Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, March 15 issue

The number of EthCC attendees (for the record, most people I talk to now think the afterparty was the main spreading event) testing positive since I published the newsletter, even while many can’t get tested. So no caffeine or beer for me just in case I’m affected (though I left the afterparty very early), and that lack of caffeine is pulling me down just a little. This might be a low-energy, “please clap” Jeb annotated issue.





Eth1

A writeup post-stateless ETH summit after ethCC as well as a summary. Quiet times usually follow productive meetings, hence only 2 bullet points this week.





Eth2

So my current estimate (completely my own) is that we’re likely looking at late q2 for phase0 launch. But who knows, maybe getting locked down will provide a small speedup? <wry grin>





I continue to think that by far the most important thing after shipping phase 0 is turning off proof of work. Stop wasting electricity! Cut issuance!





Stuff for developers

I probably should’ve added that your Gnosis Safe is always safe if you used the official front end of the mobile app.





Crypto carnage, Maker liquidations

Thursday’s global selloff of risk assets led to the most negative price action day of crypto’s short history. The selloff inflated gas prices (~200 gwei) which caused trouble for Maker. The Maker oracles stopped working for an hour or two.

Maker liquidation auctions went off for nearly 0 DAI as bots bidding on those auctions got caught in high gas prices and ran out of DAI, leading several different bot maintainers to make ~8m USD in ETH by bidding just above zero in a few disparate time periods.

As a result, the Maker system surplus became a 5.7m Dai deficit (as of the time of publication). To improve incentives, Maker governance changed some parameters and to recoup the debt MKR will be auctioned onchain for lots of 50,000 Dai on the morning (UTC) of March 19th.

Community members have started a backstop to ensure the deficit is covered

Here is a writeup of the Maker liquidations with data and graphs

Just published: Maker governance proposal to change DSR to 0 and Stability Fee to 0.5%, GSM to 4 hours, and a decentralized circuitbreaker for auctions

An interesting thing I just learned is that Maker’s standard keeper apparently only works in Parity, not with Geth or Infura. So that’s another ramification of the Kovan/Rinkeby split, and getting Maker to use Kovan.

In the meantime, USDC has been added as a collateral. It’s rather strange but USDC perhaps makes sense as a way to mint DAI in times of stress and get closer to the peg. Seems like the Stability Fee should be set high here though, as you really only want people using it in times of needing Dai, eg in auctions. Right now it’s 20%, i’m not sure that’s as high as it should be.





This newsletter doesn’t often mention price and market-related matters. But it’s quite clear that crypto is not a safe haven in crisis. Could it be in the future? Perhaps, but all the hedge funds and institutional money simply exacerbate volatility. Where we’re at is that when people wanted to take risk off the table, they viewed crypto as a risk asset - and Bitcoin got hit the hardest because it had survived the best in crypto winter, despite there being no reason whatsoever for it to have done the best.





Ecosystem

A fun parlor game: what will be the next big ETH event? Devcon? Or something before, or something after? I think we’re going to see a lot more online hackathons - and probably more sponsorship dollars for them. Perhaps more sponsorship fiat for newsletter subscriptions too?

Raul’s post on eth2 was the most clicked of the week.





Enterprise

Nice komgo writeup. Also interesting to see that the bet of Besu seems to be paying off with enterprise privatechain stuff like DAML even on Besu.





Governance, DAOs, and standards

Governance as a whole has probably been one of Ethereum’s weak points. Not as bad as governance-by-Blockstream, but still not great. People don’t turn out to vote so direct voting doesn’t work (to wit, Aragon removing voting which was the only use for ANT) - and yet one of the solutions for people not voting actually penalizes people for voting, as I’ve found out in DxDAO. I’m hopeful for some of the solutions but to date long-term governance of everything is mostly an unsolved issue.





Application layer

Nice to see people are still trying to build social media alternatives. The idea of building a better Facebook is definitely an enthralling one - yet not one that Ethereum has even come close to delivering.

Same with games - we’ve been talking about tokens/NFTs on ETH being a big thing in games for awhile. Nothing has quite hit it (let’s be honest, CryptoKitties was just a different flavor of ICO mania) but I think Skyweaver might.

My usual ex-post metric of seeing how much of this section is DeFi: 10 bullet points, depending on how you count you could say it’s 4 to ~8.





Tokens/Business/Regulation

Mass panic like with Corona is always a perfect moment to add bills on as riders to must-pass bills, so look for anti-encryption hawks to try to do this in the name of “safety.” Maybe even to bailout bills.

Kinda interesting to see CMC finally add Uniswap volume. They’ve been quite slow to add dexes generally; it seems like Bitcoiners often have a hard time adjusting to decentralization when they’ve been used to all the centralized BTC tradeoffs.

And Circle is now all-in on USDC. From Santander prototype at Devcon2 to $600m now printed, and this doesn’t even count Tether belatedly realizing that BTC was a terrible choice to secure Tether.





General

Ryan Sean Adams’ “how to” on using ProtonMail or equivalent is the 2nd most clicked, showing how he’s one of the most important people in Ethereum right now. He takes concepts them and popularizes them.

The random browser fingerprints is huge, and a big step up in privacy.

Meanwhile if you have 2gb or 3gb GPUs, you can fold some proteins which may have an impact on COVID-19. I’m always skeptical, but it seems likely to be worth the cost. Especially if you’re like me and get super cheap electricity in Texas through GridPlus! Crypto is not cancelled in Texas.