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Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, April 13 issue

The newsletter didn’t get sent until Monday morning, so a bit late for me.  The reason why is that last week I was busy securing the 4 major sponsors necessary to keep this newsletter free for everyone.  Hopefully news on that front will be coming soon.  I’ll be very grateful to the folks who help Week in Ethereum News stay free, and hopefully you will be too.  As I’ve told everyone I talked to, as an editor, the product will remain the exact same.  As a publisher, it’s very important to me that it’s a productive relationship for everyone.


Here’s the most clicked, preserved in a screenshot since my tweets auto-delete

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People are excited that the fee market is getting simulated.  This particular piece is probably a bit too simplistic, but Barnabe will be publishing more soon, with more realistic assumptions about endogenous demand.   

People are excited because the fee market change will 1) make it easier for app devs to get their user transactions included and 2) because every transaction will burn some ETH, and 3) it kills economic abstraction forever, something I remember Gavin pushing quite hard in 2015 and 2016.

Meanwhile, Danny published a design on turning off PoW.   Even though it’s long, it’s still rough and just an initial plan.  The focus has been on launching the eth2 chain, but as soon as it is launched, the goal is to turn off the wasteful electricity burn (and issuance!) of PoW.


Eth1

One important bit of stateless Ethereum is trying to merklize code chunks to shrink the witness size so that full nodes do not have to hold the full state.  Two different estimates published this week on how important and feasible it is.


Eth2

The clients are all speeding into launching the multi-client testnet.   I suppose the other stuff mostly speaks for itself.


Eth2, post-BeaconChain launch

Perhaps people forget that when Ethereum launched in July 2015, it didn’t actually do anything.  It’ll be the same with Eth2, so on the research front things shifted awhile ago towards all the things necessary to make eth2 work.


Stuff for developers

Lots of devs excited about immutable.  

One problem Ethereum has is that everyone prefers RicMoo’s ethers.js yet most people still use web3js because the tutorials push new devs to it.   


Ecosystem

I really appreciate Dean’s networking explainers, I find them quite well-written, and it makes me a little mad that he’s a high school dropout who writes better than I do.  


Enterprise

  • from the founder of Simple, Sila: payments API to take on ACH
  • EEA mainnet survey
  • Hyperledger Besu v1.4.3 – adds eth/65 for better networking, issue found for private transactions created with v1.3.4 and before

Besu now running eth/65 too, which as we found out a few weeks ago, cuts bandwidth usage by a crazy amount.   A nice change from Péter Szilágyi. 


Governance, DAOs, and standards

This week a lawsuit was filed against Maker.  Personally I think if you’re running to the US courts to bail you out (or assisting that effort) of your use of leverage, then you deserve all the opprobrium that you get.


Application layer

The Reddit thing seems like an unintentional leak, where they were trying to roll it out to just one more community but it got in the app, and now they’re unsure what to do it.   But they’ve been playing with this for years - I believe a job listing first surfaced for a dev to play with this stuff in late 2016 (may have been early 2017)

My weekly DeFi ratio: i’ll call it 3/8 to be DeFi, which is lower than normal.  On the other, the BTC++ could have very easily been in this section (it’s all a bit arbitrary, no?) as well as the 10 Dai use cases post, etc… which would have changed it quite a bit.


Tokens/Business/Regulation

Jesse Walden’s article is now the #2 most clicked - by the time I do the #MostClicked, it’s usually pretty steady, but this time it moved up quite a bit in the subsequent 24 hours.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests the answer is no, but of course the answer is actually yes.  People using ETH is a good thing, even if it is to speculate on the price of unsustainable memecoins.  It’s impressive how many people are finding different ways to bring the orange memecoin into ETH, using different trust assumptions on BTC side or different use cases.  

Case in point: Atomic Loans did a big push yesterday, where you can lock up BTC and get stablecoins.  Pretty juicy rate to lend at - 9% for USDC and 9.5% for Dai.


General

The CryptoHack site moved up and would have made the most clicked.  Not a shocker that this audience wants to learn more crypto.   Even app devs probably need to learn that the best architecture often involves more crypto and less state storage.

If you haven’t done a trusted setup ceremony, I highly recommend doing one.  Contribute your entropy to the future!   Semaphore is very neat gadget to help app developers be able to add privacy, which is a very needed layer to prevent dystopia.

