Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, March 21, 2020 issue

Shill alert: Gitcoin’s 250k in matching grants is live. My grant is here. If you give because you particularly want the annotated edition to continue, could you add .11 to whatever you give? eg, 1.11 DAI or .11 ETH or .01011 ETH. The previous round went great but tracking what people like is hard.

The $250k includes $100k for tech, 50k for media, and 100k for public health, mostly related to covid. I’m curious as to how this goes - I find it very hard to evaluate the public health proposals, whereas Eth proposals are easy for me to evaluate. I mostly know the people, I know the ideas, etc. None of that is true for the public health category. There’s an opportunity for someone knowledgeable to (anonmously?) evaluate all the applicants and shape what gets funded.





Eth1

Latest core devs call. Tim Beiko’s notes.

Discussions (non-exhaustive list) about EIP inclusions in next hard fork: eip2537 (BLS12-381 curve precompile) final, so we can have eth2 light clients on eth1. eip2456 timestamp for scheduling instead of block number, eip2542 vs ungas, eip2046 reducing gas cost for static calls, and eip1962 generalized precompile



Geth v1.9.12 – eth_call no longer defaults to first account

Merry Go Round – an idea for syncing state, a la Bittorrent

Lots of talk in the core devs call about all the different EIPs being evaluated for the next fork.

In some ways this week is a synopsis of what’s happening at the protocol layer: people are working on the things for the next fork and arguing over what should go in, as well as what is ready to go in. The Geth team are chugging along keeping the majority of the network humming, and there is research and ideas being passed around about how to get the current Ethereum mainnet to be stateless.





Vitalik’s long-term roadmap below also does a good job of explaining the main things being worked on in eth1. I wasn’t exactly sure where to put it, probably incorrectly chose to put it in eth2 since so many things are long-term.

One interesting thing to note is that this is Vitalik’s “personal” vision. Of course most of it is not controversial, but he just did this by himself. Does it mean that it is Ethereum’s roadmap? No. It means that Vitalik came up with it at some point and decided to publish it - it does not necessarily reflect what everyone thinks. He didn’t build consensus, he just published what he was seeing on the day he wrote it down.

I noticed plenty of misinformation about Vitalik’s roadmap, as if none of this will happen for a decade. Quite the opposite is true: the top 2/3 of the page is being worked on right now. The Beacon Chain of eth2 is still set to launch in the next few months.

The bottom third of the graphic is much more speculative. Polynomial commitments instead of state roots? That just got published last week, that’s likely years away. When CBC Casper? I’m not sure but it’s not soon and the transition is far from clear - to me, anyway. Perhaps Vlad would give you a different answer.





Eth2

I know probably no one else sees the order of things when I try to order things properly. So here’s who it went: Danny’s update was high-level. Ben’s was a bit more in the weeds. Even further into the weeds is client update and “run your own testnet node.” Then we got into Vitalik’s roadmap, which bridged the current eth2 with the future work. So then we got writeups of research like eth1/eth2 merge, hardening timestaps, before getting into a few explainers that were a bit more for broader audience.

The ordering flowed perfectly in my mind, but probably only in mine!





Layer2

Why iden3 is using zk-rollup for universal identities

Having been using Loopring’s exchange running on zk-rollup, gotta say: it’s a great experience. It’s like using a centralized exchange, only it’s a dex.





Stuff for developers

Solidity went back to the v0.5 series to fix a bug that not everyone agrees is a bug!

Meanwhile, lots of interesting tools and tutorials this week, I suppose they all speak for themselves. I thought it was neat that Infura released a tool to let you compare API performance. Nice little bit of subtle bragging.





Ecosystem

Onboarding newcomers is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and was tangential to my EthCC talk, which that post references. Community has decentralized, which is good, but also poses some challenges. A good portion of people who think of themselves as “Eth community” get their news from publications which are outright clickbait or have historically not done a very good job at ascertaining facts. Still churning over this one, should probably turn some of my talk into a series of blog posts myself.

Someone at EthCC told me that they summarized my talk as “Make r/ethereum great again,” which is fair. Yet while I continue to put a decent amount of time into r/ethereum, it’s not crystal clear whether we should try to revive it to be the main community discussion point. For one thing, the existing rule is that it’s English-only, which feels unfair, but perhaps necessary for moderation purposes. Can Reddit be the main ecosystem gathering point? Do we need new tools? Should they be web3-friendly sites, or should we keep Reddit as something that new people can find?









Enterprise

EY and Brody have made a big bet on mainnet, and it appears to be paying off. In his interview, he framed the competition as between public mainnet and private chains, as EY is far ahead in expertise of using mainnet.

It was also super interesting to get some of the backstory that led to the IBM/Samsung washing machine in 2014.





Governance, DAOs, and standards





Application layer

Depending on how you count, DeFi was 5 or 7 out of 9 bullet points. That’s my running tracker that I like to occasionally check on.

Backstop was a very cool community effort. Love to see that people get together to make sure the system functions - and they were also incentivized to do so.





Tokens/Business/Regulation

Jonathan Joseph’s piece on how Black Thursday is the beginning of the DeFi area would have made the #Mostclicked if I’d tweeted it out just a bit later.





General

The NYT on how the Venezuelan kleptocrats screwed the dev is the epitome of something-we-all-saw-coming, which you already knew if you’ve read the newsletter for a long time. I got criticism from a bunch of different corners (”oh that’s because you’re an American,” “you can’t say that, people will think it represents us,” etc) for calling the Petro a scam when it was announced, and I ignored it. I don’t know why you got into this space, but I didn’t get into it to help kleptocrat leftist authoritarians.



Meanwhile, lots of cool stuff in SNARKs, including in Livepeer about how they might be able to detect improper transcoding.





Finally, Cristian Espinoza translated last week’s annotated edition into Spanish, which to my knowledge is the first time that the annotated edition has been translated. Very cool, and support his Gitcoin grant for more translations!





I’ll add the #mostclicked here. Amusingly I had some maxis spreading more lies about me this week because my tweets auto-delete. So here’s a screenshot since that’s more durable than linking to a tweet