Opinion and research articles

Near-instant transaction confirmation via staggered shard block production: Vitalik Buterin on sharding.

One fee market EE to rule them all by Vitalik Buterin. Eth2 phase 2.

Minimal fully generalized S*ARK-based plasma by Vitalik Buterin.

Pairwise coordination subsidies: a new quadratic funding design: Vitalik on economics.

Work to natively integrate Eth1 into Eth2 by JustinDrake. Eth2 phase 2.

Formal Verification of Ethereum 2.0 Deposit Contract (Part I) by Daejun Park.

Handel: Practical Multi-Signature Aggregation for Large Byzantine Committees by Olivier Bégassat, Blazej Kolad, Nicolas Gailly, Nicolas Liochon: The authors present Handel, a Byzantine fault tolerant aggregation protocol that allows for the quick aggregation of cryptographic signatures over a WAN. Handel has logarithmic time and polylogarithmic network complexity and needs minimal computing resources. They implemented Handel as an open source Go library with a flexible design to support any associative and commutative aggregation function. They tested Handel with a BLS multi-signature scheme for BN256 on 2000 AWS instances running two nodes per instance and located in 10 AWS regions. The 4000 signatures are aggregated in less than 900 milliseconds with an average per-node communication cost of 56KB.

Vitalik Non-giver of Ether‏ @VitalikButerin on Twitter on Jun 10:

Question to Twitter economists.

[TLDR: are deadweight losses from taxation *actually* quadratic?]

Thread: A common model of taxation is as follows: if a tax is very low, then the economic distortion caused by the tax is *quadratically* low because…

Overview of Layer 2 approaches: Plasma, State Channels, Side Chains, Roll Upsby Alexander Skidanov.

Press and podcasts:

Talking Ethereum with Ameen Soleimani on Into the Ether: Ameen Soleimani, CEO of SpankChain and summoner of Moloch DAO joins the podcast. He talks about how he got into crypto and the journey so far at SpankChain. He then discuss layer 2 payment channel solutions and how progress is being made there. Ameen then talks about the background of Moloch DAO and its success so far. Finally, he wraps up with some general discussions about Ethereum related to funding, governance and more.

The BKP Podcast–Episode 1: How Blockchain is Making Infrastructure Investments More Accessible: This week the Brooklyn Project Podcast talks with ConsenSys portfolio company Allinfra about infrastructure investing using the Ethereum blockchain. In a conversation with Dave Sandor and Bill Kentrup, co-founders of Allinfra, Joyce Lai learns how the team seeks to change the investment dynamics in the historically slow-moving, but important infrastructure asset class. Through bypassing traditional funding intermediaries and bringing infrastructure assets closer to investors, Allinfra hopes to not only improve relative financial returns but also create positive changes in social and environmental views.

The BKP Podcast–Episode 2: Crypto Regulatory Landscape in Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Professor Brian Tang Discusses Hong Kong’s Token Regulatory Landscape

Brian Tang, Founder of ACMI and LITE Lab@HK, shares with Joyce Lai how Hong Kong, as one of the top three IPO destinations of the world, is continuing to innovate to be internationally competitive as a global capital-raising center while protecting investors. Brian also sheds light on the relevance of the recent Alibaba listing in Hong Kong and also Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” framework.

How Truffle Teams Will Change Enterprise Blockchain Development: An Interview with Mike Seese–Technical Lead for Truffle Teams–about the TruffleTeams features, blockchain development, and more!

Nick Johnson — Lead Developer for ENS: An episode of BlockHash: Exploring the Blockchain.

Episode 7: Burner Wallet with Austin Griffith: An episode of Wizard of Dapps, a podcast about decentralized applications, how they are built and their impact on the web.

Hashing It Out #49 — xDAI Burner Wallet — Austin Griffith: You’ve seen this man all over YouTube, often rockin’ a bowtie, and showing some amazing and dynamic live demonstrations of his creative process in designing new user experiences for Ethereum. Author of the xDAI burner wallet, expert in meta transactions, and dapp development pioneer, Austin’s energy and knowledge is palpable. This episode is a lot of fun and highly educational.

