using Dai removing the volatility that comes with non-stablecoins, ensuring winners receive the full value of their prize.

Opera 59 for desktop includes support for Ethereum-based Crypto Wallet: Opera released Crypto Wallet for its Android (beta) browser, allowing users to store their Ethereum tokens and other collectables more easily and allowing them to spend directly with Web 3.0 services. Now, the firm has announced that in Opera 59 for desktop, which is currently in the pre-beta phase, users will be able to pair their Opera for Android beta wallet with their desktop browser.

Amazon Managed Blockchain: Amazon announces QLDB (one party owns the chain/database) and Managed Blockchain (multiple nodes) for Ethereum and Fabric.

Kaleido Announces the First Blockchain-as-a-Service Subscription Plans Built for the Full Spectrum of Enterprise Ecosystems: Changing the economic equation for production blockchain projects, Kaleido, in collaboration with ConsenSys and Amazon Web Services, is the first to go to market with a range of flexible plans — allowing all parts of the ecosystem to participate and scale together.

Rumors

University of Basel gives Vitalik Buterin an honorary doctorate.

Jutta Steiner named top 40 under 40 by Capital magazine.

New book — “Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps” by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood Ph. D.

“Ethereum feels like the easiest one to make a bull case for right now.” Fred Wilson — Bleeding — AVC.

The Ethereum difficulty bomb kicks in 92 days from now.(Published on November 29th 2018).

France to Sell Ethereum (ETH) in 27,000 Tobacco Shops: The French Federation of Tobacco Vendors has reportedly given the go-ahead to allow customers to purchase Bitcoin and Ethereum at 27,000 locations across the country in the new year.

Retail broker RoboForex announced that it will be accepting deposits in the cryptocurrency ethereum.

A Bug Making Ethereum Transactions on Exchanges Vulnerable Has Been Fixed: A bug centering around a new Ethereum token, GasToken , which was enabling abuse on cryptocurrency exchanges, appears to have been resolved. The details are provided in a report, that discussed how the bug was exploited by attackers, and what digital platforms could do if they wished to protect their hot wallet funds.

380,000 ETH Associated With the Genesis Block Moves to new Addresses.

Social media metrics

Social media activity

Social media dynamics

Social media dynamics

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 companies (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).

Information from Cryptocompare.com

There is a 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.

Gitter (source):

Most of the last week’s noise has been on the All Core Devs Gitter.

Highlight of the week on the Sharding Gitter (no, the name can’t be changed): an excellent clarifying conversation between Jacek and Danny on the work of proposers, and the sizes of committees.

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

YouTube (Ethereum Foundation) — videos from conferences, meetups, Ethereum Core Devs Meetings. 2–3 videos / month.

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 Week in Ethereum by Evan Van Ness.