Biweekly update 11th September — 25th September

Development

GitHub metrics

The number of commits changes every day (in some repositories — several times a day). In in some repositories there are commits for just one day. This prevents us from analyzing development dynamics and from generating relevant statistics.

Developer activity (from coinlib.io)

Protocol updates

Eth2.0 Implementers Call #3 [9/13/2018]:

Client Updates Research Updates YAML test format v2.1 Discussion p2p serialization format; p2p network protocol; p2p discovery protocol.

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #46 [09/14/18]:

Testing Client Updates Research Updates Constantinople

a. Client progress.

b. Ropsten block number.

c. Can we do it before Devcon?

5. EIP-1380: Reduced gas cost for call to self

6. EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs

7. EIP-1057 (ProgPoW) and EIP-1355 (Ethash1a)

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting 46 Notes. Constantinople is coming to Ropsten testnet around the second week of October 2018; Block number announced.

A tight and intuitive Casper slashing condition: Justin Drake on Casper — a single simplified Casper slashing condition to replace the two slashing conditions in the Casper FFG paper 4. The new slashing condition cannot be weakened, i.e. it is tight. It is also intuitive and makes the safety proof (even more) obvious.

Ethereum 2.0 Casper+Sharding Development Update # 13 — Prysmatic Labs

Research Updates:

Batched Cross-Shard Transaction Fee Payment.

Merged Code, Pull Requests, and Issues:

Proposer Validator Responsibility;

Attester Validator Responsibility;

RPC Validator Interactions;

Beacon Chain Processing & Fork Choice.

Upcoming Work:

Meaningful Demo of Beacon Chain + Validator System;

Benchmarking various DBs.

Ewasm Community Hangout #6 [09/20/18]:

Benchmarking (@cdetrio)

Getting started with the Ewasm testnet/testnet demo (@jwasinger)

Ewasm testnet open source block explorer (@hugo-dc)

Using Hera and VMs (@axic)

On-chain scaling to potentially ~500 tx/sec through mass tx validation: Vitalik Buterin on applications.

Off-chain Issuable Tokens: Dan Finlay on State Channels.

State Channel Researchers Call #1 on Celer Network channel (Celer, L4 , SpankChain, PISA, Perun, Magmo).

State Channel Researchers Call #2: data exchange fabric and connectivity oracle.

Learn State Channels, similiar to Learn Plasma.

Plasma Implementers Call #14: Care for Collateral in Plasma Youtube channel: using collateral to reduce user validation load in Plasma Cash; the importance and difficulty of analyzing the value of in-flight transactions; core cryptoeconomic principles around past provability & future accountability.

Plasma Cash Minimal Atomic Swap: Vitalik Buterin on Plasma.

Plasma Cash Defragmentation: Vitalik Buterin on Plasma.

Basic Mass Exits for Plasma MVP: Kelvin Fichter on Plasma.

Debt & Liquidity for L2 Scalability UX: Plasma.

Plasma snapp — fully verified plasma chain.

GitHub — BarryWhiteHat’s roll_up.

More Minimal Plasma — an easy to read version to learn Plasma.

PlasmaChain Validator Requirements in Loom Network blog.

Enabling Faster Plasma Exits: Using existing protocols on Ethereum to enable faster Plasma exits while creating a sublime user experience.

The First Use Case of BANKEX Plasma: BANKEX Plasma is almost ready for launch, its first real-life usage: a coffee vending machine.

GitHub: Ethereum Sharding Proof of Concept: This repository contains a proof of concept for a sharding implementation on Ethereum by Vlad Zamfir. The project was built during ETHBerlin, over 2 days, and should not be considered final nor production grade. There are probably major bugs/issues.

Ethereum’s Vlad Zamfir Claims Milestone In Blockchain Sharding: Ethereum might just be one step closer to sharding its blockchain. At least that’s according to long-time blockchain researcher Vlad Zamfir, who claims to have coded up a successful proof-of-concept of the idea at the ethereum hackathon EthBerlin this week. Built with the help of several other developers, including Tim Beiko, Steve Marx, and pseudonymous coder “maurelian,” the code is said to demonstrate how different ethereum shards may be able to someday communicate on the blockchain.

Ethereum Engineering Group: Zero Knowledge Proofs, Zcash, Sprout, Sapling & zkSnarks: Roberto Saltini delivers a talk on Zero Knowledge Proofs, Zcash Sprout and Sapling releases, and zkSnarks.

Casper Standup 68.

Development tools

Solidity Bugfix Release: The latest version 0.4.25 release of Solidity fixes two important bugs. Another important bug has already been fixed in version 0.4.22 but it was only discovered recently that the bug existed.

The Ethereum Foundation runs a bounty program for the code generator part of Solidity.

GitHub: Manticore v0.2.1.1.

Tech details and SDK for Grid+ hardware agent.

Evaluating storage: on-chain index vs sidechain index vs read-only IPFS index.

