#BaseChain

[cryptotechnews24]

Introducing BakerySwap: A Game-Changing Multi-Chain DeFi and NFT Platform

Discover the revolutionary world of BakerySwap, a cutting-edge multi-chain platform that is set to transform the DeFi and NFT landscape. With its strategic incorporation with Base Chain, BakerySwap is poised to unleash a wave of innovative services, including an advanced AMM exchange, a Launchpad for budding projects, and a groundbreaking NFTSwap platform. Join us on this exciting journey as we explore the seamless trading experience, liquidity provision, and unparalleled opportunities that BakerySwap brings to the crypto community. Embrace the future of DeFi and NFTs with BakerySwap today!

BakerySwap Expands Horizons with Base Chain Incorporation

BakerySwap, a prominent player in the cryptocurrency space, is gearing up for a major milestone in its journey by incorporating with multiple chains. Their first strategic move involves backing the Base Chain, a secure and cost-effective Ethereum Layer 2 solution created by Coinbase, designed to onboard a large number of users on-chain.

The Base Chain Advantage for BakerySwap

Integrating with the Base Chain opens up new horizons for BakerySwap, enabling the expansion of its services and community outreach. The upcoming launch will feature a cutting-edge AMM exchange, a dynamic Launchpad, and a groundbreaking NFTSwap platform, all built on the Base Chain.

BakerySwap AMM Exchange: Empowering Seamless Trading

The BakerySwap AMM exchange on Base Chain promises users a seamless and reliable trading experience. With a strong focus on liquidity provision, users will have the opportunity to earn a share of trading fees, fostering the growth of DeFi within the platform. Base Chain Launchpad: Nurturing Innovation As part of the incorporation, BakerySwap's Launchpad on Base Chain will serve as an innovation hub for aspiring projects. Developers and innovators will find a secure and conducive platform to launch their projects, allowing users to invest in them at an early stage. Bakery NFTSwap: A Paradigm Shift in NFT Trading Bakery NFTSwap, an innovative platform, is poised to revolutionize NFT trading. Simplifying the process, NFTs will be mapped with tokens, and trading can take place seamlessly on the AMM exchange. Unwavering Enthusiasm for Innovation BakerySwap's commitment to innovation doesn't stop here. The team is dedicated to introducing additional cutting-edge services and functionalities to the Base Chain. This effort will significantly enhance the NFT and DeFi landscape, providing users with exciting new opportunities.

Conclusion

BakerySwap's decision to incorporate with the Base Chain is a testament to its vision and ambition. The upcoming AMM exchange, Launchpad, and NFTSwap platform are set to redefine DeFi and NFT trading, making it more accessible and user-friendly than ever before. With BakerySwap's commitment to continuous innovation, the future looks promising for both the platform and its community. For more articles visit: Cryptotechnews24 Source: cryptonewsz.com

Related Posts

Read the full article

[luckycorner1200]

LOOM: un token Proof-of-Stake utilizzato per proteggere la rete principale di Loom Network, chiamata Basechain.

bonus.bitget.com/BK6NT

[xingjewelry]

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[weekinethereum]

December 14, 2018 Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Layer 1

[Eth 2] Danny Ryan’s state of the spec

[Eth 2] Latest Eth 2 implementers call. Agenda to follow along.

[Eth 2] What’s New in Eth2

[Eth 2] Latest Prysmatic dev update

[Eth 2] Lighthouse dev update

[Eth 2] Coindesk profiles the teams building Eth2

[ewasm] Latest Ewasm call.

[1 -> 2] When stable, the beacon chain to finalize the POW chain

[Eth1] State Rent proposal update

[Eth1] How types of contracts would handle contract state-root-plus-witness architecture

NEAR: Unsolved problems in blockchain sharding

Boneh, Bünz, Fisch: Batching Techniques for Accumulators for stateless chains

Justin Drake Ethereum 3.0 tweet

Layer 2

Storj is planning to use Raiden for its payments. Raiden v0.19

Building MixEth as a state channel dapp with Counterfactual

Celer’s team to play their state channel Gomoku game for real Eth

gas payment abstraction in layer 2

prime numbers to transactions instead of coins?

should fraudulent exit bonds be partially burned?

Demo snark for Plasma Cash and Cashflow history compaction

SKALE releases architecture of their sidechain network

Stuff for developers

Ethereum on ARM. Constantinople-ready images

registry-builder: A modular approach to building TCRs from LevelK

7 uses cases with 3box.js

Gnosis Apollo to create your own prediction market interface or tournament

Schedule your token transfers on MyCrypto using Ethereum Alarm Clock

BudgetBox from Colony. Binary choices turned into budget percentages, and can be done onchain. Github

web3j v4.1 for Android

You can now integrate Gitcoin’s Kudos into your app. Gitcoin also hit 500k in issues.

A quick Austin Griffith tutorial on Commit/Reveal

Matt Tyndall’s counterfactual loan repayment for Dharma

Linkdrops: let people send crypto embedded in URLs without gas/wallets

Panoramix decompiler using symbolic execution instead of static analysis

Streamr’s cold chain monitoring tutorial

Dennis Peterson: Spam protection with probabilistic payments and cheap doublespending protection

How to debug with Tenderly and Truffle

A teaser for Harvey fuzzer from ConsenSys Diligence

Automated Eth code exploiter and similar how to scan and steal ETH

Hard fork enabled client releases

Geth v1.8.20 - hard fork enabled, Puppeth improvements, etc

Parity Ethereum 2.2.5-beta and Parity Ethereum 2.1.10-stable hardfork enabled

Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.20 Constantinople support and genesis file support 

Ecosystem

Opera releases native Eth wallet and dapp browser for Android. Download. Slick and well worth checking out.

How I learned Solidity basics for free as a noob dev

Uncle rate keeps falling. Time to start nudging up the gaslimit?

Monetary policy chart of historic and future Ether issuance

All the impressive ETHSingapore submissions and winners. Some of Josh Stark’s favorites.

A comparison of ETHSanFrancisco and EOS SF hackathons

Ethereum product management interviews. Also, video of Eth PMs call

Alethio’s EthStats block explorer

Ecosystem job listings

Web3Foundation, Validity Labs and Status working on Whisper alternative

Live on mainnet

OriginTrail: data exchange in supply chains protocol

Enterprise

Quorum v2.2.0

Cheddar suggests Facebook wants to do its own basechain and is recruiting

Why Enterprise Ethereum is way more than DLT

See OriginTrail above

Governance and Standards

ProgPOW testnet block explorer

A quick case study on Aragon’s AGP1 proposal

Evolution of a security token standard

ERC1643: Document Management Standard

ERC1644: Controller Token Operation Standard

ERC1666: Decentralized Autonomous Zero-identity Protocol

ERC1613: Gas stations network

Application layer

Cellarius first anthology released. Free to MetaMask users.

Golem’s Graphene-ng demo part2

XYO Network to launch satellite named EtherX on SpaceX’s Falcon9 in next few months

Data auditing and repair with Storj

The Fluidity stack to allow liquid secondary markets

Vitalik tweetstorm on non-financial apps

Onchain mutual insurance to return insurance to its origin: communities sharing risk

p2p loan offers on Bloqboard using Dharma

Ujo Portal out of beta and in version1.

KyberNetwork’s monthly update - new reserves, wBTC updated

Liquality offers crosschain swap of testnet Eth for Bitcoin. You can also get a good price buying Eth with Summa’s crosschain swap

GnosisSafe users can pay gas fees in OWL.

