Annotated edition of April 26 Week in Ethereum News

Here’s the most clicked for the latest Week in Eth News:

As I always say, the most clicked is determined by what people hadn’t already seen during the week.

My thought is that the annotated edition tries to give people a more high-level overview. If I were only reading a few high-level things this week, I would read

In reverse order, the fundamental value proposition of ETH, because it’s good to have a pithy post to send friends when you’re trying to get them to make their first ETH purchase, often after you’ve sent them some ETH and/or stablecoins to play around with. Of course, we used to have more “visions of web3″ posts, but those are now mostly a few years old.

In the long run, Ethereum’s vision of web3 needs applications built on it - and that comes with a native value transfer layer that is international and censorship-resistant. We do still lack a data layer to serve websites trustlessly though.

One thing those old “this is a vision for web3″ posts don’t usually contain is things like the constant function market makers as a zero-to-one DeFi innovation post. Being able to always source liquidity all over the world from a market even at 11pm at night is neat - and the sort of thing that will be needed for web3. If there’s a native value transfer layer, then all the sudden there is a very long-tail of assets. Things you earn in video games, etc etc.

We need to have a culture of educated users in the early days of web3, and the MyCrypto guide to reading audit reports is something non-devs should peruse. It’s a tough balance between encouraging people to use things - we need to have both a culture of “we use early web3 apps” but also “be educated and informed.” For me, I use lots of web3 apps, but how much I use them definitely depends on what the audit report says. If you imagine how a consultant writes a report to someone paying them, then have a good heuristic to skim. In general, if you don’t see things like “we found the code quality to be very high” then you should be cautious. You should also understand that time does harden these systems to some degree - the Hegic bug got found out within a few days - I think literally on the first day of going live.

Finally, a layer 2 post: how state channels fits into layer2 post-rollups: immediate finality, no third party necessary, and arbitrary execution. It can be hard to suss what is real and what is hype in layer2 - to date, almost all layer2 stuff has ended up being hype. Lightning has been around for years in Bitcoin-land yet has very little adoption and has serious privacy issues (new paper out this week). While we’ve seen simple uses for state channels in production (eg, AdEx’s how we built the largest payment channel network on Eth), we haven’t seen widespread adoption of channel networks nor meaningful uses of Plasma. Rollups are the new hype (and starting to be live, eg Loopring can do 10x throughput), but state channels aren’t dead yet - to use my best Monty Python voice - and should still be the right scaling tool for plenty of apps.





Eth1

Nethermind v1.8.18 beta enables beam sync by default. Stay on v1.7.x for stable releases

A very rough transcript from the latest Stateless Ethereum call. You’ll need to have context for this to make sense.

An EIP1559 implementer call (predictable transaction fees for users plus ETH burn) on April 30

Bit slow week on this front, though there was some stateless Eth work that moved forward - just no writeups yet.





Eth2

A multi-client testnet launched since publication! It was a low hype event, and if you read the client updates, there’s some low-hanging fruit that will be caught early.

A note on the eth2 chain launch: when it goes into production, it won’t really be doing anything in production. As such, we should try to launch it as soon as possible and be understanding if there are bugs and we can fix/fork them if need be. We really only need a couple production-ready clients (the rest can join later) and we don’t need this multi-client testnet to run for months and months.

This is the way Ethereum launched in 2015. We turned it on, but you literally couldn’t do anything but mine. There were bugs and emergency fixes. It’s also the way the Eth2 upgrade will launch. We’ll turn it on, but you can’t do anything but stake. Then gradually it will start doing more things, and eventually the Ethereum state will be subsumed into the eth2 chain. Let’s launch early but with low expectations for what it does in the short-run.

We’re starting to see more “omg, what do i do when eth2 launches” questions on Reddit. Every rose has its thorns.





Layer2

Private, scalable payments from Aztec using the magic of SNARKs. The next thing they’ll implement is some of the recent breakthroughs (plookup) to get the computation time down so that these things are cheaper and more scalable.

