Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, Jan 19, 2020

This is the 6th of 6 annotated editions that I promised myself to do.

Like last week, it’s an opportunity to shill my Gitcoin grant page. Right now a 1 DAI (you can give ETH or any token) has an insane matching. Where else can you get a 150x return on a buck?





There’s about 24 hours left at the time this was published.

I shared on Twitter the graph of my subscriber count for the last 90 days:

The newsletter has gotten big enough to the point where the subscriber churn is enough to force negative days. It used to be that the day I sent the email, I’d get 90% of my new subs for the week from posting on Reddit. Now Reddit is saturated, and the number only goes up because of the long tail of word of mouth - which seems to be mostly seeded by the RTs of people who make the weekly most clicked as I post it to Twitter.

It’s clear that I’ve mostly bumped up against the ceiling of people who are willing to subscribe to a tech-heavy Eth newsletter. Perhaps there are other marketing channels, but seems unlikely to find people who want a newsletter, even if they are Eth devs.

This annotated version is an attempt to test whether writing for a larger audience would succeed. I think to some degree it has, but I also haven’t done a great job of contextualizing, nor adding narratives. Still working on it.









Eth1

Eth1 is moving toward a stateless model like Eth2 will have. This will help make Eth1 easier to seamlessly port into eth2 when phase 1 is live.

In the meantime, people are figuring out what makes sense. Is it WASM precompiles? Will client devs agree to it?

StarkWare wants to reduce the gas cost again, which would make rollup even cheaper and provide more transaction scalability.





Eth2

If you’re going to read one post this week in full, the “incentives for good behavior” is probably the one. This isn’t new info, but it’s nicely packaged up and with the spec under audit, this is very likely to be the final info. This answers many of the questions that people come to Reddit and ask.

Danny Ryan’s quick updates are also packed full of info.

the spec is out for audit. the documentation all got overhauled to explain the decisions – ie, things needed for an audit – with the expectation of a post-audit spec in early March. Obviously we hope for minimal changes and then set a plan for lunch.

There’s been lots of talk about how long we need to run testnets for, but i think it’s quite clear that anything more than a month or so of testnets is overkill. We’ve had various testnets for months, the testnets will get increasingly multi-client, including from genesis. Phase 0 is going to be in production but not doing anything in production - a bit like the original release of Frontier in July 2015.

We should push to launch soon. Problems can be hardforked away and the expectations should be very similar to the launch of Frontier.





Layer2

Plasma Group -> Optimism, raises round from Paradigm/ideo for optimistic rollups

Auctioning transaction ordering rights to re-align miner incentives

A writeup of Interstate Network’s optimistic rollup

Plasma Group changed their name to Optimism and raised a round. It’s hardly a secret that layer2 has been a frustration in Bitcoin/Ethereum for years, with no solution reaching critical mass, and sidechains simply trading off decentralization/trustlessness. Plasma Group decided to go for rollup instead of Plasma, due to the relative ease of doing fully EVM through optimistic rollup. Respect to Paradigm for having conviction and leading the round, as well as IDEO.

The auctioning of ordering rights is part of their solution.

Also cool is Interstate Network, who is building something similar. I’m unclear why they decided to launch with a writeup on Gitcoin grants, but it is worthy of supporting.





Stuff for developers

Hard to miss the “time to get a key” for the API trend. But to be fair, it makes sense to require keys. It’s not surprising that providing it for free is not a business model.

Ecosystem

Tornado.cash is such a huge thing for our ecosystem that I feel no problem highlighting it forever. The complete lack of privacy isn’t 100% solved, but if you care about your privacy, Tornado Cash is super easy to use. I’ve said it before, but participating in Tornado is a public good – you’re increasing the anonymity set.

The dweb using ENS and IPFS is interesting, worth watching to see how it evolves, though currently it only has 100 sites.

I hope to see more pop-up economies happen. It’s a great way to onboard people and give a better glimpse of the future than making people wait an hour for transactions to confirm.





Enterprise

Neat to see the Kings experimenting with new tech, even if in small ways.

Meanwhile that list of building on Ethereum has 700+ RTs at the moment. Goes to the MarketingDAO above - there are many ETH holders who feel like Ethereum is undermarketed.

Governance and standards

EIP2464: eth/65 transaction annoucements and retrievals

ERC2462: interface standard for EVM networks

ERC2470: Singleton Factory

bZxDAO: proposed 3 branch structure to decentralize bZx

Application layer

In typical Livepeer fashion, they didn’t hype up their release very much, but I think Streamflow could end up being very big. They think they can get the price point down for transcoders to being cheaper than centralized transcoders. How? Because GPU miners want to make more money and GPU miners can add a few transcoding streams with negligible loss of hashpower. This will become even more crucial when ETH moves to proof of stake, and miners will need to get more out of their hardware.

Lots of people loved rTrees. As a guy who has done all the CFA exams, I have had the time value of money drilled into me too much to ever think of anything as “no loss” but people love the concept.

Psychedelic microdosing and tech has become a thing. Tim Ferriss led fundraising a Johns Hopkins psychedelic research center, it will be interesting to see if Molecule becomes a hit in the tech community outside crypto.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

Speaking of the Eth community wanting more marketing, the trillion dollar market cap piece was the most clicked this week.

If you haven’t checked out Continuous Securities, it’s a neat idea.

The tokenizing yourself trend is easy to laugh at or dismiss, but they’re some small experiments that are worth watching.

General

SciFi and zero knowledge (”moon math” as it occasionally gets called) section.

SciFi shows us the future, and zero knowledge solutions increasingly aren’t just the future, but also the present.





Full Week in Ethereum News post