Introducing the Devcon Archive (and an event update): Beginning March 30th, everyone can dive into presentations from all past Devcon events through the Devcon Archive, which will live as a permanent element of Devcon.org.

With the Archive, the team has started by gathering videos of keynotes, workshops, and other experiences all into playlists that are available in one place, with details of past events and media dating back to 2014’s “ÐΞVcon-0” in Berlin.

This is just the start for the Archive, and in the near future they plan to add new features like photo albums from each year, graphics and art, complete presenter and supporter lists, and more. So whether you’ve been fortunate enough to attend a Devcon in the past, or you haven’t had the chance just yet, they envision the Devcon Archive as a way for everyone to learn, explore and to relive the experience whether or not they were physically present.

While the other planned announcements will follow, the team appreciates your continued patience until things have settled and the timing is a bit more appropriate given the challenges now facing so many, including those in the community. They hope that this content helps to pass the time until the next update, and from Ethereum team to you and yours, please stay safe and be well!

Projects updates

Check out 0x most recent Developer Call to learn about meta transactions, 0x API updates, and the results of the ZEIP-76 vote:

Aave:

Development Update: New Features for Aave: The latest addition to the Aave blog is a development update, highlighting what’s new for Aave: parameters updates, a history page, and some sweet new design features.

Aave Ecosystem Grants: Grants will range in size between 500 aDai to 5,000 aDai and will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

— The status and progress of the team’s MVP (or previous projects).

— The execution capability of the team (or individual).

— The extent and use of Aave Protocol features.

— The benefit the project provides to Aave ecosystem participants (e.g. lenders, borrowers, LEND holders, etc).

— Potential for the project’s longevity and /or business viability.

— The efficiency of the capital / grant usage.

More than 1,250 Aragon organizations have been created, with more than $19m assets stored in them.

Aragon project updates: March 2020: 1,250 DAOs with $19m worth of assets, #PoweredByAragon, Placeholder ANT economics post, Coinbase Custody, Aragon Court back in session.

Augur v2 Deployment Details: When v2 is deployed, all current token balances must be migrated to a new REP token contract. The team will soon be sharing details for exchanges and individuals to manage the migration process, so please hang tight.

Augur’s v2 contracts will be deployed to the Ethereum network and go live during the first weeks of June, pending finalization for v1 markets ending before the cut-off date, with the REP migration beginning on a similar timeline.

The bulk of the remaining engineering work for the initial v2 launch involves polishing the Augur UI, preparing for integration with the launch of Uniswap v2, and performance and end to end testing of the contracts on Mainnet.The Augur team is in communication with the Uniswap team and will gauge their launch situation to determine the best course forward.

At this time, they’ve decided to extend the v1 cutoff date until May 15th (12:00pm UTC). This allows users to continue to create markets through the UI while also budgeting a good deal of time between then and the anticipated deployment (to ensure resolution).

Further details on the deployment procedure and REP migration will be released over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, the bounty program for finding vulnerabilities in the contracts is live, and the team has recently announced bounties for finding vulnerabilities in market template logic. All feedback can be reported on Discord, HackerOne, or Github in their appropriate repository.

Augur App Release: v1.16.11

User-Generated Liquidity Pools: New Self-Service Portal For Creating On-Chain AMMs: Automated market-maker liquidity pools have proven to be tremendously useful instruments for creating transparent, permissionless liquidity for tokens. As a result, there is now a growing need for user-facing tools that allow for the creation and customization of AMM liquidity pools.

The team announced Katana Pools, a self-service portal for creating liquidity pools with:

unlimited reserve tokens (any ERC20)

custom reserve weights

adjustable fees

Developed by Pritam Roy, Katana recently won 1st prize in the Sustain Web3 Gitcoin hackathon.

It is Beta software, so use it at your own risk. (Github).

Bancor Staking Rewards: This post introduces the concept of BNT Staking Rewards as a mechanism for incentivizing users to provide liquidity to Bancor.

Users who provide liquidity to Bancor, also known as “liquidity providers”, help the system flourish. More liquidity means Bancor can offer cheaper prices to traders and generate more trade volume and revenue.

