Alpine Public Key #3 — Token Reworks, Protocol Updates, and an Anniversary Rocco Follow May 2, 2019 · Unlisted

Welcome to the third Alpine Public Key — our monthly aggregation of what we think are the top public chain project updates with a quick tl;dr for you. If you think we missed an important news update please let us know and we’ll make sure to add that into next month’s considerations.

Bitcoin — Slump Exit, Bitcoin Banks, and Sentiment Analysis

The Bitcoin news cycle was mostly dominated by price action, as the beginning of the month saw a $1,000 jump. Speaking to content, in the middle of the month, Nic Carter released an excellent article detailing a ‘scaling solution’ in which Hal Finney’s original thought of “Bitcoin Banks” comes to life in the form of solvency proofs and IOU issuance. Later in the month, Spencer Bogart and Blockchain Capital released results from a survey conducted by The Harris Poll between April 23rd-25th to gather data on Bitcoin adoption. They found that adoption is being led by younger age groups, and that “Bitcoin awareness” is still improving at a rapid rate.

Ethereum — 2.0, New Website, AWS Integration & Musk Interactions

This month saw more progress on Ethereum 2.0 development, including an updated spec and a detailed guide on the economics of staking after the 2.0 transition. The Ethereum foundation also updated the Ethereum.org website which seems quite unfinished, but its GitHub repository encourages contributors to add to it in an open source fashion. The end of the month saw a press release from Amazon that announced the availability of “Amazon Managed Blockchain,” which includes Ethereum as one of their blockchain frameworks. Elon Musk also tweeted out the word “Ethereum,” followed by a playful jab and an engagement with Vitalik Buterin.

Cosmos — ATOMs Unlocked and Loaded

Besides the Cosmos Hub chugging away smoothly for the last couple of weeks, ATOM holders have been governing away in the background, passing proposals with high participation rates. A recent proposal defined a plan to enable ATOM transfers which was coupled with Cosmos SDK v0.34.0. The proposal was submitted on April 3rd, and after its 14 day voting period had a 78% turnout which leaned toward 90.88% yes (~91M ATOM). Major exchanges have since motioned to list ATOM, including Binance, Kraken, and Bittrex.

Binance — Binance Chain and Migrations

Binance has officially launched their own blockchain called “Binance Chain,” with its asset swap which happened on April 23rd. Along with the launch of their blockchain, many existing projects currently living in the Ethereum ecosystem such as Mithril announced their migration over. Supporters are currently waiting for the launch of trading on their long-anticipated non-custodial exchange, which will be built on their now-launched blockchain.

0x — Incentive Reworks

The 0x team recently put forth a new ZEIP in order to change the token economics for their native token. The changes revolve around encouraging market maker activities such as providing additional liquidity to relayers. In this proposal, market makers that stake tokens and provide liquidity will be able to receive a “liquidity reward” which is proportional to the number of tokens that they stake. Those with an insufficient amount of tokens can delegate to stake pools. These new changes are in an effort to create a greater amount of defensibility around the protocol, related to the way in which Hydro simply forked off a few months ago.

Monero — Happy 5th Anniversary

The Monero community has been quite busy in terms of upgrades and integrations, but more importantly, the cryptocurrency just recently celebrated its 5th anniversary. In honor of its birthday, plenty of events were held along with the release of a free version of “Mastering Monero.” The original Monero announcement came on April 25th, 2014, after a fork of the original release of BitMonero which was two weeks earlier.

Tezos — Foundation, Community, Baking Cycles

The Tezos Foundation has modified its internal charter to “improve their governance,” which requires at least five council members rather than three, and the establishment of a technical advisory committee. The foundation has also announced that they’re now in the process of transferring XTZ from internal storage to “fulfill its grant-making commitments.” On the community front, TQuorum, a day-long conference in Paris hosted by Tocqueville Group occurred and covered all-things Tezos. Lastly, Tezos has officially passed their 100th baking cycle.

Augur — Release of v2

Augur recently released the second version of the protocol, which includes a number of improvements spanning market durations, token standard upgrades, and a new DAI integration in order to allow for trading with the stablecoin. The most dramatic upgrade, by far, is their new “use it or lose it” mechanism where REP holders must participate in any fork events if a market dispute takes it to that level. If holders don’t, they lose their REP in the new forked iteration. Those that vote receive a 5% bonus on their holdings, thereby creating a form of burn and mint model.

Decred — Politeia Outcomes and Lightning

The latest from Decred’s Politeia’s governance system includes rejections for a proposal to be listed on EXMO Exchange, an ATM integration initiative, and a Ghana adoption program, and approvals on a Trust Wallet integration. Decred developers are also calling on the community to be the first to try to the testnet release of “dcrlnd,” or Decred’s Lightning Network wallet and node software. The repository is currently on GitHub, and comes after months of work and years of planning to develop the iteration. An on-chain vote signaling support for the initiative occurred all the way back in March of 2017.

FOAM — Developments and a Scavenger Hunt

FOAM had a strong April, with the announcement of the launch of their “BlockCities x FOAM Scavenger Hunt,” a doubling of tokens locked in the FOAM voting contract, and a publicizing of their Plasma MVP with tendermint consensus. The team has also been in the process of working on a new Curator Dashboard, a 3Box badge integration into their leaderboard, and in the later stages of finalizing their developer grant program. The ETH New York hackathon will also be taking place in May at the Foamspace team’s headquarters in the New Lab.