Maker proposal to reduce stability fee from 2.5% to 0.5%. Vote Dec 17

Augur’s controversial US House elections market has been reported as Republican. This is obviously nonsense because no one would have bet on that market and it makes no sense to encourage wordsmith trickery. This is a huge test of Augur and will be interesting to watch. Also, v1.8.4 out with new node endpoint. And a nice Augur 2018 review from Guesser

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks

All Devcon4 videos and photos

Arthur Falls uploads some Joe Lubin Devcon3 video footage

Video: a Wolfram language platform for Ethereum

Zero Knowledge ETHSingapore episode

Open Block Explorers community call

Blockchain Insider with Vitalik Buterin

Grid+ Alex Miller and Karl Kreder on Hashing It Out

Prysmatic’s Preston Van Loon and Raul Jordan on Into the Ether

Andrew Keys talks ConsenSys2.0 with Laura Shin

Tokens / Business / Regulation

Chris Burniske argues Ether and Bitcoin prices are undervalued based on fundamentals

4 eras of blockchain computing: degrees of composability from Jesse Walden

CFTC requests input. EthHub and Brooklyn Project are both crowd sourcing responses

Basecoin/Basis quits after raising ~130m and returns money to its VCs, blaming the SEC. I feel there may be more to come with this story.

MythX (formerly Mythril) decides against its announced token

Don’t think there was any doubt, but Coinbase is listing tokens. 30 assets up for consideration

Bonding curve intuition and parameterization

Harberger taxes in action on r/ethtrader banners

Simon de la Rouviere: Desire paths and recommendation markets

General

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Starter Pack

Support starving Venezuelans by buying NFT Christmas cards through Giveth. Easy onboarding for your non-crypto friends.

Results of Bounties Network paying local to participate in Manila Bay beach cleanup. Some interesting UX lessons.

Terra-Bridge: Transfer between Ethereum and Bitcoin protocol

CMEGroup puts up an Intro to Ether course

Zilliqa testnet v3 is live and in feature freeze ahead of January mainnet release. It also got an AWS case study

Boerse Stuttgart and SolarisBank say in next 6 months they’ll launch crypto trading platform in Europe

The state of Surveillance Capitalism is dire: your apps are tracking your location and selling it. It’s very easy to figure out who you are from your location. Bring on web3!

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

Dec 17 - vote to reduce Maker stability fee

Jan 10 - Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends

Jan ~15 - Constantinople hard fork at block 7080000

Jan 29-30 - AraCon (Berlin)

Feb 7-8 - Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)

Feb 15-17 - ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal) next hacker application round closes December 31st

Feb 23-25 - EthAustin hackathon (EthUniversal)

Mar 4 - Ethereum Magicians (Paris)

Mar 5-7 - EthCC (Paris)

Mar 27 - Infura end of legacy key support (Jan 23 begins Project ID prioritization)

Apr 19-21 - ETHCapetown

If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys

This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.

I own Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been 100% me.  If you're unhappy with editorial decisions or anything that I have written in this issue, feel free to tweet at me. 

Housekeeping and random Twitter banhammers

One of my best friends launched Stoop, an Android/iOS newsletter reader. It uses a dedicated email and clean design experience to keep your information diet healthy. If you subscribe to newsletters, you will like it.

Link: http://www.weekinethereum.com/post/181120057303/december-14-2018-week-in-ethereum-news

I’m sure that I missed things for this newsletter due to Twitter’s banhammer last week. Sorry! Plenty of folks in Ethereum got random Twitter banhammers this week.  :(

If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum?”

Did you get forwarded this newsletter?  Sign up to receive the weekly email

[yudiz123blog]

Deploy Your First Smart Contract on Loom Network Using Remix

Introduction to Loom Network:

Loom Network is a platform to help the Ethereum scale. Loom Network provides a Layer 2 solution that uses Ethereum as it’s the base layer. Using Ethereum as a base layer means base chain assets like ERC20 & ERC721 tokens can have security guarantees of the Ethereum.

The loom is the perfect solution for building scalable applications with almost no transaction cost and very less amount of time for transaction confirmation.

If you don’t know more about the Loom Network and are curious to know, then you can check this handy guide where you can get more ideas about the Loom Network.

Without wasting time, let’s go through the process of deploying smart contracts on the Loom Basechain.

How to Deploy Smart Contract on Loom Chain:

It’s easy to deploy smart contracts on the loom.

Steps to deploy Smart Contract on Loom:

Integrate Remix with Loom

Writing your Smart Contract

Deploy Smart Contract on Loom from Remix IDE.

It’s that simple! Isn’t it?

Step 1: Integrate Remix IDE with Loom

To integrate Remix with loom it requires services that proxies JSON RPC call to Loom. For that, Loom had built a small JSON RPC Proxy. So, here we will install and configure it with the Remix IDE to deploy our smart contract on Loom.

Prerequisites to install JSON RPC Proxy:

 Node.js 10 or higher(recommended v10.15.3)

Yarn

Git client

 1. Clone the JSON RPC Proxy repository:

Open a terminal, cd into your project directory and execute below command:

git clone https://github.com/loomnetwork/loom-provider-json-rpc-proxy

2. Install Dependencies and Build the Proxy:

For that run below command,

cd loom-provider-json-rpc-proxy/ && yarn install && yarn build

3. Configure the Proxy:

You need to configure a proxy to connect to Loom Testnet or Loom Basechain. For that, you need to set the following environment variables,PORT: port on which proxy listens for incoming requests. The default port is 8080. CHAIN_ID: Network Id you want to connect to. default for Mainnet & extdev-plasma-us1 for Testnet. By default, it will connect to Loom Mainnet. CHAIN_ENDPOINT: the address of the endpoint. The default value is wss://plasma.dappchains.com.Run below command to run proxy against Loom Testnet.

PORT=8545 CHAIN_ENDPOINT="wss://extdev-plasma-us1.dappchains.com" CHAIN_ID="extdev-plasma-us1" node .

Run below command to run proxy against Loom Basechain. Make sure deploying smart contracts on Loom Mainnet isn’t free. To deploy a smart contract on Loom Mainnet you need to whitelist your address, which will cost you around 1400 Loom per year ATM.

node .

Step 2: Writing your Smart Contract

Here is our Smart Contract example. It is a very simple smart contract that stores string messages and retrieve it from smart contracts. This is just for demo purposes. You can also use your smart contract code.

pragma solidity ^0.4.25;

contract HelloWorld {

  // Define variable message of type string

  string message;

  // Write function to change the value of variable message

  function postMessage(string value) public {

      message = value;

  }

  // Read function to fetch variable message

  function getMessage() public view returns (string){

      return message;

  }

}

Step 3: Deploy Smart Contract on Loom

First of all, we need to configure Remix to use Loom JSON RPC Proxy. For that open Remix Editor. Click on the Run menu and then select the Environment as Web3 Provider.

Now you are good to deploy our solidity Smart Contract to Loom Network. Paste below smart contract code into Remix. Select the appropriate compiler version and compile a smart contract by clicking the Compile button.

After compiling a smart contract you can deploy your smart contract by just clicking the Deploy button.

Conclusion:

Cheers. You just deployed your first smart contract code on the Loom network. I hope from now onwards you can deploy smart contracts on the Loom Network. If you have any confusion feel free to comment below.

Stay tuned with Yudiz Solutions!

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition of May 17 Week in Ethereum News

As noted last week, I’ve started to think of this as the “Eth holder, but doesn’t work in the industry” edition, so we kick it off with the high-level things I’d read beyond just what you can read.  So, for example, Gnosis/OpenEthereum is picking up the Parity client, but you can see that without me highlighting it.

So here’s my highlight of high-level things for Eth holders.

Some interesting findings in ConsenSys’s eth2 staking survey

Visa patent shows they are building on Ethereum

Building on ethtrader’s DONUT, Reddit unveils community points for r/fortniteBR and r/cryptocurrency subreddits. At the moment, 9000 wallets created for fortnite and just 2100 for r/cryptocurrency. Currently on Rinkeby testnet with plans to move to mainnet.

