Price Action

The overall market cap saw a 4.2% decrease on the week, leading into what will potentially be the longest bear market in crypto history. The top 5 gainers in the top 100 were as follows:

Everus (EVR) — 161.55%

Holo (HOT) — 22.91%

Pundi X (NPXS) — 14.62%

Veritaseum (VERI) — 4.58%

Litecoin (LTC) — 0.78%

The bottom 5 coins that remained within the top 100 were as follows:

Revain (R) — 28.24%

NEM (XEM) — 25.27%

Loopring (LRC) — 24.18%

Steem (STEEM) — 21.82%

Maker (MKR) — 19.79%

Development News

ETH Proof of Stake Testnet Launch in March

Ethereum has stated that they see no reason why they cannot achieve a launch of testnet for Lighthouse ETH2.0 client in March. Vitalik has stated that everything has reached a fairly advanced stage, although they still need to integrate state transitions and fork choice rules. Read more here.

ETC Adds Executive Director: As mentioned in The Ethereum Report #2, Ethereum Classic is making major moves to strengthen its community by adding a core development team.

On January 29, Ethereum Classic Cooperative (ETC) announced the addition of Bob Summerwill as its new Executive Director. Summerwill has been actively working on Ethereum projects since 2015 and officially joined the Ethereum Foundation in February 2016.

Bob Summerwill joins ETC as Executive Director.

B9lab Launches New Ethereum Dev Training Initiative: B9lab, which was founded in 2014 with the goal of providing quality blockchain education for everyone, is expanding its efforts. On January 31, it officially begins the registration/selection process for a new initiative called the Blockstars Community Programme. B9lab will mentor, train, and grant certifications to 1,000 students who want to become Ethereum developers.

B9lab will hold two courses this year (one in March and one in October), each with 500 students. For students, it will be free to participate. Up to 250 seats will be funded by community partners. B9lab will match the remaining 50% of seats.

As Co-founder Elias Haase told Forbes,

“We want input from people with diverse backgrounds, from different industries, and with different life experiences, he added. With that in mind, we didn’t want cost to be a barrier for training. That’s why we’re offering the course for free for participants.”

B9lab has made learning Ethereum development more accessible for all since 2014.

Lots of Development Talks and Demos at AraCon: Some examples included Aragon Bella 0.7 (1st mobile release), Frame (an OS-level Ethereum interface), a Planning Suite produced by Autark, and an open source incentivization app by Pando Network.

On January 30, 2019, Aragon announced the release of a new desktop client that features an embedded IPFSbot node. Originally, Aragon was built for desktop but switched to a web platform. The decision to launch a revamped desktop client means Aragon enables faster app loading and the addition of an intelligent cache function. In the future, the desktop client could even connect to or embed an Ethereum light node.

Aragon returns to its roots by launching a new desktop client.

Developer Spotlight: Luis Cuende

In honor of AraCon, which took place this week (January 29 and 30), we have selected Aragon Co-Founder and Aragon One CEO Luis Cuende in this week’s Developer Spotlight.

Since 2014, Cuende has focused on blockchain and decentralization. Besides Aragon, Cuende worked on Stamper, which aims to provide a decentralized proof of existence, ownership, and integrity using the blockchain. He is the former CTO and a current advisory board member for this startup.

At AraCon 2019, Cuende gave the opening keynote along with fellow Aragon Executive Director Stefano Bernardi. Cuende also gave the closing keynote where he recapped some of the new product demos, the capabilities of DAOs, and the upcoming launch of the Aragon Network later in 2019.

DApp of the Week: OpenSea

Since its launch in February 2018, OpenSea has gained significant adoption as a marketplace for trading crypto collectibles, gaming items, and other items that are backed by the Ethereum blockchain. Recently, the project has soared up the dApp rankings in a number of important categories.

As of January 30, 2019, it is ranked as the 33rd most popular dApp by number of users, rising 64 spots from the previous day. During the past week, volume reached 684 ETH. This marked a 15.73% increase. Development activity is also up 32.79% over the past 30 days.

OpenSea is a marketplace for trading in-game assets. As shown in the “categories” tab on the left, it supports many of the top gaming dapps on the market.

Upcoming Events

ETHDenver is proving to be one of the most exciting events to start off 2019, with the entire conference being nearly 100% ran on blockchain. This is a huge step towards showing that there are real-world applications to blockchain technology. The event will be held from February 15–17 in Denver and is open to Hackers, Workshop/General, Volunteers, and Speakers. Learn more about ETHDenver here.