Price Action

This week saw yet another decline in overall market cap with a 3.5% overall decline. The top 5 gainers in the top 100 were as follows:

Binance Coin (BNB) — 34.13%

Theta (THETA) — 26.97%

Metaverse ETP (ETP) — 20.62%

Augur (REP) — 9.01%

IOST (IOST) — 7.65%

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

Revain (R) — 18.85%

Project Pai (PAI) — 18.17%

NEM (XEM) — 17.25%

Zilliqa (ZIL) — 14.66%

Nano (NANO) — 12.14%

Major ETH News

Ethereum Devs Delay ProgPoW Decision Until Audit

Ethereum devs have decided to delay the implementation of ProgPoW pending a third party audit. ProgPow is an ASIC-resistant PoW. They claim that the purpose for this is to ensure the effectiveness of the algorithm in regards to leveling the playing field for different hardware used for mining. As of now, there is no specific date set for this audit, but it should be completed sometime in March or early April.

Events

As mentioned last week, ETHDenver will be held next week from February 15–17, 2019. This is proving to be one of the biggest events scheduled for 2019 and has the unique feature of being ran 100% on blockchain technology. Feel free to check out this event and hopefully we will see you next week!

Development News

This post on ethresear.ch looks into whether or not Avalanche RANDAO and verifiable delay functions (VDFs) are compatible.

Ethereum Foundation Weighing Possible $15 million Development Initiative: The Ethereum Foundation is considering the possibility of implementing a technology called Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) in its Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity) upgrade. In basic terms, VDFs would allow the Ethereum blockchain to secure randomized numbers. In turn, dApps that run on the Ethereum blockchain could utilize this technology.

As part of the decision-making process, Justin Drake has said that a range of tests (i.e. the RSA ceremony) will be done to determine the viability of this implementation. Drake and other core developers are also welcoming input from the wider Ethereum community about whether or not this is something that should be added to the Ethereum codebase in the near future.

Parity Addresses Node Vulnerability: Parity Technologies released a statement saying, “On February 3rd, we received several reports that an attacker can send a specially-crafted RPC request to a public Parity Ethereum node (any version pre 2.2.9-stable and pre 2.3.2-beta) and that node will crash.”

Later that same day, Parity released a patch to fix the vulnerability and asked node owners to update their nodes ASAP. The bug affected JSON RPC, which means it only impacted nodes that run a public service (i.e. Infura, MyEtherWallet, MyCrypto, etc.).

Kosala Hemachandra, who works at MyEtherWallet, was the first person to notify Parity of the bug. As a result, Hemachandra will receive a reward from the Parity bug bounty program.

Developer Spotlight: Kosala Hemachandra

As mentioned above, Kosala Hemachandra successfully notified Parity about its node vulnerability. So, this week we have decided to highlight Hemachandra’s work as a developer.

In 2016, Hemachandra completed his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from California State University, Northridge. He is skilled in C++, Linux, and JavaScript and has worked on a number of development projects since 2012.

His most notable role within the blockchain/crypto industry is as the Founder and CEO of MyEtherWallet, one of the top-rated wallets for storing ETH and ERC20 tokens. Hemachandra regularly tweets about MEW updates as well as development activities happening in the larger Ethereum community.

DApp of the Week: Bounties Network

Bounties Network provides a P2P marketplace for developers, designers, writers, and many other professionals to compete to win open bounty competitions. The issuer can choose to reward successful entries in ETH or a variety of Ethereum-based tokens. The platform includes a leaderboard for top earners and top issuers. It also includes an explorer where you can easily search and filter through various bounties and categories.

Recently, development activity on the platform has skyrocketed with 248 events over 30 days, up 853.85% as of February 7, 2019. During this same time frame, Bounties Network also has had a lot of activity from both issuers and earners. This includes 293 active monthly users and 803 transactions valued at 93.679 ETH over 30 days.