With staking rewards, Bancor seeks to create an incentive for users to participate and contribute to the system by performing a specific action the system requires: providing liquidity.

Bancor Zaps:

You can now “zap” into a Bancor liquidity pool by buying its Pool Token on 1inch.exchange.

Zaps allow users to add liquidity to a Bancor pool in a single action with one ERC20 token that is automatically split across the pool’s reserves.

Zaps are not limited to funding 2-token pools with 50/50 weights. You can zap into a Bancor pool that contains any number of reserve tokens and is set with custom reserve weights (e.g., 80/20 or 60/20/20 pools).

Bancor Dynamic Reserve Ratio (DRR) Liquid Tokens: recently, the hot-from-the-oven Bancor Dynamic Reserve Liquid Tokens were launched on EOS mainnet by EOS Nation.

As a reminder, Bancor Liquid Tokens maintain a reserve in BNT (or the stablecoin USDB), and can be purchased directly from their smart contracts by end-users, meaning no need to rely on exchanges or third-parties for their liquidity. The Bancor Formula used in liquidity pools continuously adjusts the token price based on these real-time market dynamics. Until now, Bancor Liquid Tokens have maintained a constant ratio between their reserve and their market-cap, and price the token accordingly to keep this ratio constant.

Last week, the team introduced the next generation of Bancor Protocol’s capabilities: a Dynamic Reserve Ratio, or DRR. Simply put, this means that the reserve ratio can be altered algorithmically, rather than only held constant.

Read more>>>

Bancor is Live on Dune Analytics: The new Bancor Dashboard on Dune allows you to view key Bancor metrics on Ethereum including:

Total Network Volume

Total Network Fees

Fees Per Toke

Number of Traders

New fully rebuilt Brave for Android boosts performance across the board compared to prior versions: 5% battery savings along with 3% of both data and CPU savings: Brave now has 13.5 million monthly active users and 4.3 million daily active users.

Brave Launches New Swag Store Powered by Origin: Brave unveils new Brave Swag Store, the official source for Brave and Basic Attention Token-branded merchandise. Powered by Origin Protocol’s new decentralized e-commerce platform, Dshop.

Around the Block #5: Downstream Impacts of the Recent Market Crash on Lending, Stablecoins, and DeFi: Coinbase Around the Block, sheds light on key issues in the crypto space. In this edition, Justin Mart analyzes three industries impacted by the recent market crash.

Coinbase USDC Bootstrap Fund invests in Uniswap and PoolTogether.

Coinbase makes sending and receiving crypto even easier.

Crypto giveaway scams and how to spot them.

Exodus Wallet Release, 88mph App Insights, and MetaCartel Virtual Hackathon:

Compete for Compound bounties in the Dragon Quest Hackathon:

MetaCartel’s latest virtual hackathon, Dragon Quest, is taking place throughout the month of April. In addition to competing for the main prize, developers can compete to win two Compound bounties:

To be considered for Compound bounties, hackathon projects must use the Compound smart contracts in a practical application, SDK or API.

Exodus Wallet launches Compound support:

Exodus is a desktop and mobile wallet that supports over 100 different cryptocurrencies. The team strives to remove the “geek requirement” and eliminate confusing steps when using cryptocurrency.

See their video for using cTokens.

88mph Launches:

Bacon Labs, the same team behind Betoken and Fantastic12, has released 88mph, an app that provides fixed-rate DAI interest. A user’s deposits are locked in 88mph’s pool for a minimum of 91 days. The DAI earns interest at a fixed-rate, instead of the varying interest rate like the DSR.

Decentraland and Binance join forces against Covid-19.

Decentraland: Next Steps for 2020: Decentaland strategy to continue decentralizing Decentraland beyond the governance of smart contracts.

Decentraland Events Calendar dApp is live: Start submitting your happenings to the worldwide events database.

district0x Network Incentives: An update on community programs and rewards.

The District Weekly — April 11th: News and updates from the district0x Network.

The Verified Artist Program: Aligning incentives for artists, collectors, and Meme Factory.