Piñata Overlay to make it easier to incentivize IPFS pinning.

Agile dev environment.

A simple guide for writing unit tests.

Typescript alternative to web3.js.

A walkthrough of Gemini’s regulated stablecoin code.

Deconstructing Solidity, pt4: function wrappers.

3box’s API to access and interact with a dapp user’s latest OrbitDB hash.

iden3: new SNARK tools for an identity system from Jordi Baylina.

Kauri’s full stack dapp tutorial series.

Ethernaut Lvl 15 Naught Coin Walkthrough: How to abuse ERC20 tokens and bad ICOs: This is a in-depth series around Zeppelin team’s smart contract security puzzles. We learn key Solidity concepts to solve the puzzles 100% on your own.

Introducing Purser: A universal wallet tool for Ethereum developers.

Hosted Ethereum Nodes & Load Balancing.

Learn: New In-Depth Course for ERC721/NFTs at Zastrin: Learn Solidity While Building Real Projects.

Parameterized transaction reviews: for when you want to decide which signers you want to approve different types of transactions.

Hosted Eth nodes and load balancing.

Deconstructing Solidity, pt 5: function bodies.

Solidity CTF — Part 4: Read the Fine Print: EVM instructions dictate everything within Smart Contracts.

Sigma Prime’s Mehdi Zerouali: ‘breaking smart contracts for fun and profit’ slides.

GitHub — hiddentao/ethereum-event-logs: Ethetreum event logs parser.

GitHub — ethjs-abi for use in BigQuery, to decode Ethereum event logs.

Moloch DAO Contract Walkthrough: Ameen Soleimani walks through the Moloch DAO contract code.

State of Scale: video.

Using APM to replace centralized package managers: APM stands for Aragon Package Manager.

Zymbit and Oaken blockchain security module available for pre-order for $47. i2c, Raspberry Pi ready. Ships mid-October.

Registration open for next ConsenSys Academy cohort. Zastrin also just released an NFT/ERC721 course.

ERC777-K: Formal Executable Specification of ERC777: RuntimeVerification’s formal verification spec in K of ERC777.

Implementing Harberger tax deeds: how to implement deeds that collect a “Harberger tax”.

Governance and new standards proposals

Here Be Dragons : Going Beyond ERC-20 and ERC-721 To Reduce Gas Cost by ~80%.

LoomNetwork’s ERC721x for transferring game assets: wrapping ERC1178 with ERC721.

Writeup about using ERC1167 minimal proxy.

ERC1400: security token standard.

Security Tokens Might Have New Standard on Ethereum — ERC-1400: Security tokens might have their own Ethereum-based token standard called ERC-1400. The standard was proposed this week by four authors.

Delegated execution subscriptions for ERC948/1337.

ERC1404: simple restricted token standard.

ERC1402: Signature Composition and Verification.

ERC1407: Namespacing ABI interface to allow function signature reuse in different context but same contract.

EIP1380: reduced gas for call to self.

EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs.

EIP-1057 (ProgPoW) and EIP-1355 (Ethash1a).

Crypto Composables ERC-998 — Update 6 “In the Wild”.

Summer Is Ending: Will Ethereum’s ERC-20 Pass the Governance to ERC-777?: August has now come and gone, with the development team seemingly keeping silent — or possibly preparing a surprise — around the latest attempt to create a new standard on Ethereum blockchain. While no updates related to ERC-777 have appeared on GitHub since July, a Twitter post made by Baylina last week may give us a little clue about the upcoming release.

EIP1418: blockchain rent proposal.

ERC820 pseudo-introspection registry is in last call.

ERC1412: Batch Transfers For Non-Fungible Tokens.

ERC1410: partially fungle token.

ERC1417: poll standard.

Nick Johnson had a chat with Kristy-Leigh Minehan and switched to supporting ProgPOW. Currently, there’s a 20x increase in processing over ethash in benchmarking, though Minehan says that’s because the CPU code is currently just a copy of the GPU code.

Tokensoft on its ERC1404: simple restricted token standard.

Ecosystem updates

Living our Principles, Drinking our own Champagne, Saying Goodbye to Slack and Hello to Status: Status is making plans to stop using Slack.

Gemini and Paxos got NY approval for a regulated and centralized stable USD token on Ethereum.

ETHSanFrancisco — Hacking in the belly of the beast.

The EthBerlin submissions.

ETHBerlin: Proof-of-Transparency: During the wrapping up of our hackathon, we encountered an issue. Here are all the details and the solution.

The Görli Testnet Proposal — A Call for Participation.

Ethstonia Identity — A world’s first at ETHBerlin: Ethereum transactions signed with a government issued ID.

The Forgotten Side of Decentralization: where should content live on Web3.

What to Expect at TruffleCon 2018: TruffleCon 2018 October 5–7, Portland, OR, USA.

Brave Launches Legal Offensive on Google Ads Data Collection Practices.

