Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News March 29 issue

This annotated version is brought to you by The Cure’s “The Head on the Door” album, playing over my headphones right now in a vain attempt to avoid the work-from-home-with-kids maelstrom.

Listening to an album helps me mark the time and stay focused when I’m doing something relatively unstructured like newsletter commentary. It’s somewhat unclear to me who I’m writing this for, but people seem to appreciate more context for the firehose of information, so I try to provide some.

I’ve occasionally read newsletters for other blockchains and I’m always impressed by how little I understand. I have no context for what X, Y, and Z mean. Yet there’s still usually something there that I pick up that is worthwhile enough that makes it worth the click and skim.

Here’s the most clicked for the week. The eternal caveat exists that people click things in the newsletter that they haven’t read

The annotated roadmap was the top click by a large amount.









Eth1

Bitcoiners would tell you that it’s impossible to run a full Eth node, but you can actually run one on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Ethereum has always had “being honest about our problems” as a core value, so it’s amusing that Bitcoiners never do the work to figure out what the actual problems are. Right now Geth is the vast majority of nodes, because they keep doing incredible work improving their client - or in this case, networking for all of Ethereum.

The client formerly known as Parity is being taken over, but there’s probably going to be a ramp up time.

In the meantime, running Nethermind and Besu nodes are a concrete thing that anyone can do for the network. I find the Nethermind client to be particularly easy to run, though the documentation is a bit lacking. So for a Saturday project, click the link above and get a Nethermind or Besu node running on a Raspberry Pi.

The points in between Geth/Nethermind and Eth on Arm have to do with Stateless Ethereum, the goal of getting network clients to be able to run statelessly. Those steps include getting the witness size down to be small enough and switching the tree from hex to binry.





Eth2

The audit of the eth2 spec is now public. Meanwhile nailing down the final networking for phase0 to get the last multi-client testnets up before the Beacon Chain goes live.





Eth2+

The debut of the Eth2x section. That’s a joke - I dislike the 1x moniker which somehow got hung on Eth1 improvements.

You probably won’t be clicking any of these links unless you’re into math or a protocol researcher who can fake it.





Layer2

No shocker here that Aztec is moving into rollup. It’s an underrated fact that rollup’s massive scaling is about to ship or has already shipped (ie Loopring), though there is still work to do be do to get those rollups to their full thousnds of transactions per second capacity - like optimizing the verifier.





Stuff for developers

I’ve always felt like the dev section hopefully speaks for itself. With Yul+, FuelLabs is supporting the idea that good projects naturally spinoff open source tools.





Ecosystem

An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap

Another tool to understand/revoke what contracts you have given authority to spend your tokens

Ceramic, a permissionless protocol on Eth & IPFS for tamper-proof documents

All three of these were quite high on the most clicked.





Enterprise

Ericsson: designing a decentralized marketplace

Hyperledger Besu v1.4.2 – improved onchain privacy groups

I think the Ericsson piece just missed the most clicked tweet.





Governance, DAOs, and standards

I haven’t read the Streamr paper, though of course governance is one of the unsolved problems in this space, since governance is an unsolved topic among humans.





Application layer

I don’t normally include release announcements before they happen, but Uniswap is obviously a special case.

Weekly metric: 5 out of 11 bullet points (counting on low side for DeFi, eg not including Augur) are DeFi.





Tokens/Business/Regulation

SDNY judge halts Telegram token distribution with preliminary injunction

If the SEC wins - which it appears they likely will now that they got the injunction - then Silicon Valley investors will have gotten bailed out of the two craziest crypto deals that they invested in at market top - Telegram and Basecoin. Just like Basecoin, Telegram will likely be forced to return (most of) the cash it raised.

The SEC is providing regulation-as-a-service to those investors. Interesting that the deal happened mere months after Tezos, and yet very different regulatory treatments.





General

It’s pretty great to see that the Steem community managed to fight off the hijacking that was attempted with the (unwitting?) help of Binance and Huobi. While both exchanges backed off, we’ll find out in time whether they really feel like they were misled.





Finally, time to shill for my Gitcoin grant here. If you give because you particularly want the annotated edition to continue, could you add .11 to whatever you give? eg, 1.11 DAI or .11 ETH or .01011 ETH.

I put this last week and I believe only one contributor added the 11, so maybe no one likes the annotated version. 🤔