Another round of Gitcoin Grants CLR matching ended last week with over $240,000 being donated by over 2000 unique contributors. On top of that, $250,000 was given away in matching thanks to various sponsors

Gnosis Safe Updates: The Gnosis Safe now supports gasless confirmations/rejections which means you don’t need to pay a transaction fee and you don’t need to wait for confirmations to be mined.

How To Protect Yourself From Scams: Read this quick and easy guide on how to stay safe.

Clay Golem rises! With the launch, the team has reached an important milestone. This current release — Clay Golem Beta 0.23.0 introduces the Task API to mainnet, thereby completing the long-awaited transition from Brass to Clay.

Thesis Raises $7.7 Million: Thesis, the team behind the Keep protocol, has secured $7.7 million in a fresh funding round led by Paradigm Capital, with participation from firms including Fenbushi Capital and Collaborative Funds. The venture production studio is preparing to launch its tBTC product on April 27.

KyberDAO: Staking and Voting Overview: KyberDAO considerations, KNC staking, voting, and claiming rewards. In this post, the team does a quick progress update, then jump right into understanding some of the key design principles and mechanisms of the KyberDAO, including details on how staking, voting, and delegation works. For those who wish to take a deeper dive into the technical details, they can refer to Kyber Beta staking documentation.

Kyber Ecosystem Report #13: The team has been making good progress on Katalyst. First round of smart contract audits are complete, they’re on-boarding staking partners, and making progress on UI/UX as launch date gets closer and closer. In on-chain news, they’ve had another record breaking month in terms of volumes, trades, and user numbers. And as always, the team has had new integrations, tokens, and reserves join the Kyber ecosystem over the last month.

Kyber Network Q1 2020 Recap:

BandProtocol (BAND) is now available on Kyber Network.

Basechain Build 1376 Hard Fork:

Integration with Huobi: With this integration, Basechain developers are now able to build dapps that accept payment in HT, as well as trade HT for ETH, LOOM, DAI, and many other ERC20 tokens.

A new CryptoZombies course is now live:

A Guide to Dai Stats: To examine that data all in one place, there’s no better resource than daistats.com.

Executive Vote: Adjust the USDC, Sai and Dai Stability Fees: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

The Executive Vote (FAQ) will continue until the number of votes surpass the total in favor of the previous Executive Vote. This is a continuous approval vote.

Top 10 Use Cases and Benefits of the Dai Stablecoin: Each day, people all over the world discover the top 10 use cases and benefits of MakerDAO’s Dai stablecoin. Join them to unlock money’s true potential.

The First 13 Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs) To Further Decentralization of MakerDAO: The Maker Foundation introduced the first 13 Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs) to the Maker community.

Governance Polls: Vault Compensation, IRV Ranked Choice Voting, Dai Stability Fee, and more — April 6, 2020: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system.

What Will Maker Governance Look Like After Complete Decentralization? The Maker Foundation continues its efforts to prepare the voting community to govern the Maker Protocol after complete decentralization.

Executive Vote: Adjust Multiple Risk Parameters: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

Making Maker: March 2020: Here at Maker, the month brought another problem: a plunge in the markets that eventually developed into an outright collapse over a 36-hour period. Human and system resilience were tested in the wake.

Beyond Holding MKR: The Responsibility of Decentralized MakerDAO Governance Voting: Over the next three months, the Maker Foundation and the community will engage in several important governance discussions around decentralization.

The Market Collapse of March 12–13, 2020: How It Impacted MakerDA: Nearly month ago weeks ago, the Maker Protocol and the Maker Governance community were tested by a severe downturn in the capital and crypto markets.

MelonJS — release of version 1: Avantgarde Finance released the first version of MelonJS.

MelonJS is a convenient JavaScript interface to the Melon protocol smart contracts on Ethereum. Today’s release is in the spirit of making the Melon protocol more accessible for dApp developers.

The Melon Terminal is using MelonJS and it has been the main driver for defining the functionality of the new MelonJS.

What’s in it?