Universal Logins update: first code release by Alex Van de Sande: a working happy flow for universal logins.

On The Road So Far With Loom Network: Plasma Cash, ERC721x, And Sundries: The blockchain network looks toward the “technological horizon” with further research into Plasma Cash and other developments.

A Consumer Token Framework: Forging a Path Towards Responsible Token Projects: The Brooklyn Project community has tapped into the expertise of its community and the industry to create an extensive consumer token framework.

ENS’ Nick Johnson ‘Fairly Convinced’ ProgPoW Is Necessary: After speaking with the blockchain space’s own OhGodAGirl, the Go Ethereum core developer now supports the adoption of a programmatic proof-of-work algorithm for Ethereum.

All-Aboard! Alliance for Mass Adoption of the Blockchain: a UX, technical and strategic solution to easily on-board no-coiners and accelerate the adoption of the Blockchain.

Universal Logins update by Alex Van de Sande: first code release: a working happy flow for universal logins.

Wyohackathon submissions and winners. EthBerlin winners. Hack the North Ethereum submissions.

Ethereum network throughput under Shasper: what Eth 2.0 layer 1 scalability will look like, by the numbers.

‘Turbo Geth’ Seeks to Scale Ethereum — And It’s Already in Beta: TurboGeth is in private beta, per Rachel O’Leary’s interview with Alexey Akhunov.

Projects updates

0x:

Relayer Report #10 — V2 Bug Bounty and Advisory Board Update: The latest updates from the 0x ecosystem: September 19th, 2018.

Auditing the 0x Protocol v2 with ConsenSys Diligence.

Development Update #11 — August — September 2018: the release of the V2 0x smart contracts to mainnet.

Augur:

Augur app v1.5.

Augur Weekly Report — September 12th.

Augur Weekly Report — September 19th.

Cofoundit:

Booming blockchain industries across Europe: combined Coin Market Cap’s Top 250 list and internal resources to compile a list of 57 Europe-based businesses.

Introduction & roadmap.

Closing Cofound.it as crowdfunding market disappears and presenting good practice for ICOs.

Phishing attempt — fake email notification.

Common questions #1.

Update regarding market manipulation & final call to action.

Cofound.it token redistribution website is live.

CFI token burn address verification.

Coinbase:

Welcome Brian Brooks, Coinbase’s new Chief Legal Officer.

WATCH: What is bitcoin?: Coinbase CEO answers the number 1 question in crypto.

Correcting the record: Coinbase does not engage in proprietary trading.

CryptoKitties:

Sign SantaClaws’ Christmas petition: Meet one of the first Fancy Cats released into the game.

Thanks a million!: This week our 1,000,000th Kitty was born, thanks to you.

Stack your Kitties or turn them into shareable coins.

What the heck is a CryptoKitty?: How CryptoKitties are different from Bitcoins and real cats — and why that matters.

Herding one-million cats: The state of CryptoKitties and where we’re going from here.

Wonder which cats the CryptoKitties team loves?

To celebrate one million CryptoKitties, here are some of the weirdest.

Decentraland:

Developer Tutorial: Object Transitions and Rotations: Learn how to use transition and rotation settings when moving entities around your scenes.

Dether:

Update: the Dether Beta App is Now Open in 20 New Countries.

Country Spotlight: Dether in Russia — the current state of crypto in Russia and five ways that Dether can make buying crypto in Russia easier.

Token Spotlight: HAV and nUSD — the second post in a series of “Token Spotlights” that will feature new tokens listed in the Dether beta app.

Token Spotlight: ZLA — the third post in a series of “Token Spotlights” that will feature new tokens listed in the Dether beta app.

Dharma:

Dharma Community Update: 17 Sept 2018: Nadav on Unchained, ETHBerlin, New DIPs, DeFi Momentum, Development Updates, and SF Blockchain Week.

district0x:

Official Discord & Ambassador Launch: The next phase of the community & how you can get involved.

Final Design Contest Update: Last Chance To Submit Your Memes.

Community Poll Update & FAQ #6: Results From Poll #5, Completion of Design Contest & More.

The District Weekly — Sept. 15th, 2018: News and updates from the district0x Network.

district0x Dev Update — September 18th, 2018: Development progress and product changes from district0x.

The District Weekly — Sept. 22nd, 2018: News and updates from the district0x Network.

Ethfinex:

Introducing Ethfinex Trustless: A high performance platform for decentralised trading.

Vote Delegation On Ethfinex.

Ethfinex Performance Report — Month 7 — September: Monthly insights into the performance of Ethfinex.

Golem:

Brass Golem Marketplace, Introduction.

Keep:

Building a Beacon: The Road to Mainnet: Keep approach to launching on the Ethereum mainnet from prototyping, to audits, and release plans.

Random Beacon Alpha API Demo App: a fun web app to play with randomness on the blockchain.

Kyber Network:

Etheremon Accepts ERC20 Token Payments via Kyber’s On-Chain Liquidity Protocol.

