Price Action

The overall cryptocurrency market cap is down 3.04% in a one-week period starting on February 22 and ending on March 1 at around 3:30 PM UTC.

The top 5 gainers in the top 100 were as follows:

Enjin Coin (ENJ) — 96.62%

Santiment Network Token (SAN) — 94.70%

Theta Token (THETA) — 55.66%

Digitex Futures (DGTX) — 44.55%

Ravencoin (RVN) — 32.51%

The top 5 cryptocurrencies to lose market cap while remaining in the top 100 are as follows:

Holo (HOT) — 20.61%

Veritaseum (VERI) — 20.25%

BitTorrent Token (BTT) — 18.25%

Revain (R) — 16.54%

Monaco (MCO) — 10.87%

Product Launches

Stanford Researchers Launch Zether: One of the biggest missing pieces of the Ethereum blockchain is the option to make private transactions. In order to solve this issue, blockchain researchers at Stanford University have developed “a fully-decentralized, confidential payment mechanism” called Zether.

This new smart contract, which can be executed individually or by other smart contracts, maintains the account balances encrypted. It also enables deposits, transfers, and withdrawals of funds via cryptographic proofs. The researchers report that each private transaction using Zether costs around 0.014 ETH. Here’s the full academic paper that explains exactly how this technology works.

New Prediction Markets Platform Hits Mainnet: Helena, a ConsenSys-funded project, launched on the Ethereum mainnet on February 22. Helena was built using the Gnosis prediction markets protocol and spent a one-year period in incubation at ConsenSys. The concept of this project is somewhat similar to existing prediction market projects on Ethereum mainnet like Augur (REP).

Initially, Helena users (referred to as insight providers) will receive an account and a starting balance of 2,000 Proton (P+) tokens, which can be used for participating in prediction markets. These tokens don’t have any monetary value and are just a means for signaling the predictions of participating insight providers. Predictions will be ranked each month and insight providers will be rewarded according to performance. The top participants will be able to earn rewards in DAI or ETH. Helena will provide the initial reward funding. At one point in the future, the company will start charging subscription fees that will be used to fund the rewards pool.

Development News

Constantinople and St. Petersburg Upgrades Complete: Constantinople was originally scheduled to take place on Jan. 16th at block 7,080,000 as we reported in The Ethereum Report #1. However, security researchers delayed the hard fork due to a security vulnerability found in a code review.

With this delay, a second hard fork titled “St. Petersberg” became a requirement. The primary objective of St. Petersburg is to reverse the original Constantinople changes that testnets (i.e. Ropsten) had made with the adoption of the original Constantinople code. With St. Petersburg, EIP 1283 (Net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps) will be removed.

Both Constantintople and St. Petersburg were implemented on the same block number (7,280,000) on February 28, 2019. For more info about these upgrades, read the official announcement here.

CasperLabs Appoints Vlad Zamfir: The blockchain R&D organization, which is funded by ADAPtive Holdings, has selected Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zamfir as its Lead CBC Casper Architect. Correct-by-Construction Casper (CBC) Proof-of-Stake consensus aims to provide “a faster, safer and more energy and computationally efficient decentralized network consensus”.

According to various reports, CasperLabs is developing a blockchain that is trying to compete with Ethereum. At the same time, Zamfir will remain in a paid role at Ethereum Foundation. When asked whether this would be a conflict of interest, Zamfir responded, “I think so. I have many conflicts of interest.” Still, Zamfir emphasized that CasperLabs was paying for his research on the Proof of Stake protocol and not his loyalty.

7 New Ethereum Foundation Grant Recipients: The first grant winners of 2019 include DeepSEA, Goerli testnet, Shadowlands, Ethereum on ARM, Py-libp2p, LeapDAO, and The Matter. These ‘Wave 5’ recipients received grants (funding amount unknown) based on their common focus on building for Ethereum 2.0 and Layer 2 scaling. The announcement article can be found here.

Goerli Testnet, one of the EF Wave 5 grant recipients, launched at GörliCon in January 2019.

Developer Spotlight: Johann Barbie

In honor of LeapDAO being one of the Wave 5 Ethereum Foundation grant recipients, we have chosen to put the spotlight on one of the project’s core contributors: Johann Barbie. Looking at stats on GitHub, Barbie has made 893 contributions within the past year. One of the biggest tasks for Barbie and the LeapDAO team is the development of SolEVM.

According to a LeapDAO blog post, this solution will “extend the capacity of Ethereum not only for the transfers of funds, but also for the execution of rules.” SolEVM is composed of 3 parts: an on-chain stepper, an off-chain interpreter, and a library for developers.

On February 13, 2019, the team announced its successful mainnet deployment (Driftwood release), which can be found at mainnet.leapdao.org.

DApp of the Week: Fysical

The Fysical dApp rose 61 spots in the State of the Dapp rankings. As of February 28, 2019, it sits at #135 for Ethereum dApps. The number of users (24 hours) reached 166, an increase of 232%. Over the past 30 days, the Fysical dApp has 1,378 transactions.

Fysical is the world’s first decentralized and largest crypto-powered data protocol, enabling the next generation of big data. Fysical studies how humans move through the physical world. It directly contrasts with the closed systems, data brokers, and black boxes of Web 2.0. It replaces them with a transparent peer-to-peer blockchain protocol.

Fysical has also partnered with a number of blockchain projects. Most recently, on February 22, it announced a partnership with Storm.