JavaScript methods to interact with all contracts in the Melon protocol

Written in modern TypeScript

Well documented (individual methods, but also example code)

Part of our initiative to make the Melon protocol more accessible

MelonJS is published as an NPM package @melonproject/melonjs

As a developer, you can write scripts and dApps to e.g.:

Set up a fund

Manage your funds

Write a trading bot

As an end user:

There is no need to use MelonJS directly, but you can go to the Melon Terminal, which is a nice interface to the Melon protocol.

The Melon Café launched: an exclusive channel for Melon Managers to meet one another, discuss new feature priorities & interact with Melon Council DAO members on anything user-related:

MyEtherWallet Chrome Extension MEW CX is restored on the web store:

Built on Substrate: Centrifuge Chain. The team is building Centrifuge chain on Substrate with:

•Zero-knowledge verifiers

•Non-fungible tokens

•a Financial Supply Chain network that can scale

Sub0 is back and this time it’s going virtual:

The Raiden Trust announced it’s first grant of 100k USD worth of RDN to PISA:

Set Community Update #9 — March 2020:

- The team launched new Social Trader features

- Introduced their new TokenSets Ambassadors

- Launched LINK-based Sets

Deprecation of Range Bound Sets.

Andrew Wilkinson (Tradespot) — Set Social Trader AMA Series.

Nimbus update: April 10: The latest update from the Nimbus team. The main focus this month has been implementing spec v0.11.1. Updates on mainnet testnet configuration and node discovery.

DeFi with Aave: Open Source Borrowing & Lending: Aave brings a compelling interface and competitive option for depositing crypto and earning interest, or borrowing against crypto collateral. All accessible through the Status mobile app.

Peer-to-Peer Messaging — Where Whisper Falls Short and Waku Picks Up: Status v1.2 introduces Waku — a fork of the previously used peer-to-peer messaging protocol Whisper. Waku aims to solve some of the issues of Whisper in an iterative fashion and enable greater scalability.

Status Launches Private Peer-to-Peer Messaging Protocol: Version 1.2 of Status, the secure messaging app, brings benefits of blockchain to regions with unreliable payments systems, censorship, and surveillance.

v1.2 Release — Waku Servers & Scalability: This release is one of the most important in Status’ history. The change log is small, but significant.

Coronavirus, the Rise of Surveillance & the Importance of Access: Governments around the world rush to fight the spread of the highly contagious COVID-19. However, this has also provided a pretext for increased surveillance and outright information censorship.

The Surveillance Economy & Why Privacy Really Does Matter: Explore what is causing the rise of the surveillance economy, why privacy really does matter, and what to look out for in choosing the tools that protect us best.

Exploring the Status Web3 Browser: The Big 3 Pieces of Status Functionality: Explore the Status Web3 Browser — privacy, security, data ownership and access to the growing ecosystem of dapps.

News: Binance’s real-time trade feeds on decentralized Streamr Marketplace: Streamr has partnered with major cryptocurrency exchange Binance to feature the exchange’s data on its marketplace.

New Frontend Release Process: Information about Synthetix new process for frontend updates.

Synthetix.Exchange Discord + Trading Competition Round 4: All the details about our new Discord server and trading comp.

Use sAUD for payments with RelayPay: Learn how you can start using your sAUD.

SNX is now listed on Poloniex!: SNX listing on Poloniex

More Information on the new Equity Indices: Further details about the new equity index.

Coinbase USDC Bootstrap Fund invests in Uniswap and PoolTogether.

Zilliqa Staking Update: 9 April 2020: Staking smart contract code is now open-sourced and is live on Testnet (v. 6.2.0)

Bug hunters can now start working on the smart contract to identify unforeseen issues. It will be added to Bugcrowd’s crowdsourced Bug Bounty programme by the end of this week to amplify security measures for all users. Potential staked seed node operators like exchanges can begin the staking integration process. Interested potential partners can also assess the staking code, documentation, and start building prototype services for testing. Dapps developer and wallet providers can now try out staked seed node services on Testnet The team has released a staking yield calculator to provide users with an easy estimation of yields.