JPMorganChase decides to bank Coinbase and Gemini

ErisX launches ETH futures, physically delivered, monthly and quarterly contracts

dydx’s BTC/USDC perpetual with 10x leverage is open to the public

This BTC/USDC perpetual matters because the crypto market has been overtaken by YOLO gambling on centralized exchanges that probably trade against you as they know liquidation points and no one else does.   Not a surprise, dydx’s founder says this is already the #1 most traded DeFi.   Centralized exchanges get hacked all the time - not your keys not your crypto.  DeFi is an improvement.

We finally have Eth futures!  And they’re physically delivered, which is good.  Though physical delivery requirements can lead to strange consequences (eg,negative price of oil last month!), it keeps traders honest and moors the price to the actual asset.

JPMorganChase finally banking some crypto clients is an important step for the space.

Reddit is testing letting subreddits govern themselves and pay for things using an Eth token.  Very cool

Visa patented their method of digitizing dollars on Eth at the same time that their chairman said at a conference that “digital currencies could be additive to the payments ecosystem” and that they “supported” them.

In September 2018, the same Visa chairman said that “[blockchain] isn’t really at its core, for us, a good technology.”

It’s interesting that even as the crypto market continued to wane, Visa realized they needed to try to get ahead of the curve.   Crypto isn’t dead.

Eth1

Geth v1.9.14 – unindex and save disk space

OpenEthereum v3. Formerly the Parity client. Support for eth/64, breaking database changes to save disk space. Deprecating light client, auto updater, and private transactions

cross-client consensus tests v7

Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes from the call, largely around EIPs for next hard fork, eg: 2315 (evm subroutines), 2537 (precompile for curve in eth2), 2046 (reduce gas for static calls to precompiles) and 2565 (repricing the 198 precompile)

EVM+384 bit arithmetic as an alternative to EIP2537’s precompile

Discussion of a second method for resource accounting alongside gas: oil from Suhabe Bugrara, separately formulated as karma from Martin Swende. Or a counterproposal from Vitalik: per account gas limits

The case for Eth-collateralized tokenized gas at the protocol level

So the first real release of the fka Parity client.  Very cool, client diversity is important and to my knowledge there are no large scale miners running anything but the Go and Rust clients, so this is important.

What’s up with the “second method of resource accounting alongside gas?”  The idea is that stateless Eth will need a substantially different gas schedule for block witnesses, yet we don’t want to break existing contracts.  We want backward compatibility without overly complicating the dev experience.  Not an easy problem, hence the debate about the best way to do it.

Meanwhile there’s a bit of a debate about some of what goes into the next hard fork.  Relatively normal stuff, some folks think we should stop doing all these precompiles (eg, bit arithmetic proposal), others think we should only do the general precompile EIP

Eth2

Latest what’s new in eth2, featuring Ben’s thoughts on timelines

Latest eth2 implementer call. Notes from Ben and Mamy, targeting June for the multi-client testnet

Schlesi testnet: Teku is fully participating and Nimbus is almost fully syncing, though there was a chain split this weekend

Proof of custody through occasional checks and slashing

Stethoscope: networking test suite

Idea from Justin Drake on putting price feed oracles in eth2 via validators, and a counter-proposal from Vitalik Buterin

The Schlesi testnet went down, but overall it has been quite stable.  Nothing terribly unexpected for a testnet, and Lodestar will soon be the 5th client to join up.  Slow and steady progress.

Price feed oracles got quite a bit of pushback, I think some of this is because stablecoins are having their second renaissance - something I’ll touch on later.

Proof of custody (ie, that you as a validator hold the data you say you do) through a Truebit-like game: to prevent lazy attestations, the protocol will guarantee false things, and if validators don’t point it out, then they get slashed.  

Layer2

What are the true finality guarantees of state channels? Depends on liveness of layer 1 chain

We often say that state channels offer “instant finality” but this is a bit of a shorthand to say that it offers “instant finality” assuming that the underlying basechain has “liveness” (which is just blockchain-speak for “is producing blocks”)

This newsletter is made possible by Trail of Bits!

Trail of Bits recently reported and fixed 12 security issues in projects across Ethereum, some of them critical. Read more about what they were and how they found them in Bug Hunting with Crytic.

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.6.8, some important bugfixes

Using immutables in Solidity v0.6.xx

Austin Griffith tutorial: build smart contract wallet with social recovery using React

If you haven’t watched Austin’s wtf is eth.build video, you should. It’s under 3 minutes, funny, and informative.

Running the Incubed light client with Python

OpenZeppelin Contracts v3, but modified to be safe for upgrades

Mainnet testing with your own node using Brownie

headlong: ABI v2 and RLP for the JVM

EthPM v3 – spec for v3 of Eth package manager is in last call

12 bugs found by Trail of Bits’ Crytic tool using 90+ detectors

Verifiable randomness on-chain using the Chainlink VRF

Austin’s eth.build explainer vid is great.  Truly recommended - as a community we should be trying to get this in front of many devs as possible.   

How long until someone wins a hackathon with eth.build + oneclickdapp or dapphero?   Seems possible.

Chainlink VRF seems quite cool; PoolTogether is already integrating it.

Ecosystem

Tornado.cash finished the largest trusted setup ceremony to date, operator soon to be set to null

Some interesting findings in ConsenSys’s eth2 staking survey

A guide to building with MACI – an anti-collusion demo using SNARKs

And Tornado did burn the admin keys between then and now.

Enterprise

Visa patent shows they are building on Ethereum

Where to use the Baseline protocol: sharing business process automation with counterparties

Brave releases Mjolnir tool for easy deploying and benchmarking permissioned Eth chains

Brave is going to move their token to a separate chain, presumably with a bridge.  Doesn’t seem like terrible news to me, if you have a small amount of BAT, you don’t need a strong censorship-resistance guarantee.

Application layer

Building on ethtrader’s DONUT, Reddit unveils community points for r/fortniteBR and r/cryptocurrency subreddits. At the moment, 9000 wallets created for fortnite and just 2100 for r/cryptocurrency. Currently on Rinkeby testnet with plans to move to mainnet.

Dfinity’s first Swiss employee Robert Lauko now working on Liquity stablecoin, low collateralization with algorithmic liquidation via stability pool

“Augur v2 core contracts are finalized and in a code-freeze state, and the trading UI is undergoing performance testing”

Aave changes its interest rate model. Inflection point in the curve now 8% and 90% usage.

Kyber hit 1 billion USD worth of trades

Brave at 14m MAU/5m DAU

Sai successfully shut down on May 12 and now is redeemable for ETH

Hasu: the future of cryptomoney is central banking. An analysis of Maker’s options and decisions

Utah County (Provo) in Utah offering marriage licenses certified with the hash on Eth mainnet

dydx’s BTC/USDC perpetual with 10x leverage is open to the public, and compares centralized and decentralized perpetual markets

Lots of cool stuff, some of which touched on above.   Utah County is not the first local government to do something like this, but as far as I could tell, it was new.   That must have been a hard sale with the crypto hope at a relative nadir.   Amusingly their site was not https (not that I should judge, I’ve been lazy about that myself, usually do to my cheapness in finding hosts...ahem Tumblr)

Brave growth keeps going.  It really is a superior product, it always surprises me that there are some in crypto who doesn’t use it.

One interesting trend is that we’re having a bit of a renaissance in projects trying to compete with Maker.  Of course Synthetix has had quite a bit of success, though previous rounds contained some laughable attempts (Basecoin).   Stablecoins have a large design space with lots of risks to tradeoff.  I think the new wave of stablecoin designs has some interesting ideas.  I think there’s plenty of space for more people to be successful, though I think plenty of folks are underrrating how hard it will be to compete with Maker.

Overall this felt like a good week for the app layer section, and my usual arbitrary “how much is DeFi? metric comes in at 6/10

Tokens/Business/Regulation

ErisX launches ETH futures, physically delivered, monthly and quarterly contracts

Now ~2300 WBTC on Eth versus 900 BTC on Lightning

RAC’s $TAPE launched on Zora and went from $20 to $1000. $TAPE is a token redeemable for a special edition cassette of RAC’s latest album. Interesting new model for artists to capture value

I guess “days, not weeks” dies as an Ethereum meme?   Or maybe it’s like wooks and TwoWeeks, and it will live forever.