Grid+: Lattice1 Hardware Wallet and Announcing Phonon Network: Alex Miller and Karl Kreder of Grid+ join Into the Ether to talk about exciting things their team has been working on. Their core energy business is growing in Texas but they’ve also been working on some really exciting things on the hardware front. The Lattice1, open for pre-orders now, is a new take on hardware wallets that is trying to revolutionize both UX and security. On top of that, they announce on the show a brand new Layer 2 scaling solution called Phonon Network.

DARMA Capital’s Andrew Keys and James Slazas: $100M Ether Fund Launches — Largest of 2019: Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital (DelphiDigital.io) is joined by Andrew Keys and James Slazas of DARMA Capital to discuss DARMA’s $100M Ether Fund. This episode was recorded on the day of Andrew’s announcement that he was joining DARMA, after an impactful career at ConsenSys. DARMA’s flagship fund is a $100M Ether optimized long strategy with $100M under management, which is sizeable for the space. On this episode they go into the strategy, both James and Andrew’s careers, their results, goals and so much more. The brain power between James and Andrew is remarkable.

58-The Frontier of Dai, With Mariano Conti on POV Crypto: Mariano Conti is an Argentine developer for MakerDAO. He works as the head of Oracles for the MakerDAO system, and receives his paycheck in Dai. Mariano takes David and Christian though his experiences using crypto out of necessity, rather than speculation. David and Christian ask Mariano to compare using Bitcoin vs using Dai as a money for his own personal finances. They also discuss how Mariano leverages Ethereum applications such as DYDX to earn interest on his capital.

Hayden Adams. Uniswap — An Automated Decentralized Exchange for Ethereum: The concept of a decentralized exchange has been a holy grail in the cryptocurrency space for many years. Many attempts have been made, but most decentralized exchanges suffered from central points of failure, poor user experience and little liquidity.mLaunched during Ethereum’s DevCon 2018, Uniswap is one of the first fully decentralized exchanges and managed to become the leading DEX very fast. The host was joined by Uniswap Founder Hayden Adams to discuss Uniswap’s unique model, the different participants in the protocol and the importance of decentralized exchanges for the blockchain space.

Topics they discussed in this episode:

How Hayden’s exploratory project to learn smart contract development took off and became Uniswap

How Uniswap works and its different participants

The advantage of an automated exchange instead of using order books

The role of liquidity providers in Uniswap

Feedback loops that can make Uniswap markets popular or collapse

The challenging economics of liquidity shares

Addressing Arthur Hayes’ criticism of decentralized exchanges

Why Uniswap didn’t create a tokeneconomic monetization model

Videos:

Berlin Ethereum Meetup 2019/05/24:

What’s new in WallETH — Ligi.

Buying Mate with WalletConnect — Pedro Gomes (pedrouid).

Remix’s latest release and live coding on plugin development — François Guezengar (GrandSchtroumpf).

Whiteboard Series with NEAR | Ep: 21 Alex Chapman from Augur: In this episode of the Whiteboard Series, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin speaks with Alex Chapman who’s a Tech Lead at Augur.

Daxia Podcast Episode 13 with guest Thomas Jay Rush: Thomas Jay Rush is an wise sage of the data world. From internet pioneer to poet and back to data revolutionary, Jay runs Quikblocks, a company set up to decentralize data access on Ethereum. Nick and Jay talk about the necessity of running nodes on the network and Jay tells us how this whole experiment is going to end if we all refuse to protect our data.

Upcoming events:

June 25–27 — EthPlanet hackathon (Beijing)

July 3–5 — WindingTree’s HackTravel (Lisbon)

July 19 — BuildETH (San Francisco)

July 19–21 — State of Scale (Los Angeles)

July 22–23 — Buidl 2019 (Seoul)

Aug 2–4 — ETHIndia (Bangalore)

Aug 2–4 — TruffleCon (Redmond)

Aug 21–23 — Dappcon (Berlin)

Aug 23–25 — ETHBerlin

Sep 3 — Deadline to apply for EU Horizon Prize.

Sep 6–8 — EthBoston

Sep 15 — Augur v1 cutoff

Sep 15 — Ethereal Tel Aviv

Sep 15–16 — StarkWare sessions (Tel Aviv)

Oct 8–11 — DeVcon (Osaka)