Posted at 10:28 AM Tags: ethereum
Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, April 5 issue

Listening to Fountain of Wayne’s Sky Full of Holes, which is unfortunately their last album because lead songwriter Adam Schlesinger died this week at age 52 from COVID19.  Unappreciated genius.


For me, the big news of the week is that about 10 days ago I decided to leave ConsenSys:

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I’ve been doing this newsletter for almost 4 years now, it seemed like the right time to make the jump.  

My expectation is that the newsletter stays free, while this annotated version goes subscriber-only of some sort.   Figuring out the pricing model isn’t super easy - I think the way to maximize revenue is to price quite high, but I don’t particularly want to do that.  If I spend the time on this, I’d like it to be read more widely.   My tentative pricing is $9 a month or $99 a year.  

The bigger question is whether the main newsletter can stay free long-term.  I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I mostly enjoy doing it it.  But I strongly believe in listening when the market speaks.  

Roughly speaking, the audience is the 15,000 most important people in Ethereum and web3.  That strikes me as quite valuable, and it should be apparent that sponsors and ads will transparently take a more prominent position.  Of course, surveillance capitalism has trained people to think that the only value to advertising is what they can track - which I think quite understates the value of this audience.  There’s no other way to reach all the insiders, devs, investors, journalists, and power users in one place.

More on this in the future, but the bottom line is: if you like Week in Eth News being free, I hope you’ll check out the sponsors. If we do it right, the sponsors should be value add and worth your attention.



Here’s the most clicked this week

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Gitcoin extended the CLR round, my grant is here.  I’d love it if you put 11 somewhere after the decimal so I can track the donation to the annotated newsletter.   1 Dai currently gets matched 73 Dai.


Eth1

Gnosis is resuscitating the client formerly known as Parity as OpenEthereum, a welcome contribution to client diversity.

The Stateless Ethereum tech tree is an interesting exercise in decentralized ecosystem vs centralized VC coin.

If you talk to many of the VCs, they don’t believe in Ethereum’s decentralized ecosystem.   They want large dev teams gathered in one central location under centralized leadership - hence all the VC coins with 9 figures to spend, but zero ways to deploy that capital effectively (nor do they even seem to try!) and zero community.

Ethereum isn’t like that.  People show up and pitch in from all corners of the world.  Often they start out making pull requests, and people see the quality of their contribution, then eventually they work their way into being a paid contributor.  It’s decentralized, messy, and there’s often a lot of complaints from those who aren’t good enough to get funded full-time or fall through the cracks for a variety of reasons.

But it’s been working so far.


Eth2

The tldr of Eth2 right now is that the long-running multi-client testnet before eth2′s beacon chain launches is close.


Layer2

The emergent order of rollups is an interesting example of what I was talking about above.  They’re all working out what their selling point is.  Some are going after dexes (ie, loopring, idex, deversifi), payments (Dharma, Fuel), some privacy (Zeropool).  That’s an extremely incomplete list, because I was pointing out the stuff from this week plus the stuff that’s live (loopring) or imminent.


Stuff for developers

RicMoo continues his exploration of CREATE2 magic.  It’s still something that is underappreciated (possibly good, as users probably also need some education) in our ecosystem among devs.

Samczsun continues his reign of terror when he shows up in your discord/telegram/riot/it doesn’t matter.  As predicted, he’s the clear winner of this round of Gitcoin grants.  Fun fact: I was his first contributor during the CLR round.

Fortmatic’s magic link is pretty cool, and applicable outside of our relatively small web3 circle.


Ecosystem

I included the https bit because ethereum.eth didn’t work for me without explicitly including the https.  


Enterprise

Also could have added that EY is doing a (obviously virtual) conference in mid to late April.


Governance, DAOs, and standards

It’s an underrated thread that most of the apps are in progress of decentralizing themselves this year.   That’s a trend that will continue.


Application layer

Every week I get to this section, and my first instinct is to count “DeFi or not?”  This week it’s 5/11.   That doesn’t include prediction markets - though of course that’s an arbitrary distinction.  Defining the contours of DeFi isn’t easy.

Given the stresses on centralized video infrastructure, Livepeer looks like a prescient bet from Doug and Eric, and something where decentralization can really deliver unique value.

Also very cool to see Brave using Origin Protocol.  We need more of this.


Tokens/Business/Regulation

Subcontext of USDC growing is that many folks moved to USDC because DSR went down to zero, plus liquidity crunch etc etc.

However, the interesting part about Maker adding USDC is that USDC ended up being quite symbiotic for Dai.   While USDC seemed like a competitor (and is to some degree!), it turned out that there’s a symbiosis there that emergent order created in a way that a centralized planner would never have come up with. 