A completely under-hyped thing in Ethereum is AZTEC’s roadmap which includes “Code privacy — hiding asset/code being spent/run.” web3 business models all change when you can obfuscate your code. I have no idea when this is coming - but you can kinda make something out if you look out on the horizon.





Stuff for developers

Some cool stuff in there this week. Solidity stacktraces in Truffle, the new big release of Zeppelin contracts, Zerion SDK, getting revert reasons easily, etc.

It’s been suggested for awhile that more exchanges sign a price feed, and now Coinbase is doing it. I think they’re first.

I saw a couple people suggest this week that the Ethereum wannabe chains should have natively included things like price feeds and stablecoins. All of the late 2017 VC coins have really underwhelmed in both execution and imagination.





Ecosystem

Thanks to Cloudflare for being a Rinkeby signer. Very cool, some of the Rinkeby signers have not been very stable, so this should be a substantial upgrade in testnet stability.

The spreadsheet of hackathon ideas doubles as a “startup ideas.” I’ve heard people say they wish someone would collect people’s problems and post them weekly.





Enterprise

Italy’s ANSA newswire registers a hash of articles to combat fake news, including transparency about updates

Citing the pandemic, Indian shipping ministry wants to use CargoX for bills of lading on Ethereum

Two neat uses. It’s often hard to separate fact from fiction (and hype) in the enterprise space but these seemed legit.





Governance, DAOs, and standards

Greg Colvin put ProgPoW on the agenda for the next core devs call

A walkthrough of TheLAO, launching April 28. They’re using a TCRParty-fork called LAOScout to put startups on radar for funding from TheLAO.

ERC2615: Non funglible property standard

ERC2612: Permit extension for ERC20

It’s inexplicable that Colvin is bringing up ProgPoW again without any change in argument. He’s doing serious damage to the chance that we are able to put ProgPoW in if we need it - and I’ve learned some things that makes me think that we might need it.

It’s interesting to me to see how TheLAO does. I never thought TheDAO was a good idea - direct democracy + money doesn’t sound to me like the way to improve venture funding - but I wonder whether our space gets excited about anything that gets KYC’d.





Application layer

The eternal (and eternally arbitrary) how much is DeFi metric: 12/16, though that’s not counting prediction markets as DeFi, and whether I count prediction markets as DeFi probably changes from week-to-week.

This was an exciting week at the app layer. Coronavirus markets, onchain futures so folks don’t YOLO gamble on centralized sites that know your liquidation point and trade against you, the Zoom paywall, etc.

Cent is quite neat. It was obvious that previous seeding wasn’t quite right, I’ll have to try the new one. The idea of getting paid for discovering new content and creators is super appealing. I remember the feeling once upon a time that I should get paid for all the new bands I was discovering and getting people to buy records for. This is what Cent is going for, and it’s very cool

Dharma social payments is very cool, a nice emulation of web2, but automatically earning interest. Of course Twitter is giving them troubles. The whole point of web3 is not getting capriciously censored. And Twitter is the worst at that - I remember when they randomly locked my account ~4 times in a month last year, including twice in one day!





Tokens/Business/Regulation

Take some of the P/E with a grain of salt, especially if you aren’t comparing apples-to-oranges, but if you sort by PE, I think it’s obvious which layer 1 chains are massively overvalued right now.





General

Like anything, “safe to use” is an evaluation. Even holding USD requires an evaluation of all of your goals, tolerance for risk, timeframes, where you are, how you’re holding it, etc. It’s the reason why “this is not financial advice” is a thing, even outside of trying to discourage idiots from suing you. So to me saying anything is safe is a tough goal. But it is safe to say that Dai is getting more hardened.

Libra shifting away from its goal of going permissionless isn’t surprising. I said at the start that if they ever launched anything, it wouldn’t be anything like what they announced. Seems like they’re solidly on track for that.

Do people know that much of Libra’s Move comes from work funded by the Ethereum Foundation?







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Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

Apr 29-30 – SoliditySummit (Berlin)

May 8-9 – Ethereal Summit (NYC)

May 22-31 – Ethereum Madrid public health virtual hackathon

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 17 – EthBarcelona R&D workshop

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