Week in Ethereum News, Dec 15, 2019 annotated edition

Full Week in Ethereum News for Dec 15. This is the annotated edition:

Eth1

Latest core devs call. Notes. Lots of EIP1559 (fee market change) discussion now that it has been implemented. Decided to go forward with EIP2384 for Muir Glacier, anyone can propose changes afterwards. Also lots of talk about 1962 precompile calls.

Update your clients for the Muir Glacier fork in early January. Geth, Nethermind, Besu all are ready. Parity, Aleth are coming.

Piper Merriam on the 4 steps to an eth1 stateless client network

Background on eth1 very long-term sustainability problems and options





Annotations: EIP1559 is a big deal. It locks ETH in as part of the protocol and eliminates the possibility of economic abstraction [economic abstraction was heavily discussed in 2016 and if I recall correctly was pushed by Gavin] which would destroy ETH’s value. If ETH had no value, then the amount of things that Ethereum can do drops by magnitudes. We’ll have EIP1559 in eth2, and we may be getting it sooner rather than later in eth1. While I have some reservations (ie, really cheap transactions will go away), on balance it is a good idea.

The Muir Glacier fork is also coming. I’ve noticed quite a bit of pushback in the community about how the difficulty increase (sometimes called the “Ice Age” or “The Bomb”) is being pushed back 4 years with no reduction in issuance. Personally I think we are overpaying for security, but any issuance reduction should be mild (in fact, I had a proposal to do so in exchange for progpow and funding public goods!) and based on sound analysis, not “yeah, it’s December (which tends to be a bad month in capital markets) and the price is down so….wah.” 4 years is also too long in my opinion, but the conspiracy theorists seem to forget that the actual pull request came from Eric Conner, known as one of the main proponents of #ETHismoney, among other things. They should do their own pull request if they want a different parameter.

Meanwhile, Piper’s post on what is engineering and what is research on the way to an eth1 network of stateless clients is definitely a mustread. The idea of keeping eth1 around for years is a worthy insurance policy in case there any implementation hiccups in phase 2, though I don’t anticipate we will need to keep eth1 around so long.





Eth2





Annotations: The launch date isn’t changing, despite Justin’s love for crypto launch anniversaries. It’s still scheduled for q1, though I don’t expect it until late in q1. Of course, this is a software deadline and we’re still 3.5 months out, so it could slip, but I remain optimistic.

Lighthouse, among others, has done an amazing amount of work, and they launched their Rust client this week. I haven’t run it yet,

Meanwhile, Jim Mcdonald is doing a centralized Eth2 staking service and has had some good content marketing lately - this one on understanding the deposits, as well as the recent one on understanding effective balance. Others should up their game!





Layer2

Celer light client SDK, runs in the browser

Annotations: Celer continues to work. Otherwise a layer2 light week, obviously.







Stuff for developers

Annotations: Interesting to see the posts written about minimal proxy contracts lately. Not sure what has prompted that. I probably should have noted in this section that the Remix update included a Quorum plugin, though I noted that below.





Ecosystem





Annotations: You like how I faked you out with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines? (Betteridge’s Law: the answer to any question in a title is no.) But the answer is yes. Rollup chains aren’t live yet, but they will be in 2020. And they’re a sort of half layer 1, half layer 2 arrangement, though I often put them in layer 2 in the newsletter. That’s because data goes onchain (ie, on eth1, ie on layer 1) but there’s a rollup chain that does all the transaction execution off chain. ZK rollups provide validity proofs that the transactions are correct. Optimistic rollup provides crypto economic validity that the transactions are correct - that is, if anyone submits an improper transaction, you slash their bond and take their money for cheating.

Parity’s update was apparently the shot before today’s post saying that they’re quitting Ethereum. Disappointing but not surprising, that they are going to work on their in-house Polkadot product instead. If we’re being honest: their client has been in mainenance mode already.

Networking: I’m excited to see Dean and Oskar do great work making Whisper into more than something that is barely a proof of concept, so this should be a good thing for Ethereum.





Enterprise

Annotations: Enterprise sure looks like an Ethereum moat, doesn’t it? As I tweeted out today, EY’s Paul Brody said on Reddit something I 100% agree with. “there is much more headroom in 1.x than most people think. I just gave an internal talk this morning about how so many people misunderstand scalability and that most of that talk about Eth is just fear mongering by the private blockchain crowd.”



Nike’s patent application is written to be purposely ambiguous as to whether it is blockchain agnostic (it’s a patent application, the whole point is to reserve the right to sue someone!) but also leaves little doubt that it’s on Ethereum right now.

And of course, BancoSantander continues to drive mainnet use forward. Innovators in this space for years now.





Governance and standards

Annotations: Keep an eye on Vocdoni. It’s built by Catalans, and while they haven’t talked about it much, it seems clear they’re building tools that they wish to use in their own quest for the right to self-determination.



It’ll be interesting to see if the governance security module passes or not. At the moment, it has not, because after Micah’s article, a bunch of people voted their MKR in favor of the status quo (to up the amount needed to execute Micah’s attack). I imagine it will, but I believe there are many within the ranks of Maker holders who believe that the 0 delay is still a good idea.





Application layer

Annotations: Sablier is such an interesting primitive. Stream money by the second to someone. Imagine paying your rent or payroll or salary that way.

Synthetix keeps moving, you have to admire their pace of execution. They seem to be considering adding ETH as collateral in their system, which makes it much more interesting to me - though all crypto is pretty correlated these days.

Kong is super cool. I am definitely keeping a hold of my KONG from devcon. Just be careful not to fold it, as I hear that can break the circuits.

Set keeps shipping interesting stuff. Love the idea of a trading Strat that either holds ETH or puts it into cDAI/cUSD. And undercollateralized lending seems like something that will happen, whether it be Union or Trustlines or one of the other ideas. I’m also quite pumped about RealT, it just sucks that they can’t offer it more seamlessly. If they could, I think the demand would be high.





Tokens / Business / Regulation

Annotations: Nobel winner Myron Scholes advises Saga. That’s just such a clickbait title that I refuse to use it. I’m also quite skeptical that anyone wants SDRs. I got much more bullish when they switched from SDRs to USD.

ING getting into crypto custody. Fidelity made some noise about supporting ETH too. Even in cryptowinter, this stuff looks like it is here to stay.





General

Annotations: Filecoin launches a Testnet. Oddly, I have yet to hear from anyone who has tried it.

Lots of crypto stuff. I’m not a cryptographer, so I sometimes feel a bit lost and should probably spend more time in the crypto books. I like the explanations, it’s great to see that blockchains have really given zero knowledge in particular a boost. ZK stuff is the future of this industry.