0x, Augur, and Binance Coin is now available on Kyber Network.

Tech Updates (August 20, 2018).

Kyber Network Decentralized Exchange Enables ~120,000 Ethereum ERC20 Tokens for Payments.

Loom Network:

Loom Network Roadmap Update: Q4 2018 — Q1 2019.

Designing a Sustainable Game Economy, Part 1: Card Scarcity and Mining via Play.

Games Will Be the Catalyst for Blockchain Mass Adoption.

MakerDAO:

The Code is Ready: The code for Multi-Collateral Dai is ready for release.

The MakerDAO Voting Proxy Contract: This post provides details about the voting proxy contract that is being used in the dapp for the governance vote about the Foundational Principles for Maker.

Introducing the Governance Voting UI for the Maker Foundational Vote: The vote for the Maker Foundation Proposal v2 marks the first time MKR Governors will vote using an application UI. Until now, participation in Dai Credit System governance has only been available via command line tools.

MakerDAO Supports Development Focused on Dai Applications.

Making Maker — September 22nd.

Dai and CDP Hackathon Projects: Over the past two weekends, the Maker team was involved in three hackathons: EthBerlin, Wyohackathon, and Whacked Blocks in Warsaw. 14 teams submitted a Dai-related project, and a short description of them and devpost links are below. In total, these teams won over 9,000 Dai.

a16z crypto purchases 6% of MKR, backing Stablecoin Vanguard MakerDAO: Signaling their support of MakerDAO’s Dai stablecoin, investment fund a16z crypto has purchased 6% of the total MKR token supply for $15 million USD.

Single collateral Dai — 9 months in review: his post mainly focuses on the raw analytics and less on the business developments / partnerships that Maker has also been hard at work on.

Ocean Protocol:

Ocean Protocol Advisor — #1 Meltem Demirors.

Ocean Protocol Advisor — #2 Dr. Carsten Stöcker.

Community Report, July/Aug 2018| — The Summer of Data.

The Ocean:

A Beginner’s Guide to Crypto Arbitrage: New Generating Alpha series: Every week, Ocean’ll be diving into various technical topics in the cryptocurrency market from a beginner’s perspective. Each article will include some foundational knowledge, market data, and the occasional sample code to jumpstart your foray into more advanced concepts and strategies in trading.

New Listings: Loopring and Zilliqa Arriving Next Week: LRC and ZIL will be listed on The Ocean next week.

Token Codex: Zilliqa and Loopring — In this week’s Token Codex edition, Ocean delving into Zilliqa and Loopring, two projects aiming to innovate on top of existing solutions in the blockchain space.

A Beginner’s Guide to Cryptocurrency Trading Bots.

Parity:

Parity Ethereum 2.0.4-beta: a bug-fix release to improve performance and stability:

eth_coinbase now provides an actual account for light clients;

don’t report skipped primaries when empty steps are enabled in proof-of-authority networks;

fix snapshot restoration failure on windows;

check warp sync status for eth_getWorks.

Parity Ethereum 2.1.0-beta.

Parity’s Schoedon Pushes For Universal Ethereum Testnet.

Polkadot/web3:

Jack Platts: State of the Polkadot Ecosystem — T-12 months until the launch of Polkadot. What’s the state of the ecosystem?

Polkascan explorer is live.

GRANDPA block finality in Polkadot.

Cloudflare now runs an IPFS gateway. How they built it e2e.

Raiden Network:

v0.9.0 — Carradine: the latest weekly testnet release in preparation for the Red Eyes mainnet release.

v0.10.0 — Janin.

Update on the Development Status and the Red Eyes Mainnet Launch: the current development status and the reasons why the software is not quite ready for mainnet deployment yet.

Status:

Forget about UX for a while.

#CommuniTEE Winners announcement.

A Tribute to the Hybrids.

Status Core Devs Call 2018–09–17.

Engineering the Status Network for Growth — Contributor metrics, activation ladders and first steps to mass adoption.

SITG experiment #1 — Status intense micro adoption!

Important bug fix to wallets may impact 1% of users in v0.9.28 release next week: preparing to release version 0.9.28.

Streamr:

Streamr and Fysical to Radically Reshape Road Planning.

Streamr’s hardcore Hackathon in Mexico: use cases to fend off bus robbers and feed meat eating plants.

Unlocking the benefits of vehicle data: Solving data limitations in the transport industry.

Trinity protocol:

Trinity Monthly Report — Early Sept: Development Progress (Sept 1st — Sept 15th).

Announcement of Trinity and NEL Strategic Partnership.

Trinity Q&A Series: answer to the node set-up and the restrictions.

Trinity Q&A Series: is there NEED for scaling?

Trinity Q&A Series: The difference between Trinity and Celer routing mode.

Trinity Q&A Series: What is the difference between so-called generalized and payment state channels.

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Aragon biweekly update: 11th August — 25th September.