General

I wonder how long CMC remains dominant.  Having an exchange as an owner seems like untenable in the long-run.  While their dominance is enshrined by Google, that depends on 1) links which may disappear now that it is owned by an exchange and 2) Goog’s (human thumb on the scales) algorithm.

One has to wonder whether Bitmain can extend their ASIC again with another firmware update?

Bump to OpenVDF, a very interesting open hardware collaboration.

Posted at 10:57 AM
Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News March 29 issue

This annotated version is brought to you by The Cure’s “The Head on the Door” album, playing over my headphones right now in a vain attempt to avoid the work-from-home-with-kids maelstrom. 

Listening to an album helps me mark the time and stay focused when I’m doing something relatively unstructured like newsletter commentary.   It’s somewhat unclear to me who I’m writing this for, but people seem to appreciate more context for the firehose of information, so I try to provide some.

I’ve occasionally read newsletters for other blockchains and I’m always impressed by how little I understand.  I have no context for what X, Y, and Z mean.  Yet there’s still usually something there that I pick up that is worthwhile enough that makes it worth the click and skim.

Here’s the most clicked for the week.  The eternal caveat exists that people click things in the newsletter that they haven’t read

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The annotated roadmap was the top click by a large amount.  



Eth1

Bitcoiners would tell you that it’s impossible to run a full Eth node, but you can actually run one on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Ethereum has always had “being honest about our problems” as a core value, so it’s amusing that Bitcoiners never do the work to figure out what the actual problems are.  Right now Geth is the vast majority of nodes, because they keep doing incredible work improving their client - or in this case, networking for all of Ethereum.

The client formerly known as Parity is being taken over, but there’s probably going to be a ramp up time.  

In the meantime, running Nethermind and Besu nodes are a concrete thing that anyone can do for the network.  I find the Nethermind client to be particularly easy to run, though the documentation is a bit lacking.  So for a Saturday project, click the link above and get a Nethermind or Besu node running on a Raspberry Pi.

The points in between Geth/Nethermind and Eth on Arm have to do with Stateless Ethereum, the goal of getting network clients to be able to run statelessly.  Those steps include getting the witness size down to be small enough and switching the tree from hex to binry.


Eth2

The audit of the eth2 spec is now public.  Meanwhile nailing down the final networking for phase0 to get the last multi-client testnets up before the Beacon Chain goes live.


Eth2+

The debut of the Eth2x section.  That’s a joke - I dislike the 1x moniker which somehow got hung on Eth1 improvements.  

You probably won’t be clicking any of these links unless you’re into math or a protocol researcher who can fake it.


Layer2

No shocker here that Aztec is moving into rollup.  It’s an underrated fact that rollup’s massive scaling is about to ship or has already shipped (ie Loopring), though there is still work to do be do to get those rollups to their full thousnds of transactions per second capacity - like optimizing the verifier.


Stuff for developers

I’ve always felt like the dev section hopefully speaks for itself. With Yul+,  FuelLabs is supporting the idea that good projects naturally spinoff open source tools.


Ecosystem

All three of these were quite high on the most clicked.  


Enterprise

I think the Ericsson piece just missed the most clicked tweet.  


Governance, DAOs, and standards

I haven’t read the Streamr paper, though of course governance is one of the unsolved problems in this space, since governance is an unsolved topic among humans.  


Application layer

I don’t normally include release announcements before they happen, but Uniswap is obviously a special case.

Weekly metric: 5 out of 11 bullet points (counting on low side for DeFi, eg not including Augur) are DeFi.


Tokens/Business/Regulation

If the SEC wins - which it appears they likely will now that they got the injunction - then Silicon Valley investors will have gotten bailed out of the two craziest crypto deals that they invested in at market top - Telegram and Basecoin.  Just like Basecoin, Telegram will likely be forced to return (most of) the cash it raised.

The SEC is providing regulation-as-a-service to those investors.   Interesting that the deal happened mere months after Tezos, and yet very different regulatory treatments.


General

It’s pretty great to see that the Steem community managed to fight off the hijacking that was attempted with the (unwitting?) help of Binance and Huobi. While both exchanges backed off, we’ll find out in time whether they really feel like they were misled.  


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Finally, time to shill for my Gitcoin grant 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.  