In this initial phase of the Zilliqa staking program, staking is done through a seed node and a smart contract on the Zilliqa blockchain. The seed node operator who wishes to host an SSN will need to register with the Zilliqa team and deposit a certain minimum number of $ZIL into the staking smart contract. The seed node operator will then receive blockchain rewards at regular intervals according to the performance of its SSN, and in proportion to the amount of $ZIL deposited in the contract during those intervals.

Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — March 2020.

Welcoming Zilliqa new Developer Evangelist Arnav Vohra.

Other project’s updates:

The LAO Launches on April 28: On April 28, 2020, members will be able to join and contribute to The LAO — a platform that aims to resurrect the spirit of The DAO but be fully compliant with US laws and regulations.

dPiggy Live on Mainnet: dPiggy is a no-loss crypto investing platform built on top of Compound and Uniswap. It allows users to automatically direct interest earned to things like buying ETH or other tokens.

ENS Roadmap Update: Brantly from the ENS team gives an update on what the team is working on right now and what’s coming in the future.

RealT has sold 1m USD of tokenized Detroit real estate.

Livepeer’s opportunity in a socially distanced world.

Coinbase Adds Liquidity to Uniswap and PoolTogether: Coinbase has used their USDC Bootstrap Fund to add $1.1 million worth of USDC liquidity to both Uniswap and PoolTogether.

Zerion Acquires MyDeFi: The acquisition was formally accepted in January 2020 and involved a combination of cash and stock. MyDeFi’s founder, Baptiste, will continue providing his support and guidance to the Zerion team as they continue their work on MyDeFi.

Burner Wallet and Fuel Team Up: An experimental version of Burner Wallet powered by Fuel was announced and released last week. The new wallet uses a Fuel open-beta optimistic rollup side chain running on Görli.

Frontier and Trust Wallet Team Up: The Trust Wallet SDK is now integrated with Frontier. With this integration, Trust wallet users can now import the Public Eth address in one click into Frontier and start tracking DeFi Portfolio and perform DeFi operations.

Fairmint Goes Live: Fairmint is a “continuous securities offering” platform that allows teams and individuals to raise money from anyone at any time. This week, they announced their platform is now live.

Sila Raises $7.7m Seed Round: Sila is an Ethereum-based startup building payment technology that is meant to be replace the existing ACH system. This week, they announced that they raised a $7.7mil seed round led by Hope Cochran and Madrona Venture Group.

imToken Updates: New GasStation feature allows users to pay Ethereum network fees using USDT while using the imToken app, new feature to view and edit your token allowances, performance optimizations and more.

Introducing Dedge: Dedge is a new DApp created by the StudyDefi team that allows you to swap both collateral and debt via Compound. It does this by leveraging flash loans from Aave, token liquidity from Uniswap, and loan positions from Compound.

Introducing SmokeSignal: SmokeSignal is a tool that allows users to post unstoppable messages to the Ethereum blockchain using a web3 wallet, ENS and DAI.

Lien Announced: The Lien protocol allows anyone to create an ETH derivative in a simple, elegant way. The innovative features of this protocol include providing a secure derivatives market with no liquidation involved and enabling a fully decentralized stable coin designed to function without over-collateralization.

Opinion and research articles

Simple guide to fast linear combinations (aka multiexponentiations) by Vitalik Buterin.

Using polynomial commitments to replace state roots: Vitalik on cryptography.

Won’t Casper slide into Eos-like centralization? Vitalik on economics.

A Casper FFG explainer with proofs of its guaranty of liveness and safety.

Dankrad has proposals for Hashmap-based polynomial commitments for state and a newer Multi-layer hashmaps for state storage that improves on Vitalik’s proposal. Both Dankrad and Vitalik appeared last week on the ZK Study Club to discuss all this.

Demystifying Supersonic Snarks.

Bilinear accumulators as merkle tree alternative, a particular type of polynomial commitments.

Open VDF, an architecture of the current hardware design.

Ligero’s IACR paper: Lightweight Scalable RSA Modulus Generation with a Dishonest Majority.

EVM Bytecode Merklization — merklize code chunks for block witnesses, estimates 40–60% reduction.