OmiseGo biweekly update: 11th August — 25th September.

Basic Attention Token biweekly update: 11th August — 25th September.

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Other projects:

Protocol Weekly — Issue #9: Protocol Weekly is a newsletter to exclusively showcase the progress of Ethereum layer-2 protocols.

Mesh News 09.13.18: This Is Why We BUIDL: New Bounties Explorer. DEXWatch is live. The definitive intro to blockchain.

Mesh News 09.20.18: But First, a Word from Our Sponsors — 10 key questions for token projects. Blockchain analytics. The challenge of Web3 storage. Enterprise Ethereum Hackathon.

Remix IDE v0.7.0 Released:This release is deployed to http://remix.ethereum.org and is available on npm. The electron desktop app will soon be provided. For more info: https://github.com/ethereum/remix-ide/releases/tag/v0.7.0

EthereumJS Recap August 2018 — Client Light Sync Support / Chain & Hardfork Support for Blockchain Library.

The FOAM Map is now live on Ethereum.

Schedule Your Ethereum Transactions Now On MyCrypto: The Ethereum Alarm Clock from ChronoLogic is live.

Hurricane Victims Edge Closer to Automated Insurance Payouts With Ethereum: Etherisc planning to write hurricane insurance policies next year in Puerto Rico.

The Civil Foundation — A New Fund to Support Ethical Journalism Around the World.

Learn How Civil’s Decentralized Newsrooms Are Reviving Journalism: The CVL Token sale began this week.

Witnet Monthly Report — August 2018: Development update from the Witnet team.

Lighthouse Update #00: Sigma Prime introduces an open-source Ethereum 2.0 client, written in Rust.

Twitter — MEWConnect iOS app is out from My Ether Wallet.

CasinoFair will be the first live FunFair casino later this month. Available in Canada, Switzerland, Finland, Norway and Thailand.

WindingTree’s summer demo release.

Santiment’s daily active addresses and Github commit data is free.

Grid+ is live with its first electricity customers. GRID+ announced that they have begun supplying power to their first four customers in Texas.

Dapped launches with dapp game reviews.

Universal Logins update: first code release — a working happy flow for universal logins.

Remix IDE v0.7.0 released.

Opinion and research articles

Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Says Crypto Growth Ceiling Is Near: Though some optimists still hope for the bright future for cryptos, Ethereum co-founder believes that we won’t see 1000x Growth again.

Vitalik Buterin Discusses On-chain Governanace: video.

Vitalik Buterin tweeted: “To be clear, I never said that there is “no room for growth” in the crypto ecosystem. I said there is no room for 1000x price increases. A 1000x price increase from today means $200T in crypto, or ~an entire 70% of today’s global wealth being in crypto. What I actually said is that, because large portions of the population have already heard of crypto, further growth of crypto in any sense must come from depth (ie. actual usage), and not bringing in more attention”.

Vitalik Says Ethereum Can Scale to 500 tx/s Using Zcash Technology.

Interview: Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder of Ethereum & ConsenSys.

Ethereum Co-Founder: Crypto is Seeing Huge Amount of Activity, Tremendous Growth: Over the past few weeks, in spite of cryptocurrencies establishing new YTD lows, Joseph Lubin has been making the rounds in traditional news outlets, doing his best to convince theм м public that crypto is here and is here to stay. Most recently, Lubin appeared on CNN Money on Tuesday to discuss the current state of this early-stage market and the future of Ethereum and crypto assets in general.

Ethereum cofounder apologizes for old blog post where he wrote about having sex with a preteen girl, which he says was fiction: Gavin Wood has apologised for a now-deleted blog post he wrote in 2013. BuzzFeed republished elements of the blog post, which resurfaced last year on Reddit and featured a story about Wood having sex with a preteen girl dying from AIDS. Wood tweeted a lengthy statement apologizing for the blog and stressing that it is a work of fiction, designed to “spark debate and conversation” about the nature of consent.

Episode 0: Raul Jordan, Prysm Sharding Implementation: Eth 2.0 Go implementation on Scaling Today.

Danny Ryan on Hashing It Out: about the Casper Sharding v2.1 specification.

Ujo and Capitol Records Bring Blockchain Innovation to Music: interview with Ujo co-founder Jesse Grushack about how Ujo’s digital rights management platform is enabling fairness and transparency in the process of artistic expression, and how musicians can eventually make the living they deserve from their work.

Research and Sharding: Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation) at the Ethereum Meetup 2018: Justin Drake talks research and sharding at the Ethereum Meetup 2018 produced by TechCrunch in Zug, Switzerland.

Let’s Talk ETC! (Ethereum Classic) #49 — Dr. Matthew Green — Zero Knowledge Proofs & ZK-SNARKs.

Venture Stories: The bull case for Ethereum podcast interview of Spencer Noon and Cyrus Younessi.