(if you don’t catch the reference, there before Eth shipped in july 2015, there was 18 months of Bitcoiners claiming that it was vaporware that was impossible and would never ship, and the eternal answer was always that the ship date was “two weeks” away....which became “two wooks” because the internet is wonderfully weird).

Meanwhile BTC keeps migrating to ETH, as the Bitcoin chain is too limited and fundamentally unsustainable so if you want to do anything with your orange memecoin, then you have to use Ethereum.

Loved seeing RAC’s $TAPE do well.  While critics say this is gimmicky and perhaps not replicable, I actually tend to think the opposite.  Many artists have huge fans who would pay insane amounts - artists have never done a great job at giving their fans new experiences and capturing value.  

General

JPMorganChase decides to bank Coinbase and Gemini

Wired’s story on MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins, from stopping WannaCry to FBI arrest

the main idea in HALO snark construction

Open cryptography problems: improving stealth addresses and ideal vector commitment

I love how the general section is such a mismash of the deepest crypto things and then human interest stories like about Marcus Hutchins.  The Wired writer bought his story - I tend to think it’s probably slightly more complicated

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the calendar.  I’m not excited about virtual conferences and VR.  But maybe some of you are?

That’s all for this week in the annotated edition.  If you made it this far, would you tweet about it or RT this?   https://www.evanvanness.com/post/618575234233204736/annotated-edition-of-may-17-week-in-ethereum-news

Housekeeping

Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter, usually forthcoming in a day or so, as well as a real-time source of Eth news.

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Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-17-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 18 – Book of Swarm launch

May 22-31 – Ethereum Madrid public health virtual hackathon

May 26 – last day to apply for Ethereum India fellowship

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 17 – EthBarcelona R&D workshop

[luckycorner1200]

LOOM: A Proof-of-Stake token that is used to secure Loom Network's mainnet, called Basechain.

bonus.bitget.com/BK6NT

[27aume]

RT @loomnetwork: Boom 💥 The first exchange to be built on Loom Basechain 🙌 https://t.co/WNpGYaptMn by 27aume on November 02, 2019 at 02:24PM

[truthblockchain]

Blockchain Interoperability Solutions

The majority of interoperability solutions up till recently were mainly focused on chain interoperability across public blockchains, thereby using crypto-directed tools like sidechains (or relay chain), notary schemes and timed hash-locks. The focus however has increasingly shifted towards solutions for interoperability between private networks and/or between private networks and public blockchains.

One way to solve interoperability is to use a separate blockchain as a bridge to facilitate cross-communication. Essentially, this is a third blockchain that sits in the middle of the two blockchains and maintains a cryptographically secured timestamped ledger of the transactional and messaging activity between the two. Interoperability tools that are used range from hub and spoke, decentralised finance (DeFi) and general purpose bridges.

Another way to facilitate interoperability between systems is with off-chain or middleware systems. This so-called non-blockchain interoperability approach uses tools including atomic swaps, oracles and state channels.

Blockchain Interoperability projects

A growing number of interoperability projects have entered the scene to try to bridge the gap between the various blockchains. Their aim is to facilitate interaction between networks and ensure the concept of decentralisation is fully realised. Depended on the interoperability solutions these can be used for activities like decentralised asset exchange and decentralised message exchange. Interesting projects are Chainlink, Cosmos, Hybrix, Polkadot and Wanchain. Other examples include Aion, Ark, ICON, Transledger, and Overledger.

Chainlink

Chainlink is a decentralised oracle network, an interoperability solution to facilitate secure and trustless communication between all disparate blockchain systems. The resources mostly revolve around off-chain data to trigger smart contracts and settlement outputs like established payment systems and cloud backend. This standalone function is important for many blockchains that don’t have to interact with other blockchain protocols but do need access to externals inputs and outputs.

Chainlink nodes are able to format messaging and data from public APIs into a readable format for smart contracts. These nodes can connect to any API, whether it is a blockchain, enterprise system, Web API, or IoT device.

Chainlink is sometimes working in combination with other interoperability protocols. Chainlink has already announced partnerships with Polkadot and Ethereum to provide off-chain data to their networks. Wanchain is integrating with Chainlink to provide off-chain data to their on-chain smart contracts.

Cosmos

One of the most prominent interoperability solutions is Cosmos, very much focused on its Cosmos SDK platform. Cosmos aims to act as an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate with each other. Cosmos is a smart contract platform that has prioritized interoperability as a critical component of their blockchain design. Their architecture is based on the so-called ‘hub-and-spoke’ system whereby a series of ‘spoke’ chains connect to a ‘central’ hub by means of inter-blockchain communication.

Cosmos is heavily reliant on validators to provide interoperability. It makes use of the so—called Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm and uses both member chains and Peg-Zones for existing chains to improve the overall ecosystem. Their end goal is to create an ‘internet of blockchains’ – a network of blockchains that can communicate with one another in a decentralised way.

The implementation of the IBC (Inter Blockchain Communication) protocol is scheduled for this year 2020. Cosmos will use the IBC protocol to allow communication between a central hub and the chains linked to the network, also called Zones. It will first only concern the interoperability of chains built on top of Cosmos SDK platform.

Hybrix

Hybrix is an open-source cross-chain solution aimed to make it easier to make cross-chain transactions, and also increase the level of ease for developers who want to offer multi-chain platforms. For that purpose Hybrix is developing an “HY” token. Each token represents an identical block of a chain and can be used to reconcile data across the entire crypto complex. Tokens form as bridges that allow transactions to be conducted on either a single chain or multi-ledger systems. Since Hybrix utilizes existing languages to build its protocol and interface, there’s no need to acquire new coding languages to use its system. Hybrix has amplified its capacity to adapt 27 major blockchains and more than 400 tokens.

Polkadot

Another project is Polkadot, which facilitates transactions and data exchange, aiming to promote interoperability between blockchains. It uses the DPoS algorithm and employs required validators which can lead to a certain degree of centralization .

The concept at Polkadot is quite similar to that of Cosmos. It allows communication between the relay chain and the parachains of Polkadot’s network. By using Parachains and Bridgechains, this approach enables to transfer both value and data. Additionally, scalability will be taken to a whole new level by running multiple parallel chains. This is a bit different from other projects which are looking to bridge the gap between blockchains as well.

The launch of their mainnet is planned for this year (2020). As for interoperability, there are no precise timelines regarding their protocols for chains implementation.

Wanchain

The Wanchain network allows interoperability between very heterogeneous blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum and EOS. Wanchain aims to link and facilitate communication between the different blockchains as much as possible.

Wanchain is already functional and allows communication and exchange of value and data between public and private blockchains through storeman nodes and the T-Bridge framework. The storeman node system combines two cryptographic concepts that ensure security and confidentiality of network transactions: secure multi-party computation and “Shamir’s secret sharing”.

The Wanchain project recently announced the integration of EOS blockchain and the implementation of the T-bridge framework. Wanchain’ s next challenge is to fully decentralise its network. This is planned to be finalised in 2022.

Other interoperability offerings

And there are many more interoperability projects including Aion, which is working towards integrating artificial intelligence in its consensus model. Or Ark which uses Smartbridge to link existing chains, and will also allow for the transfer of both data and value. And the Loom Network, which uses its DPoS blockchain Basechain to connect and transfer value among several blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance. A rather unknown but interesting player is Block Collider. Its proof-of-distance (PoD) consensus algorithm ensures that ledgers can operate with one another. It is also the only project that, in its current form, requires any validators.

https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/18972/blockchain-and-interoperability-key-to-mass-adoption

[damonbation]

Liquid Bitcoin with Adam Back & Samson Mow - WBD224

Location: Zoom

Date: Friday 15th May

Project: Blockstream

Role: CEO & Chief Strategy Officer

Bitcoin: decentralised, permissionless, censorship-resistant and unconfiscatable. Unique properties which make it a unique form of money

For Bitcoin to keep growing, these features mustn't be compromised. However, scaling solutions for Bitcoin, may trade off some of these features for other benefits.

