2017 - Reddheads newsletter 37: Ethereum DAPPs proliferate View this email in your browser Ethereum DAPPs proliferate

Hello Reddheads,



Last Friday I travelled to Paris to attend some of the presentations being given for the EDCON Ethereum conference.



It was a great experience and a good opportunity to find out first-hand what applications are being built to make use of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.



To gather the most possible information for readers of Reddheads I spoke with some attendees at the event itself, and contacted others by email afterwards.



The diversity of applications being worked on is quite astonishing. I have to say, having followed Bitcoin seriously for four years it is hard not to get the impression that Ethereum is the exact opposite of Bitcoin. Even after ten years one could still be forgiven for thinking that Bitcoin's primary purpose is to encourage the development of an ecosystem of exchanges. The focus is 90% on exchanges.



With Ethereum it is the exact opposite - the focus is on applications and usability. Indeed, that is the very raison d'être behind the project.



With this in mind, I am pleased to be emailing you today the 37th edition of the Reddheads newsletter, which includes a series of short interviews with DAPP developers and leaders working to build Ethereum-based projects.



Happy reading!

Reddibrek Chief Editor PoS panel discussion, EDCON, Paris, 2017. EDCON At the EDCON Ethereum conference held in Paris last week, Core devs, researchers and representatives from myriad teams working on Ethereum applications gathered to hear presentations and learn about progress being made in all areas of the Ethereum ecosystem. Reddheads.com attended the conference on Friday 17 February. The main events of the day were the presentations made by the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, by Core researcher Vlad Zamfir, and by other Ethereum Core researchers and team members. Highlights also included talks on “The Shanghai Attacks” (Ethereum Core security developer Martin Holst Swende), on the “Trustlines Network” (Brainbot/Raiden Network developer Heiko Hees), and on formal verification (Ethereum Core researcher Yoichi Hirai). For a full list of the excellent talks see http://edcon.io/#main. The day was completed with a panel discussion on Proof of Stake. Various media outlets have reported the principle keynotes at EDCON, for example Coindesk and the International Business Times, but for those who attended the conference and the myriad activities that took place before, during and after the main event, there was a whole lot more going on in Paris that week (see last week’s article published in the run up to EDCON). At the EDCON conference and by email, Reddheads.com caught up with developers and project leaders working on diverse DAPPs being built using Ethereum, to ask two questions: What is your project? Why are you building it with Ethereum? The answers received from seven of the hundreds of Ethereum DAPP projects currently being built – Blocktix, Etherplay, Melonport, Aragon, Streamr, Orion and DAO Casino – can be read below. Blocktix From blocktix.io: “Event hosts can use Blocktix to distribute tickets and directly market to people who are most likely to attend their events…”

Founder – Ryno Mathee "Blocktix is a decentralized system that prevents counterfeiting, enabling companies and individuals to sell and buy tickets utilizing the security of the Ethereum Blockchain. Blocktix has been designed as a cost-efficient event hosting platform to end the billion dollar annual losses resulting from ticket-fraud. Ethereum offers all the tools we need to write the smart contracts, deploy them and integrate with our UI. There is an amazing community that is moving forward at a tremendous rate. They have great tutorials and guidelines to follow for security, etc., so it was the most logical path to build it on Ethereum." Etherplay From etherplay.io: “We were actually planning to build a skill game portal using traditional technology and fiat currencies. Fortunately, we encountered Ethereum and its community on our way…”

Game Developer and Co-Founder – Erwan Sandford "Etherplay is a skill game platform where players compete for the high scores. Players pay for each attempt contributing to the progressive jackpot. Players with top scores get rewarded. We like to think that our platform is like an arcade machine, you put a coin to play, while playing you try to be in the leaderboard and at the end of the competition the top players share the jackpot! Ethereum allows Etherplay to provide a transparent and verifiable system. Since our system records all the data, it is possible to verify if the correct players got their rewards. Ethereum also provides micro-transactions. Our players do not need to deposit any money nor do they need an account. They also get instant payout. On top of that Ethereum simplifies our backend to a great extent by making it secure by default." Melonport From melonport.com: “Melon is built from the start to be ever-expandable and flexible. A modular framework for easily adding new functionality and features in a permissionless way that rewards developers…”