Why ‘Ethereum Killers’ Will Have a Hard Time Attracting Its Developers — Ep.038: Linda Xie, cofounder at Scalar Capital, talks about what she saw at ETHBerlin, why it made her think Ethereum’s first-mover advantage may be hard for other smart contract platforms to overcome and how the crypto community in Berlin differed from that of Silicon Valley.

ETHPrize & Open Source Block Explorers: Mitch Kosowski & Andrew Cravenho talk about POA’s open source block explorer on Zero Knowledge.

Jacob Eberhardt talking Zokrates on Zero Knowledge.

Hudson Jameson talks EIPs and Ethereum core decision-making on Zero Knowledge: chat with Hudson Jameson of the Ethereum Foundation about how he got involved in the space, the EIP process, and the challenges of decision making in the decentralised space.

Interview: Nick Johnson of Ethereum Name Service on Mass Adoption & Scaling: Nick Johnson discusses how first and second layer solutions will impact ENS, how to scale teams, and more.

Analysis: The State of Ethereum Today.

The State of Plasma: #1 in Consensys blog: What is Plasma, where is it going, and when?

ETHBERLIN — Aya Miyaguchi — A Thank-You Message to the Ethereum Community: Aya shortly introduces the progress of Ethereum Grants, the Foundation at the opening conference of ETHBerlin.

ETHBerlin Videos.

ETHBerlin Podcast.

Video from UXUnconference in Berlin.

Satus Youtube channel: Golem, Status, Raiden UX talks from their meetup at EthBerlin.

Finding meaning through use at ETH Berlin: Meaning happens between users of a concept, between builders testing a protocol or application. Meaning is a social event. Here are some of the issues, ideas, and applications animating the Ethereum developer community.

#6 — Open Source Web3Design Livestream: web3 design community call.

Sam Cassatt, Amanda Gutterman and Joe Lubin at TechCrunch SF event.

Blockcrunch podcasts on state channels: Connext’s Arjun Bhuptani and Celer Network’s Mo Dong.

First episode of Around the Block documentary.

#14 Open Source Block Explorers: Latest Open Source Block Explorers call.

Zero Knowledge Summit videos.

Dr. Conrad Barski of Forward Blockchain — Voice of Blockchain 2018: An interview with Conrad Barski: he explains how he went from medical school to data science, to the Ethereum blockchain and how can Ethereum change the healthcare game.

How To Stop Ether Going To Zero: Defusing The ‘Difficultly Bomb’ on Forbes.

How Ethereum Hackathons are Drastically Improving Blockchain Systems: Since mid-2017, Ethereum hackathons have been held in many major cities across the globe, to encourage the development of decentralized applications (dApps) and blockchain-based systems.

Constantinople Ahead: What You Need to Know About Ethereum’s Big Upgrade.

EVM 2.0: Inside the Race to Replace the Heart of Ethereum.

Dispelling Myths: How a Pruned Ethereum Node Can Fully Verify the Blockchain.

Dialogue, Dissent, And Development In The Ethereum Community.

Ethereum Projects Start Using DAI as a Bank.

Ethmagicians Call for EIPs & Interoperability: The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians Council of Prague is coming up ahead of DevCon4, as the third gathering that started just at the beginning of the year at EthCC in Paris, with a summer session in Berlin.

Devcon IV Sells Out in Seconds: Devcon tickets have now sold out with three waves finished in seconds as 900 tickets are sold to the general public and what may well be bots.

DevCon 4 Will Set the Stage for Ethereum’s Next Milestone: Constantinople.

Upcoming events:

Finance

Ethresear.ch — Are maker-taker fee models a no-op?: Vitalik Buterin on economics.

More robust public goods funding gadgets on top of lose-lose games: Vitalik Buterin on economics.

September, 13th: Ethereum’s Price and Network Activity Diverge: Ethereum’s price usually follows network usage in a fairly significant correlation in line with MetCalfe’s Law, but recently that hasn’t quite been the case. Ethereum’s daily transaction numbers, for example, although they have fallen slightly, they have stayed somewhat stable at around 600,000, not falling below 500,000 during normal network usage. Ethereum’s price at these transaction numbers was about $400-$500 in April and around same level in November, yet the current price is at $192 at the time of writing.

Ethereum Consolidates Newly-Won Growth as Wider Crypto Market Falters: Friday, September 14: After yesterday’s bullish upswing, crypto markets have today been hit with widely-dispersed corrections. Ethereum (ETH) is today’s most resilient large-market-cap altcoin, seeing the most notable growth on the day among the top twenty cryptoassets, as data from Coin360 shows.

ICOs Capitulate, 300,000 ETH Sold: In the past 10 days, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) projects have sold three times more Ethereum (ETH) than they did in August, according to research by TrustNodes published September 13.