With the vast majority of the community in agreement that block sizes must remain small to maximise decentralisation, Bitcoin is best scaled using layered solutions. The Liquid Network, like the Lightning Network, is a layer two solution that, by sacrificing some aspects of decentralisation and censorship resistance, can improve speed and scalability.

Liquid is a project spearheaded by Blockstream and is aimed at traders, exchanges and market makers to offer faster and more confidential transactions than the Bitcoin basechain. It also adds the ability to build tokens on the network.

In this interview, I talk to Adam Back and Samson Mow Blockstream's CEO & Chief Strategy Officer. We discuss The Liquid Network, the tradeoffs between Liquid and the basechain, how it differs from Lightning network and tokenised securities.

from Money 101 https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/liquid-bitcoin-adam-back-samson-mow via http://www.rssmix.com/

[danielmarkharrison]

Liquid Bitcoin with Adam Back & Samson Mow - WBD224

Location: Zoom

Date: Friday 15th May

Project: Blockstream

Role: CEO & Chief Strategy Officer

Bitcoin: decentralised, permissionless, censorship-resistant and unconfiscatable. Unique properties which make it a unique form of money

For Bitcoin to keep growing, these features mustn't be compromised. However, scaling solutions for Bitcoin, may trade off some of these features for other benefits.

With the vast majority of the community in agreement that block sizes must remain small to maximise decentralisation, Bitcoin is best scaled using layered solutions. The Liquid Network, like the Lightning Network, is a layer two solution that, by sacrificing some aspects of decentralisation and censorship resistance, can improve speed and scalability.

Liquid is a project spearheaded by Blockstream and is aimed at traders, exchanges and market makers to offer faster and more confidential transactions than the Bitcoin basechain. It also adds the ability to build tokens on the network.

In this interview, I talk to Adam Back and Samson Mow Blockstream's CEO & Chief Strategy Officer. We discuss The Liquid Network, the tradeoffs between Liquid and the basechain, how it differs from Lightning network and tokenised securities.

from The Let's Talk Bitcoin Network https://ift.tt/2A3yfm8 via IFTTT

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition of May 3 Week in Ethereum News

As it is wont to do, the newsletter buried the lede: ProgPoW is indefinitely shelved.

I think it’s been relatively clear since last time that ProgPoW wasn’t going to happen.  The leads of the two largest clients are against it personally, plus it’s quite clear that there isn’t anything close to community consensus. If anything, at the moment the majority of the community opposes it.  Greg Colvin bringing it up again last week unfortunately made it harder to do in the case where we do actually need it, ie an ASIC manufacturer has a 10x breakthrough but is only selling the machines privately to control 50%+ of the network.

I’d say it’s unclear whether ACD continues to be a thing.  To me it feels like an experiment which was worth trying but has become calcified, which needs a complete refresh in terms of both process and non-technical people involved.  But inertia is also a very strong force.  To overcome that, Ethereum should have a strong culture of continuously sunsetting things if they are not working.

One amusing thing to me has been the idea that ProgPoW is an AMD/Nvidia conspiracy.  Given that ETH price declining in 2018 absolutely destroyed their earnings and share price, those two should have been conspiring! Yet if they were, then they did an exceptionally bad job at it.  Instead everyone I know got the impression that the GPU manufacturers were indifferent.  There are some competing interests for them of course - the anger of their traditional gaming market, plus AI/neural net researchers - but it still surprises me how they did not get involved at all.

Despite the noise, Ethereum governance works!  I remember polling everyone I talked to at EthDenver2019 about whether they supported ProgPoW and (at the time I was pro-ProgPoW; I’d say my position is much more complicated now) being disappointed at how everyone I talked to was against it. 

I’m very glad we don’t have on-chain governance where a few exchanges/whales could collude to push things through.  Because of that, I’d say on-chain governance will drastically limit the market cap of any basechain’s native token.

Eth1

Latest core devs call. Tim Beiko’s notes. Updates on EIPs for eth2 curve, EVM subroutines. ProgPoW shelved due to clear lack of consensus. Discussion of migrating to binary trie

Analysis of EIP-2315 simple EVM subroutines

DHT+SkipGraph for chain and state data retrieval

Notes from the fee market change call

Vitalik’s EIP1559 fee market change FAQ

There’s a risk of being repetitive, but much of the eth1 work does not lend itself to high-level summaries.  Folks are discussing the technical details of EVM improvements (eg, subroutines), as well as getting clients to be stateless (eg the DHT and Skipgraph link).   And we’re also talking through EIP1559 in light of Dan Finlay’s escalator algo alternative proposal.  

One development not mentioned is that Martin Swende has come around to Alexey’s gas/oil proposal instead of his previous approach of penalties for trie misses.

Eth2

Latest what’s new in Eth2

Schlesi multi-client testnet launched with Lighthouse and (slightly updated) Prysmatic clients. Then Nimbus joined Schlesi a few days later.

Bitfly has a Schlesi explorer

Nimbus client update – up to date, joining Schlesi testnet, RFP for security audits, and benchmarking Nimbus on a 2018 midrange phone

Update from ConsenSys’s TXRX team: prkl network monitoring tool, verifiable precompiles, cross-shard tx simulator, fork choice testing, discv5 sim, and work on turning off proof of work.

A step-by-step guide on joining Prysmatic’s Topaz testnet for Windows10 and MacOS

ConsenSys’s high-level eth2 FAQ

I don’t really do corrections in the newsletter, because once you send an email, you can’t easily clarify your language without sending another email.

But, if you click the “Nimbus joined Schlesi,” then it appears to me that Nimbus is receiving the blocks and following the chain, but not proposing/attesting/etc. I probably should have been more clear when I said “joined.”

Layer2

Channels funding channels: how state channels reduce latency and onchain transactions

This series feels to me like a “yes, state channels are almost here now, let’s get ready to reconsider how to use them.”   Productionizing any new technology isn’t easy, and finding the uses that best fit the tradeoffs is not trivial.  Seems like this is that series.

This newsletter is made possible by Chainlink

Decentralized oracles are a key capability enabling smart contracts to reach their full potential. Come work with the leading team providing oracles for Ethereum. Join us to help build the next generation of smart contracts in roles including Software Engineering, Developer Evangelism, DevOps, Product Management, and more.

I’m very excited that Week in Ethereum News will continue for the next year due to Chainlink, Celer, Trail of Bits, and 0x.

Stuff for developers

buidler v1.3 – test time-based cases in Buidler EVM, works with TheGraph

Waffle’s plan for making testing better with v3

Testing with Python and Brownie

Typechain v2 – Typescript bindings. truffle v5 support, natspec

Solidity docgen v0.5 – documentation generation for Solidity project

Running async/await scripts in Remix IDE

Austin Griffith’s scaffold-eth, a toolkit to prototype and win hackathons

A linked hashmap in Solidity

How to add proxy Ethereum addresses to BigQuery

Authereum’s batched transactions API for interest rate arbs

discv5 feasibility study for Status

Tutorial to testing on mainnet fork with Ganache, Jest and Uniswap

Etheroll security issue: hacker monitoring for onchain forks and then uses that info to frontrun transactions. Novel (to me!) hack

Dragonfly releases an oracles tracker

Synthetix CTO Justin Moses on 10 things they did to improve their Ethereum development experience. tldr: Buidler, Slither, TheGraph, and Tenderly.

It feels like a very undercommented trend how most devs now tell me that their stack is Buidler + Waffle + ethers, and increasingly Typescript as well.  Of course, dev tool stacks are perpetually in flux, but this seems to be the stack du jour.  