Podcasts

Lefteris Karapetsas: Open Source Crypto Portfolio Tracking with Rotki on Into the Ether: Lefteris Karapetsas, founder of Rokti, joins the podcast. Lefteris has been around the Ethereum ecosystem since the beginning and we talk about his journey through crypto to date. He’s contributed to Solidity, the C++ Ethereum client and helped mitigate the DAO attack. Since then he’s worked with Raiden but has since moved on to building Rotki. They talk about Rotki’s commitment to privacy and how it makes it very easy for anyone who deals with crypto to track their portfolio and ultimate turn it into a tax statement.

Covering Against Smart Contract Bugs with Nexus Mutual on Into the Ether: Hugh Karp, founder of Nexus Mutual, joins the show to talk about insurance coverage for smart contracts. Nexus Mutual offers a way for people to buy coverage against potential bugs in smart contracts they are using. If there is a bug, the person who holds coverage can file a claim and those in the mutual can decide if it’s a valid claim or not. In the past few months, Nexus has had to handle a variety of different situations and claims. Hugh walks us through how the mutual works and the future plans for it.

Crypto Memes Good on Bankless Podcast: Most people identify memes are internet images with text, or reaction gifs. Memes are much more than that; they are a tool for information transmission at the largest possible scale. Memes are little packets of data that hop from brain to brain. They can transfer data across the globe and also across time! Join David and Ryan as they explore the role that memes have in crypto, and some of cryptos best and worst memes!

DeFi Trust Spectrum on Bankless: Different Ethereum applications require different amounts of trust, depending on how each app is designed. This episode discusses how to think and measure the trustlessness of each app, and where the humans and computers meet.

Why Decentralization Isn’t as Important as You Think on Unchained: In this essay, Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly Capital explains why he thinks the focus on decentralization can be overhyped. He looks at why decentralization can be important but then makes it clear, by dissecting when it is important and when it’s not, and to whom it does and doesn’t matter, that it isn’t the be-all end-all goal for every endeavor. He talks about which questions we should be asking beyond just, “is it decentralized,” and also explains why that question doesn’t even make sense.

Hudson Jameson: Development lifecycle of Ethereum & Decision Making on The Block Experience: Last week’s podcast is with Hudson James, a prominent developer liaison for The Ethereum Foundation. In this chat they went in-depth into the workings of the Ethereum Foundation, they talked about how the development lifecycle of Ethereum, how teams are working together to focus on the current production of Ethereum 2.0, how decisions are made and just generally having a great chat about the overall ethereum production.

How VeriLedger Found B2B Product-Market Fit Beyond the Crypto Hype with Megan Knab on Ethereal Podcast: In Episode 4 of the Ethereal Podcast, DeFi Dad interviews the Founder/CEO of VeriLedger, Megan Knab. While Megan was working in the Swallow Cafe in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, she fell down the crypto rabbit hole after her friends mentioned “there’s a cryptocurrency company working in this building,” which led her to be introduced to the team at ConsenSys. She quit business school, went to her first Devcon in Shanghai, and started working full-time on an Ethereum startup. With her accounting background and expertise to know the importance of an immutable ledger, she eventually had the idea to build automated bookkeeping for Web3 businesses, now called VeriLedger. They talk about her journey building an accounting product, specifically for others who are building on Ethereum or using the Ethereum blockchain. She has lots of perspective on living through the hype of 2017 and coming out of it focused on establishing a lasting product. Megan is also a member of the Marketing DAO and frequently volunteers at major global Ethereum events.

Human Values & Robot Protocols with Nic Carter on POV Crypto.

MakerDAO Founder Rune Christensen On DeFi’s Biggest Test Yet — The Defiant.

Finance

Information from Etherscan.io (April 14th, 2020):

A report on eth2 staking UX.

The Block’s Open Finance Index (OFI).

New eth2 staking calculator:

A group of Chicago-based crypto trading shops is coming together to connect more closely with Open Finance (DeFi) projects.

Volt Capital, Jump Capital, CMT Trading and DRW Trading launched today the Chicago DeFi Alliance (CDA. The organization, announced late Tuesday in a blog post, seeks to bring together the Chicago-based trading firms and DeFi projects from the world.