Ethereum Shorts and Longs Go Parabolic: Bulls and bears are enraged as ethereum reaches a critical stage after nine months of endless selling, with a recent bounce grabbing the attention of all around. Sending longs and shorts to crazy high. Some 130,000 eth has been added to shorts this month which now stand at 230,000. ◊40,000 closed on September 10th to a total of ◊190,000. Then, as price rose so did shorts. Around ◊60,000 was added on September 12–13 to a new high of ◊250,000 before currently settling at ◊230,000.

Bridging the Fiat-Crypto Divide: OpenLaw has integrated Chainlink’s decentralized oracle service to denominate agreements in USD and settle them in ether, creating the first real-world link between traditional agreements and fiat currencies.

Indiegogo quietly canceled its first ICO after raising $5.2 million: Indiegogo refunded everyone who bought FCFL tokens, apparently after SEC told them to.

A Consumer Token Framework: Forging a Path Towards Responsible Token Projects: The Brooklyn Project.

Crypto Composables ERC-998 — Update 6 “In the Wild”: A recap of the Composables Call held September 6th, 2018 in the NFTy Magicians Discord Voice Channel.

Rewriting the Story of Human Collaboration: Intro to token bonding and curation markets.

What do In-Game Credits, Plasma Cash and Security Tokens have in common? — Polymath on using partially fungible tokens from its security token standard for gaming.

Claims curated registries: Thoughts on reputation development.

On Bonding Curves as Funding Mechanisms: Approaches for extracting funds from bonding curves.

The scale of staked ETH versus staking interest rate according to the latest Shasper 2.1 spec and the impact on inflation:

The scale of staked ETH versus staking interest rate according to the latest Shasper 2.1 spec and the impact on inflation. Source: Reddit.

Roadmap

Release Step 3.1: Metropolis phase 2: Constantinople, 2018.

Ethereum’s developers are gearing up to launch the platform’s next hard fork, Constantinople. Its activation is scheduled to take place by October 30th. Constantinople is designed to increase efficiency and lower transaction fees.

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

Ethereum’s Constantinople Hard Fork to Go Live in October in FutureSin blog: ETH’s developers are planning to launch the platform’s next hard fork, Constantinople.

Partnerships and team members

Inside the BMW and Bloom Partnership: Streamlining the Lending Experience: Bloom announces its partnership with BMW Group Financial Services to streamline its customer journey and lending experience as part of the BMW Collaboration Lab 2018.

Brave ad-blocking browser gets Chrome’s extensions with major new version: The ad-blocking browser looks a lot more like the newly redesigned Chrome, too.

LiquidEOS presents BancorX on EOS Blockchain: This will allow users to buy and sell EOS tokens directly on the blockchain; with no deposits, no central servers storing your tokens, and no need to match buyers and sellers. The Bancor Protocol facilitates smart contracts which provide instant liquidity to all EOS tokens on the network. Since Bancor does not hold user funds, users will still be subject to receiving all EOS airdrops.

Civil Media Partners with ZigZag to Explore Blockchain Technology and Motherhood: Manoush Zomorodi, a former host to the WNYC technology podcast “Note To Self” and Jen Poyant, the executive producer of the WNYC show, have recently teamed up to create a podcast called ZigZag. According to an article published by The New York Times on September 18, 2018, the purpose of ZigZag is to spread the word about blockchain technology, entrepreneurship, and life as a working mother.

Brave Browser Is Using Civic’s Blockchain Platform to Verify Publishers: Privacy-focused internet browser Brave will begin using blockchain identity startup Civic’s verification services to ensure publishers are paid for their content with Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT). The companies announced Friday that content producers hoping to participate in Brave’s “verified publishers” program can use Civic’s identity verification and know-your-customer (KYC) services to confirm their identities and earn BAT tokens. Both startups maintain a focus on protecting users’ identities and personal information through their services.

a16z Puts $15 Million Behind Stablecoin Platform MakerDAO: In a $16 million deal, Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto fund is buying 6 percent of the total MakerDAO maker (MKR) token supply. The investment will give a16z a financial and governance stake in the dai stablecoin.

Coinbase and Caspian Partner to Drive Institutional Participation in Crypto: New collaboration enables professional investors to leverage Caspian’s full-stack of crypto trading tools across the leading digital currency trading platform, Coinbase.

Announcement of Trinity and NEL Strategic Partnership: Trinity announced the partnership with NEL and work together on the following fronts:

1. Trinity Wallet App will integrate NNS domain name transfer service, which is NEL’s first key operational project.

2. Trinity will work with NEL to advance Neo game ecosystem, co-host technology salons, share Trinity state channel technology in the game field, and improve the performance of game and blockchain integration.

ING, Citigroup, Shell And ConsenSys Partner to Create Ethereum-Based Platforms: In spite of a multi-month tumultuous market, institutions continue to clamor for the implementation of innovative systems and solutions that are based on blockchain technologies.

Airbus Foundation to Accept Tokenized Donations with DAI, Plasma: “Ethereum is the leading decentralized platform for smart contract development and scaling without sacrificing decentralization or the underlying consensus that gives its blockchain value.”