This isn’t new either.  After writing the paragraph above, I remembered that Connext’s Rahul had written something about a similar stack 3 months ago.  I go back and check Rahul’s recommendation: Buidler + Waffle + Ethers + typescript.   If this was a chatbox, I would put a rofl emoji, but in prose this seems less appropriate.  

Ecosystem

Contribute to the TornadoCash trusted setup ceremony. It takes about 5 secs of clicking and requires you to leave the browser tab open a few minutes.

Multisigs controlling multisigs: Avsa’s vision for a usable web3

Renew your ENS names or you will lose them. Names start to expire May 4th

Forgive me the clickbait - you actually have 90 days grace period if your domain expired, but I don’t want anyone to miss this if their domain has expired.

If you haven’t contributed to Tornado’s trusted setup ceremony, I recommend that you do.  Assuming that the software works correctly, you can ensure that Tornado becomes trustless for you by participating!   It literally takes just a few seconds to start, and then you leave your browser tab open for about 3 minutes.  You can even contribute multiple times.

Enterprise

Hyperledger Besu v1.4.4, added priv_getLogs, added Splunk integration

Governance, DAOs, and standards

Governance processes for Maker and Compound add WBTC to Maker and USDT to Compound. TBTC also proposed for Maker

Maker’s MIPs ratification vote is live

MetaClan: DAOs for in-game coordination

ERC2611: Geotimeline Contact Tracing Data Standard

Last call: ERC1363 Payable Token

Last call: EIP1193 Eth provider Javascript API

ERC 2612: permit, 712-signed approvals

EIP2357: Total difficulty in block header

Lots of blowback to Maker adding WBTC.  I very much understand the criticism, but to me it looks like Maker is taking reasonable measures, given the current situation where DAI is trading a little rich on the peg.  It’s true that permissioned assets have some risk, but this is literally why MKR is supposed to have value: because those MKR holders make good decisions.

Now perhaps you don’t like that model, and that also makes sense, designing for stablecoins is a large solution space.  But this has always been the Maker vision.  And I say this as someone who does not hold any MKR, and never has (though you’re welcome to give me some!).

Application layer

DeFiZap and DeFiSnap merged to be ZapperFi: now track and trade your DeFi together

Gnosis Safe apps: interact with apps straight from the Gnosis Safe interface

dforce/lendfme plan post-hack: user airdrop, dSAFU insurance fund, large bug bounty

OpenBazaar now supports Eth

A rough proposal for a GasToken forward

Everest: a project registry from TheGraph and MetaCartel

I know I have said this before, but the ebb and flow between sections is fascinating to me.  The stuff for devs section was full this week, but the app layer was a little light.  Maybe I just missed stuff.

Arbitrary “how much of this section is DeFi” count: 3/6

Tokens/Business/Regulation

UMA did an Initial Uniswap Offering, and there was a 5-10x spike

It appears Telegram will have to return $1.2 billion to investors

Ideo’s Simple Agreement for Future Governance for DeFi

Auditing the 10k top Eth addresses: ETH is better distributed than BTC and a bunch of other interesting claims

I again note that US federal regulators continue to bailout Silicon Valley investors from the worst deals that Silicon Valley did in late 2017/early 2018.  

I’d say it’s inevitable that we’re going to see some folks copy UMA.  Watch for it.

Adam Cochran’s onchain activity of top 10k addresses is very interesting.  Definitely some undersupported claims in there, but certainly worth a read.  This is the second time he wrote a 100+ tweetstorm and then compiled it to a blog post.  Personally I prefer viewing it as a blog post.

General

EtherScan Connect: an alpha for mapping addresses with a leaderboard

a16z raises $515m crypto fund

Vitalik’s review of Gitcoin grants round 5

SuperMarlin: no trusted setup with DARK polynomial commitment

“alpha for mapping addresses with a leaderboard“ is another thing I could have said more eloquently.   It’s an interesting attempt by Etherscan to give something to their community, though of course it comes with risks.

There’s something amusing about a16z announcing a new fund, mentioning Bitcoin, and then mostly talking about the stuff that’s being built on Ethereum, without actually mentioning Ethereum.   People like to talk about being contrarian investors.  Wanna know how buying ETH is somehow still a contrarian play in crypto right now?  It’s right there.

zk continues to just explode.  It almost seems like plug and play, where people are pulling out the parts of different schemes that they like and putting in others, depending on the tradeoffs you want around trusted setups, verifier time, prover cost, etc.

Housekeeping

First issue post-ConsenSys. As a reminder, this newsletter is and has always been 100% owned by me.

Did you get forwarded this newsletter?  Sign up to receive it weekly

Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-3-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 6-20 – Gitcoin’s virtual hackthon

May 8-9 – Ethereal Summit (NYC)

May 22-31 – Ethereum Madrid public health virtual hackathon

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 17 – EthBarcelona R&D workshop

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition for Week in Ethereum News Feb 9

There’s too much going on in Ethereum for Substack!

This edition was so massive that I found out that Substack (my email provider) has a character limit, because it started giving me warnings when I wasn’t even done.  So to make space, I cut out some of the default language in the bottom sections that few people read.  Probably should switch some of that language up anyway.

Link for standard version of Week in Ethereum News without my commentary.

Eth1

Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes

EIP1962 generalized elliptic curve and pairing engine implementation in Go

Nethermind v1.6.1 – better tip of the chain tracking and reorg handling, JSON RPC bugfixes

Parity v2.7.2 and the next steps for Parity client maintenance under GPL3 (though reportedly most participants preferred a more permissive license)

Slockit’s Incubed ultralight client server setup wizard

On the core devs call, they’re going over what makes sense to include in the next fork.  The second EIP1962 implementation is the link in here, important because it’s the alternative to the MatterLabs implementation for the generalized precompile.

Nethermind continues to improve with constant releases.   Parity kicked off their “OpenEthereum” transition of the client to the community.  Apparently the DAO idea is on the backburner - if reports on Twitter are to be believed, they would have held the majority of the tokens.  That’s crazy, presumably the idea was that they’d be giving them out over time to the contributors.  It would have been nice to have a better writeup somewhere

Headsup: at some point there is going to be (another) fight over ProgPoW.  It’s an odd beast where both sides are convinced that they have already won - meaning that anger and disgruntled ragequits are almost guaranteed.  

If you’re the sort of person who ragequits because you didn’t get your way, then there’s a reason why forks of Ethereum exist.

Eth2

Danny Ryan’s quick eth2 update – it’s optimization time

What’s New in Eth2

Latest eth2 call. Notes from Mamy and Ben.

Jim McDonald: defining eth2 network metrics

A look at Rocketpool’s GUI

Nimbus’ first mobile testnet on Android. Plus part 2 of building Nimbus on Android.

Eth2 research team ask me anything on Reddit

Rocketpool is currently the 3rd most clicked of this week’s issue.  I’ve been of the opinion that CLI is fine for staking - most people who are willing to stake their ETH at the start can handle a CLI, I think.  Rocketpool is conservatively estimating to go live in Q4 - I imagine that the staking rewards will be substantially higher in q3 pre-rocketpool, and then will go down again around q1 2021 when exchanges/custody services start staking for their customers.

Nimbus mobile testnet is neat.  The idea has always been that you can run a validator on a mobile phone.  It’s happening!

Layer2

Batch Deposits for [op/zk] rollup / mixers / MACI

Matic explains advantages and limitations of Plasma and rollups

A relatively straightforward section this week. 