CEO – Mona El Isa "We are building blockchain software for asset management The software allows you to do four things: set up a fund structure using smart contracts . This means pre-defining what the fund can and can’t do using smart contracts. manage the fund within the pre-selected parameters. obtain a visible, auditable and transparent track record on the blockchain. invest in other blockchain (smart contract run) funds or allow others to invest in you. Ethereum pioneered the idea of smart-contracts, and Solidity is the most comprehensive and well supported contract oriented coding language available today. We have great faith in the Ethereum developers to scale and improve it over time, and have been impressed by the progress made thus far. Whilst we will initially deploy on Ethereum though, we do plan to have a governance structure in place which will allow deployment of Melon on other blockchains too, be they other new, public/consortium based platforms, or something entirely different. We see a future where many blockchains will be able to seamlessly interact with each other, and will of course make sure the Melon Protocol is able to leverage that for its users benefit." Aragon From aragon.one: “Death to paperwork. Avoid useless intermediaries.”

Project Lead – Luis Cuende "Aragon is everything you need to build your company on Ethereum. Cap table, vesting, voting, fundraising, accounting, bylaws and identity all in a beautiful, unified interface. Ethereum has by far the best development tools in place. It lets you create basically anything you can dream of. It has its limitations and we’re very early on, so things such as security best practices are still being worked on, but we’re fine with it because of the pace at which it is exploding. It is crazy how many smart people are getting into Ethereum." Streamr From streamr.com: “Streamr is a cloud platform for creating and running logic that instantly reacts to newest data…”

CEO and Founder – Henri Pihkala "We’re building a usability and analytics layer on top of Ethereum. We offer data streams, visual programming tools and contract templates so that anyone can create functional and fairly complicated smart contracts in minutes. We make combining off-chain and on-chain computation completely seamless – a crucial feature in (big) data-driven smart contracts. At EDCON we demonstrated how this can be done in a particular use case. In the demo, there’s a live data feed from the City of Helsinki public transport containing the position and speed of all the trams every second. This data is aggregated off-chain on the Streamr platform and then fed into a smart contract which automatically makes pay-per-use payments to the tram operator based on the distance travelled by all the trams. This is only one of many possible use cases: we’ve got integrations to e.g. financial data and weather data, and have the capability to offer a broad range of real-time professional quality data as inputs for smart contracts. We’d like to contribute to the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem by making it easier to connect with real-world data and start creating real-world applications for smart contracts. Ethereum is a brilliant platform and there’s a large and talented developer community. We think it’s now important that we all do our bit to help Ethereum reach the business world and move towards consumer applications. There are still technical hurdles to overcome, such as attesting the provenance of external data and striking the right balance between on-chain and off-chain processing, but there’s good momentum and lots of interest in real-life use cases for smart contracts." Orion From the Orion Github: “Orion is a global augmented reality cryptocurrency treasure hunt…”

Web Developer at Thoughtbot – Mason Fischer "Orion is an augmented reality treasurehunt application build on the Ethereum blockchain (think Pokémon go except instead of hunting charzards you hunt for Ether). We built Orion at the Blockchain Hackathon in Ireland. We used Ethereum so treasure hunt rules could be programmed as smart contracts and ERC20 tokens could be issued as prizes! Here’s a link with more: http://www.masonforest.com/blockchain/2016/11/21/orion-takes-second-place-at-dublin-blockchain-hackathon.html" DAO Casino From dao.casino: “DAO.casino is an open ecosystem for gambling games that don’t rely on a trusted third party…”

Bizdev – Ksenya @j32804 "The focus of DAO Casino is not to build a front end for Ethereum games but rather to design and implement an autonomous economy which works for both players and game devs. In this sense we are not in competition with others working hard in the area of games platforms for Ethereum. The goal is to support many front end platforms with games – in different languages – hosted on servers or on Swarm when it is ready and tested, or on IPFS. We are in pre-alfa with one game on site already – Hack the DAO! It’s a history of a DAO in an indie game & the game logic is on Ethereum & Oraclize. We want to build all this on Ethereum as the community synergy is powerful and we want to work with technology that is perfect to create the decentralised governance system we require."