Inaugural members of the alliance include TD Ameritrade, DV Trading, Arca, dYdX, and Compound.

The alliance aims to help DeFi projects understand the Chicago trading ecosystem, a major financial hub famous for its derivatives market. As DeFi projects look to bootstrap liquidity and onboard professional traders, CDA provides them a platform to communicate with trading firms, liquidity providers, and over-the-counter desks.

Roadmap

Vitaliks eth2 and beyond flow chart:

An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap.

A recent audit report of ETH 2.0’s specifications revealed security vulnerabilities regarding the protocol’s P2P messaging system and block proposer system, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claimed that the team is working on the problems’ long-term solutions

According to Buterin, successful multiclient testnets will have to precede the long-anticipated Phase 0 mainnet launch and the testnets will likely start running in April.

To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.

The original timeline for the Ethereum development stages and the intermediate hard forks:

Block #0 — Frontier

This was the initial development stage of Ethereum, from July 30th, 2015, to March 2016.

Block #200,000 — Ice Age

Ice Age was a hard fork to introduce an exponential difficulty increase, to motivate a transition from Proof-of-Work consensus to Proof-of-Stake when ready.

Block #1,150,000 — Homestead

The second state of Ethereum launched in March 2016.

Block #1,192,000 — DAO

The infamous DAO case. This was a hard fork that reimbursed victims of the DAO hack and caused Ethereum and Ethereum Classic to split into two opposing systems.

Block #2,463,00 — Tangerine Whistle

Another hard fork to change the gas calculation for certain I/O heavy operations and to clear the accumulated state after a DoS attack that exploited the low gas cost of those operations.

Block #2,675,000 — Spurious Dragon

A hard fork addressing more DoS attack vectors and another state clearing. Also, a replay attack protection mechanism.

Block #4,370,000 — Metropolis Byzantium

This was the third stage of Ethereum development, launched in October 2017. Byzantium was the first of two hard forks for Metropolis.

Block #7,280,000 — Constantinople

The first significant milestone in 2019 was Constantinople/St. Petersburg update that was deployed on the main network on February 28th, 2019. This was the second hard fork from the Metropolis stage. Initially, the Constantinople upgrade was planned for block number 7,080,000. That upgrade had to be postponed due to a security vulnerability.

Block #9,069,000 — Istanbul

On December 8th, 2019 the network has undergone an Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) driven hard fork, dubbed Istanbul, in which six distinct upgrades have been added to the network.

Block #9,200,000 — Muir Glacier

The latest fork was called Muir Glacier. The Ethereum mainnet has undergone this, less than a month after its Istanbul update. The Muir Glacier update was activated on January 2nd, 2020, with only one improvement proposal, EIP 2384. The proposal aims to delay the difficulty bomb, a built-in algorithm of the Ethereum blockchain that could drastically increase the difficulty in mining a new block if left unaccounted for. The update is designed to delay the difficulty bomb for another 4,000,000 blocks, or approximately 611 days.

You can read more about this on the Muir Glacier Fork meta EIP 2387 and previous difficulty bomb upgrades in EIP 649 and EIP 1234.

Eth2 — Serenity

Serenity is the last stage of Ethereum development. It will introduce Eth2, the new Ethereum blockchain that will finally have Casper, a new Ethereum Virtual Machine, and much more. The goal of Serenity is to improve the scalability, security, and programmability of Ethereum. Instead of 15 TPS on a single chain, Eth2 will process thousands to tens of thousands of transactions per second without compromising on decentralization.

The majority of developers foresee these main phases of Eth1’s evolution to Eth2:

Phase 0: Beacon Chain (Q1 2020)

Phase 1: Shard Chains (2021)

Phase 2: eWASM (New Ethereum Virtual Machine) (2021/early 2022)

Continued Improvement (2022)

Phase 0 — Beacon Chain Shipping in late Q2/early Q3 of 2020

On the beacon chain, we will finally see Casper. The Beacon Chain will be a separate blockchain from the main Ethereum blockchain. This new chain will have a PoS consensus algorithm, and it will run in parallel to the main PoW Ethereum blockchain. Initially, the blockchain will be created for simplicity and will not support smart contracts or accounts.