Stuff for developers

Kendrick Tan’s practical guide to building zk dapps

Kimi Wu’s hands on your first zk dapp

OpenZeppelin contracts v2.5 – with CREATE2, enumerableset and big NFT gas savings

Remix v0.9.3 – you can now test the functionality of receive & fallback functions

ABDK adds a number converter to its online toolkit

ethers.js and Google’s Bigquery

Alethio adds API endpoints for Rinkeby, Kovan and Ropsten testnets, as well as webhooks

MythX, Quantstamp, Runtime Verification, Sooho, SmartDec and ConsenSys Diligence starting Ethereum Trust Alliance, a security rating system for deployed Eth code

Time travel queries using a subgraph from The Graph

Brownie now supports Vyper

Microsoft’s Azure Eth development kit is now generally available

A write up of the bug that Sam Sun found in three of Kyber’s bridge reserves

EthVigil’s interactive tutorials for devs new to Ethereum concepts

3Box Comments and Chatbox plugins now have emojis, likes, and votes

I like to highlight the zk stuff as it’s clearly the future.  

Sam Sun just keeps finding bugs.   

Checkout the EthVigil tutorials.  They look pretty slick!

Though it’s still early days (the standard thing to say on every panel at every crypto conference), a sign of maturity is that things like Microsoft’s Eth dev kit being generally available isn’t an earth shattering headline anymore.  Everyone now knows that all the world’s biggest companies are experimenting with this technology, almost always on Ethereum, yet they’re also often quiet about it.  

It’s usually safe to just replace “blockchain” with “Ethereum” in most MSM headlines.

Ecosystem

Why ENS uses Ethereum and not a new basechain. (Also: ENS’ registry migration is complete)

How Whisper-fork Waku does DNS based discovery

ConsenSys lays off 14% as part of strategic transformation

Matt Leising says he knows who the DAO hacker is

SHPLONK, an explainer of last week’s paper from Boneh, Drake, Fisch, and Gabizon

Matt Leising has identified...the best way to sell a book by claiming that he has  identified the DAO hacker.  He’s been teasing it for a bit.  I sure hope this holds up better than the Newsweek “scoop” identifying Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi.  After it was clearly debunked, the Newsweek authors kept claiming that their “forensic analysis” was correct.  Embarrassing.  Let’s see the evidence.

The zk naming schemes are great.  Zero knowledge is one of those things that is exploding because of blockchain.

ConsenSys had a round of layoffs this week, though as you see below, it also acquired a municipal bond broker-dealer.  Coverage was actually reasonable - it’s another sign that perhaps this industry is (sometimes) growing up a bit.

Enterprise

ConsenSys acquires Heritage Financial Systems, a municipal bond broker-dealer, to tokenize them on Codefi

Governance and standards

Two articles on DigixDAO dissolution: as an example of DAOs working (though just 58 addresses voted out of 11,000+) and Coinfund looks at the Digix voting power

Why ragequit is game changing

Live on mainnet

Colony is in public beta live on mainnet

First 10,000 zkDai is on Aztec

Mattereum’s asset passports are live on mainnet

District0x’s District Registry is live on mainnet, a TCR for its community

Coronavirus whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang is memorialized on mainnet

AirSwap Delegates is live on mainnet. Configure automated trading rules, onchain limit orders, liquidity integration with Kyber, and ability to add new tokens

I love the idea of Colony and want to get a chance to test it.

I had to break up the app layer section this week because there were just too many things.  Obviously a DeFi heavy list, and many of the things in the next “application layer” section are also on mainnet.  Things are shipping!  The distinction between the two sections was a bit arbitrary, as is always the case.

Application layer

DeFi hit $1 billion USD equivalent locked up

Maker Dai Stability Fee 8%; DSR 7.5%

Data viz on Maker’s Sai to Dai migration success

A spreadsheet of admin keys in DeFi

Etherisc’s flight insurance app returns on Rinkeby testnet using Chainlink

Idle Finance v2 (an autobalancer similar to Staked’s RAY)

Collateral Swap – swap between Maker collateral (eg, ETH<>BAT) with Aave + Uniswap

List of DeFiZaps – one click to do a bunch of DeFi actions

Gelato, a no code bot to automate your Ethereum tasks. Tutorial

Gauntlet’s analysis of why Uniswap is a good oracle

Credentify, an API to issue standard European education credentials stacked into ECTS

Circles’s universal basic income is live on Kovan testnet

Maple Loans undercollateralized loans through communities with the option to slice up the risk CDO-style

Zero Collateral loans with cDai, live on mainnet (but unaudited alpha software)

Dharma’s dtokens – wrappers around Compound tokens, a la rDai, but for services to take profits. In this case, 10% of interest to Dharma

DeFi hitting $1b USD is definitely the story of the week.  Of course there are criticisms you can make (it’s risky, the risks are cascading, there will likely be some kind of crisis at some point, oracles are centralized, etc etc) but as Josh Stark and I wrote in our Year in Ethereum 2019 piece, DeFi is an alternative financial system and in many ways a remarkably better one.   Way less paperwork, much less settlement times, better transparency, not to count the various improvements on censorship-resistance, trustlessness, permissionlessness, etc.

I liked Avichal’s tweet:

Imagine a Fintech startup tweeted: "We launched two years ago. Today we have $1 Billion in collateral and have given out a cumulative of $1B in loans!" Every VC in the world would want to know what the hell the startup does and how it works. 2020 is going to be wild for crypto. pic.twitter.com/yb8gfISSoX

— Avichal Garg (Electric Capital) ⚡ (@avichal)

February 7, 2020

One thing we linked in the Year in Eth piece was a story about a Turkish football star who is now driving for Uber because Erdogan froze his bank accounts in Turkey.  I take the story with a small grain of salt, but it’s a reminder than any wealth you save is...sometimes not really yours if it resides in a bank. 

Unsecured/undercollateralized loans is definitely becoming an area of experimentation, with multiple projects on Ethereum.  

Tokens/Business/Regulation

Hester Peirce speech proposing an SEC safe harbor for tokens

Op-ed: America falling behind the world in blockchain

Viewing GDPR from a blockchain lens

6 central banks to talk digital currency in April

Ethereum needs more entrepreneurs and product people just as much as more devs

Are stablecoins parasites on ETH?

Why ETH will sustain a monetary premium

The SEC should have figured out some kind of safe harbor in 2016, and then we wouldn’t have had the mania and fraud and misallocation of capital that occurred in 2017 that set the space back.   But still, better late than never - though certainly some things have happened outside of the US because of the SEC.  Decentralization in action!

Kames’s article calling for more entrepreneurs is an interesting one.  Is more devs the bottleneck or is it better entrepreneurs?  

I’ve never liked the “monetary premium” angle.    What I do find amusing is how many Bitcoiners point to something written at the peak of BTC’s 2017 bubble where a legacy finance guy tries to get his friends to buy BTC (I hope they ignored him then!) and not ETH with the argument that ETH is intrinsically valuable, but BTC is not, therefore all the value will accrue to BTC.

Only in crypto, folks.

General

Dispelling Bitcoin maximalist myths about Ethereum

a visual introduction to Merkle trees

Accelerating powers-of-tau ceremonies with optimistic pipelining

How does cryptocurrency have value, part 2 of Maker’s intro series

It’s impressive how much fake news is created about Ethereum by Bitcoin maximalists.  I’m convinced that a decent chunk of Bitcoin holders actually think that Ethereum runs on Infura, and another chunk think that an Eth full node needs 10 TB.  A bunch of the crypto clickbait media feeds these falsehoods because they can get cheap clicks from Bitcoiners.   

If you don’t know what a Merkle tree is, check out the intro.  

See you next week.  Somehow I’ll try to get an issue out in the midst of EthDenver.

[evanvanness]

Crypto funds show just how immature web3 is

The immaturity of the crypto fund space highlights to me just how early we are in the process of building web3.

The start of the fund boom

Polychain wasn’t the first fund, but it arguably was the first big one, with big name investors and a media splash.  It raised with a hedge fund structure and set the precedent.

The upside of hedge structures

As a result of the 2017 bull market, many funds followed and a hedge fund structure became the normal way to raise.  It made some sense - you can continually fundraise which means you can get a fund set up and then keep fundraising.  This is quite important, as it’s tough to get non-true believers to write their first crypto check.  However, in a bull market you can continue to raise as prices go up and investors that you talked to last month start to FOMO in.  Thus funds can launch with a smaller size but continually fundraise until they get to the targeted fund size.