Holding War Criminals Accountable with the Ethereum Blockchain: Hala Systems’ Sentry Early Warning System is using blockchain to secure immutable evidence in the ongoing Syrian Civil War.

15 of the world’s largest banks and trading firms start Komgo to build a commodity trading platform on Ethereum.

Dodgers Gives Out Thousands of Tokenized Baseball Cards and Ethereum Wallets.

News: Streamr and Fysical to Radically Reshape Road Planning: Blockchain-backed data platform Streamr announce pilot project to build nationwide traffic model of Georgia.

Rumors

Ethereum Starts Dominating Crypto Chatter, Google Searches Rise: Ethereum was almost off the crypto radar for much of this summer, with the second biggest crypto and the dominant smart contracts platform attracting almost no social attention. As can be seen, bitcoin accounted for close to 70% of all social discussions, with that now falling to circa 35%. Ethereum, in contrast, was as low as 5% in July, but now accounts for close to 35% of all crypto discussions.

Ethereum social activity, September 2018. Source: Trustnodes.

September, 13th: Has Ethereum Bottomed While Stocks Are in a Bubble?: Ethereum has suddenly risen today on increased volumes to above $200 at the time of writing. That’s after reaching a new low of $167 yesterday. A low that was tested in quick succession about three times and perhaps even a fourth time, with it holding as there may have been no more sellers left or perhaps there were far more buyers to cover them all and more.

This Ethereum Wallet is Targeted by More Attackers than Fortune 500 Banks.

Ethereum in BigQuery: how we built this dataset: how the team built the BigQuery Ethereum Public Dataset that contains the Ethereum blockchain data. This includes the primary data structures — blocks, transactions — as well as high-value data derivatives — token transfers, smart contract method descriptions.

New Mining Manufacturer Linzhi Announces Ethereum ASIC Miner: Chen Min, the former chief chip maker at Bitcoin mining chip developer Canaan Creative, is turning her attention to Ethereum. Announcing her venture at the Ethereum Classic Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Chen’s new company, Linzhi, will focus on building cryptocurrency mining devices, and its first official products are a series of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners designed specifically for Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

Ryan Sean Adams Counters Ethereum FUD With Success of Maker: As Ethereum faces intense pressure from bearish market forces, a number of distinctive faces within the cryptocurrency community have been making comments to counter the overall FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) sentiment seen in September. Ryan Sean Adams, the founder of crypto asset investment company MythosCapital, took to Twitter to remind its followers that Ethereum is being used for real-life applications that are causing real change in the lives of people.

Morgan Creek CEO Bullish on Ethereum’s Future: During a discussion on September 7th with Yahoo Finance’s Dan Roberts, Dion Rabouin and Rick Newman, the CEO of investment firm Morgan Creek Capital Management, Mark W. Yusko, voiced his optimistic opinion regarding the future relevance of Ethereum.

Reddit discussion — Understanding the current criticism of Ethereum.

Ethereum’s New Network Upgrade Constantinople Will Soon Hit Testnet: Ethereum’s Constantinople hard fork upgrade, which aims to make processing information more efficient by reducing mining rewards, is scheduled to be implemented by the end of October 9, 2018, Ethereum community member Eric Connor tweeted on September 14, 2018.

Ethereum’s Hashrate Falls 20%: Ethereum’s hashrate has dropped in the past month from 294 Terahashes to a low of 246 TH/s, down to February levels. Making this the biggest drop in ethereum’s hashrate certainly in the past year, but perhaps even since ethereum’s invention in 2015. Ethereum’s hashrate falls, September 2018:

Ethereum’s hashrate falls, September 2018. Source: Trustnodes.

Global Banks and Industry Giants to Launch an Ethereum Based Commodities Trading Platform.

An artsy call on Ethereum: A dramatic call is out from Thomas Crown Art on the cryptocurrency market. The art industry upstart thinks advancements with the Ethereum (ETH-USD) blockchain will lead to a large bite into Bitcoin’s (BTC-USD) dominance over the next five years. Thomas Crown sees a rapid reversal in the price of Ether as the utility of the “immutable ledger” grows.

Weiss Ratings Still Sees Ethereum (ETH) Displacing Bitcoin (BTC) in Five Years: The ratings company believes Ethereum is a more innovative ecosystem, and will remain valuable in the future.

With grounding as strong as the one Ethereum (ETH) has, it would be unwise to think it can go down without a serious fight.

NY AG claimed that Coinbase was doing its own trading. Actually, 20% of Coinbase exchange volume comes from Coinbase’s retail. It doesn’t even have an OTC desk.

NSA’s ‘Codebreaker Challenge’ Features Exploiting Blockchain To Steal Ethereum.

Twelve reasons I’m bullish about Ethereum today article. And Vltalik Buterins’ answer.

Social media activity

Social media activity

Facebook — official announcement channel. Recent publications — about Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, Conferences, Devcon4 — (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

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.