Phase 1 — Sharding Shipping in 2021

Sharding will be introduced on the Beacon chain, and it will have initially 100 shards. Validators will validate transactions from their own shard, and in the first phase, they won’t approve any smart contract, account or asset.

While sharding will bring more scalability, there are a few setbacks to take into account. Validators have a small pool of transactions to validate, which makes it easier for a 51% attack, as they only need 51% computing power (or stake) of the shard they are in, instead of the whole network. This technique can also lead to higher centralization, as each shard can be validated with a small group of validators.

It will be fascinating to see how this stage is implemented, as it still needs thorough testing to ensure all validators are randomly selected to avoid centralization and any risk attack.

Phase 2 — State Execution Shipping in late 2021/early 2022

During Phase 2, the foundational aspects of the previous Eth2 releases will come together and provide functionality for the updated network. A new operational mechanism called Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) will be launched instead of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. eWASM will work much faster.

One of the main issues with the current EVM is that it processes transactions sequentially. With the PoS and Sharding changes, there’s a need to process transactions in parallel, and the current EVM won’t be suitable for this.

The new EVM called stands for Ethereum WebAssembly, an open standard defining a portable binary code format for executable programs. This new architecture for the EVM will allow for much better performance and will make it possible to support smart contracts, accounts, states and much more on the new blockchain. The current status of the eWASM development is at the very early stages, as it is planned to be released in 2021. There’s still a lot of research to do around this phase.

Continued Improvement

Continued Improvement is the code name to encompass all the future changes, fixes and improvements of the previous stages, and whatever comes along. The following technologies to be implemented:

Cross-shard transactions

Lightweight clients

Super-square charting

Closer ties

See the Eth2 Phase 2 Wiki for current progress, discussions, and definitions regarding this work. The Eth2 Project Management repo holds ongoing notes and meetings.

Other

According to a user post on the social media platform and confirmed by a company spokesperson, Reddit is experimenting with “Community Points” — a new system for subreddits (communities) that gives power users extra benefits. These Community Points are apparently stored using Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard.

According to the video by Reddit user MagoCrypto, the site will publish a list of users and their karma every four weeks; allow the community’s users to propose any changes; and then sign off on the list, allowing users to claim Community Points.

In a statement, a Reddit spokesperson said, “We continuously experiment with ways to support communities on Reddit. In this instance, we’re working with one community to test a feature that represents a user’s involvement in a community. We value and seek out community feedback as we continue to explore features that engage our users and communities.”

Upcoming events

Check out Ethereum virtual events list.

Social media metrics

Social media activity:

Social media dynamics:

Ethereum community continues to grow. There is constant stable growth in Ethereum social media channels these weeks.

Twitter (Ethereum) — Official announcement channel.

Twitter (Ethereum Network) — News from dApps .

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

Facebook — Official announcement channel. Recent publications — about Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, conferences.

r/ethereum — plain Ethereum development discussion. News about projects, links to interviews, podcasts, upcoming events.

Keep price discussion and market talk to subreddits such as r/ethfinance or r/ethtrader.

Keep mining discussion to subreddits such as /r/ethermining.

Do you have any question that feels really dumb? Try r/ethereumnoobies

Don’t forget to check out /r/ethdev for the Ethereum developer community.

Check out /r/ethdapps.

Surfwith r/ethstaker. The future is at stake!

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.

Check out Ethereum Community and Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forums.

There is strong stable 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.

This is not financial advice.

Subscribe to detailed companies’ updates by Paradigm!

Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Reddit.

Main sources

Ethereum official social media

Ethereum subreddits

Ethresear.ch

Core Devs Meetings

Eth2.0 Implementers Calls

ConsenSys blog

EthHub

Week in Ethereum by Evan Van Ness

What’s New in Eth2 by Ben Edgington

Projects build on Ethereum official blogs

Ethereum in news

Crypto Twitter in general