This structure also made sense in 2017 when you could do an early round for a token, have the project do a sale and then have your token get liquid within a couple of months.  No theoretical need for long lockups of your investors if your investments get liquidity in the short-term.

Downside of hedge structures

The downside is that in bear markets, hedge fund structures exacerbate volatility.

First, many of these funds were set up with relatively unclear mandates, but many of them mainly did some combination of the following 2 things:

1) buy ETH/BTC and hold it 

2) buy tokens of projects on ETH and then flip them when they went live.

Unfortunately many “crypto funds” were depressingly in this second category. Some of them were rather fly-by-night operations.

As prices fell a crazy amount in the 2018 bear market, no LP wanted to just watch funds hold.  So funds had to try to outperform ETH/BTC but they no longer had the token flipping strategy.  

When prices are falling, LPs (investors) tend to redeem.  Hedge funds generally allow the GP (ie, the hedge fund) to take carry (that is, 20-30% of the profits) frequently, so hedge fund investors usually pull out their money as funds fall because 1) hedge funds tend to make bad decisions when they are falling and 2) the incentives become increasingly misaligned as the hedge fund wants to make YOLO bets to get back to even so that it once again return to taking carry.  

So, especially in a volatile market like crypto, falling prices leads to falling prices in a vicious cycle.

Hedge fund structures doing venture deals don’t make any sense

Hedge funds generally only permit redemptions (”asking for your money back”) after 12 months.  

Many of these funds also have a bunch of illiquid deals on their books from 2018.  Often they are at ridiculous valuations for new basechains (ie, another privacy coin, or the millionth lame attempt at an “eth killer.” or 31 different flavors of professor coins, etc)

This is one reason we saw the crazy fall in ETH.  Funds had all these illiquid SAFTs held on their books at cost, so as redemptions flooded in, they had to sell what they could.  The only things they had with reasonable liquidity were BTC and ETH.

Many funds are actually run by closet quasi-Bitcoin maximalists (I know, it’s weird to me too!), so given the choice between selling ETH and BTC, they primarily sold their ETH. And given that their fund manager friends were also selling more ETH than BTC, it became a short-term a Schelling point. When you’re a hedge fund, you have to worry about short-term price movements.

Sidenote: given their fresh memories of being stuck in liquidity traps, most fund operators are likely to quickly liquidate their positions as many of these new chains launch.  That means they will push a big hype bubble in the media in the hope that they can dump on retail for as much as possible. I may be wrong, but I generally doubt many chains launching in 2019 will do well for anyone who buys them once they go live.  There may be a short initial hype push, but basic forces of gravity suggest that funds will be providing lots of sell pressure that will be tough to overcome unless a true bull market returns.

Funds being 50% trading hedge fund and 50% VC is LOL

In the real world outside of crypto (for what it’s worth, I’ve passed the CAIA and CFA exams), if a fund came to you and told you it was going to try to 1) long/short (”time the market”) and 2) also do venture deals, you’d look at them funny.  And then you’d throw them out of your office, and maybe send a terse email to whomever referred them to you.

But most crypto funds are part trading and part venture fund.  It’s madness.

It doesn’t make sense to mix short-term trading results with venture deals that have a 5-10 year time horizon.  But here we are.

Reason for optimism

As I said at the outset, all of this underlines how we are still very early in web3.  No one can predict when the next crypto bull market will come, but given that the technology continues to make progress, I’d guess the next bull market will be substantially bigger than the last one.  

And the market will start to show more signs of maturity - including at the fund level.

[At points in this post I painted with broad strokes, particularly how funds operated.  It’s a blog post after all]

[damonbation]

The Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin Part 13: The Lightning Network with Jack Mallers - WBD

Location: Las VegasDate: Thursday, 20th February Project: Zap & Strike Role: Founder

Welcome to the Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin can be intimidating for beginners. The protocol is complicated, the community can be aggressive and unforgiving, silly mistakes can lose you money, and it is easy to succumb to altcoin marketing.

Bitcoin does though, offer you the opportunity to hold a new type of monetary asset, one which can't be seized by the government and is censorship resistance and It has the potential to change the way the world.

The goal of What Bitcoin Did has always been about making things simple; there are no stupid questions, and the show is here to help beginners navigate this new world. To kick off 2020, we are launching a special series to help beginners understand Bitcoin. We will be looking at the basics from breaking down the protocol to explaining the economics and discussing the potential societal shift.

Beginners Guide Part 13 - The Lightning Network with Jack Mallers

Bitcoin produces a 1mb block on average every 10 minutes. The block size and time limitations are essential for keeping the blockchain small enough so that anyone is realistically able to run a full node, keeping Bitcoin decentralised.

The block size limit, however, does present a scalability issue, as there is a maximum number of transactions that can be broadcast in each block. The limit led to an acrimonious scaling debate, lasting years which resulted in a fork of the Bitcoin protocol and the arrival of Bitcoin Cash. With Bitcoin, layer two solutions have been hailed as the best way to solve scaling.

The Lightning Network is a Layer 2 solution that runs on top of Bitcoin. By allowing users to create channels, Lightning allows for P2P micropayments that settle almost instantly and at a low cost.

The Lightning Network offers other benefits such as improved privacy because the details of Lightning payments aren't on the public blockchain.

The Lightning Network is still a relatively new protocol, as such, it can be intimidating to newcomers as the user experience has some key differences from transacting on the basechain.

In Part 13 of the Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin, I talk to Jack Mallers, the founder of Zap Lightning Wallet and Strike. We discuss the Lightning Network, the scaling debate, fees, settlement and the future of the protocol.

from Money 101 https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/the-beginners-guide-to-bitcoin-part-13-the-lightning-network-with-jack-mallers-wbd via http://www.rssmix.com/

[danielmarkharrison]

The Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin Part 13: The Lightning Network with Jack Mallers - WBD

Location: Las VegasDate: Thursday, 20th February Project: Zap & Strike Role: Founder

Welcome to the Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin can be intimidating for beginners. The protocol is complicated, the community can be aggressive and unforgiving, silly mistakes can lose you money, and it is easy to succumb to altcoin marketing.

Bitcoin does though, offer you the opportunity to hold a new type of monetary asset, one which can't be seized by the government and is censorship resistance and It has the potential to change the way the world.

The goal of What Bitcoin Did has always been about making things simple; there are no stupid questions, and the show is here to help beginners navigate this new world. To kick off 2020, we are launching a special series to help beginners understand Bitcoin. We will be looking at the basics from breaking down the protocol to explaining the economics and discussing the potential societal shift.

Beginners Guide Part 13 - The Lightning Network with Jack Mallers

Bitcoin produces a 1mb block on average every 10 minutes. The block size and time limitations are essential for keeping the blockchain small enough so that anyone is realistically able to run a full node, keeping Bitcoin decentralised.

The block size limit, however, does present a scalability issue, as there is a maximum number of transactions that can be broadcast in each block. The limit led to an acrimonious scaling debate, lasting years which resulted in a fork of the Bitcoin protocol and the arrival of Bitcoin Cash. With Bitcoin, layer two solutions have been hailed as the best way to solve scaling.

The Lightning Network is a Layer 2 solution that runs on top of Bitcoin. By allowing users to create channels, Lightning allows for P2P micropayments that settle almost instantly and at a low cost.

The Lightning Network offers other benefits such as improved privacy because the details of Lightning payments aren't on the public blockchain.

The Lightning Network is still a relatively new protocol, as such, it can be intimidating to newcomers as the user experience has some key differences from transacting on the basechain.

In Part 13 of the Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin, I talk to Jack Mallers, the founder of Zap Lightning Wallet and Strike. We discuss the Lightning Network, the scaling debate, fees, settlement and the future of the protocol.

from The Let's Talk Bitcoin Network https://ift.tt/32QKInt via IFTTT