I put this last week and I believe only one contributor added the 11, so maybe no one likes the annotated version.  🤔   

Posted at 9:50 AM
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

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

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

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Posted at 8:43 AM
Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, March 15 issue

The number of EthCC attendees (for the record, most people I talk to now think the afterparty was the main spreading event) testing positive since I published the newsletter, even while many can’t get tested.  So no caffeine or beer for me just in case I’m affected (though I left the afterparty very early), and that lack of caffeine is pulling me down just a little.   This might be a low-energy, “please clap” Jeb annotated issue.


Eth1

A writeup post-stateless ETH summit after ethCC as well as a summary.  Quiet times usually follow productive meetings, hence only 2 bullet points this week.


Eth2

So my current estimate (completely my own) is that we’re likely looking at late q2 for phase0 launch.   But who knows, maybe getting locked down will provide a small speedup?  <wry grin>


I continue to think that by far the most important thing after shipping phase 0 is turning off proof of work.  Stop wasting electricity!  Cut issuance!


Stuff for developers

I probably should’ve added that your Gnosis Safe is always safe if you used the official front end of the mobile app.


Crypto carnage, Maker liquidations

  • Thursday’s global selloff of risk assets led to the most negative price action day of crypto’s short history. The selloff inflated gas prices (~200 gwei) which caused trouble for Maker. The Maker oracles stopped working for an hour or two.
  • Maker liquidation auctions went off for nearly 0 DAI as bots bidding on those auctions got caught in high gas prices and ran out of DAI, leading several different bot maintainers to make ~8m USD in ETH by bidding just above zero in a few disparate time periods.
  • As a result, the Maker system surplus became a 5.7m Dai deficit (as of the time of publication). To improve incentives, Maker governance changed some parameters and to recoup the debt MKR will be auctioned onchain for lots of 50,000 Dai on the morning (UTC) of March 19th.
  • Community members have started a backstop to ensure the deficit is covered
  • Here is a writeup of the Maker liquidations with data and graphs
  • Just published: Maker governance proposal to change DSR to 0 and Stability Fee to 0.5%, GSM to 4 hours, and a decentralized circuitbreaker for auctions

An interesting thing I just learned is that Maker’s standard keeper apparently only works in Parity, not with Geth or Infura.  So that’s another ramification of the Kovan/Rinkeby split, and getting Maker to use Kovan.

In the meantime, USDC has been added as a collateral.  It’s rather strange but USDC perhaps makes sense as a way to mint DAI in times of stress and get closer to the peg.  Seems like the Stability Fee should be set high here though, as you really only want people using it in times of needing Dai, eg in auctions.  Right now it’s 20%, i’m not sure that’s as high as it should be.


This newsletter doesn’t often mention price and market-related matters.  But it’s quite clear that crypto is not a safe haven in crisis.   Could it be in the future?  Perhaps, but all the hedge funds and institutional money simply exacerbate volatility.  Where we’re at is that when people wanted to take risk off the table, they viewed crypto as a risk asset - and Bitcoin got hit the hardest because it had survived the best in crypto winter, despite there being no reason whatsoever for it to have done the best.


Ecosystem

A fun parlor game: what will be the next big ETH event?  Devcon?  Or something before, or something after?   I think we’re going to see a lot more online hackathons - and probably more sponsorship dollars for them.  Perhaps more sponsorship fiat for newsletter subscriptions too?  

Raul’s post on eth2 was the most clicked of the week.


Enterprise

Nice komgo writeup.  Also interesting to see that the bet of Besu seems to be paying off with enterprise privatechain stuff like DAML even on Besu.


Governance, DAOs, and standards

Governance as a whole has probably been one of Ethereum’s weak points.  Not as bad as governance-by-Blockstream, but still not great.  People don’t turn out to vote so direct voting doesn’t work (to wit, Aragon removing voting which was the only use for ANT) - and yet one of the solutions for people not voting actually penalizes people for voting, as I’ve found out in DxDAO.   I’m hopeful for some of the solutions but to date long-term governance of everything is mostly an unsolved issue.


Application layer

Nice to see people are still trying to build social media alternatives.  The idea of building a better Facebook is definitely an enthralling one - yet not one that Ethereum has even come close to delivering.

Same with games - we’ve been talking about tokens/NFTs on ETH being a big thing in games for awhile.  Nothing has quite hit it (let’s be honest, CryptoKitties was just a different flavor of ICO mania) but I think Skyweaver might.  

My usual ex-post metric of seeing how much of this section is DeFi: 10 bullet points, depending on how you count you could say it’s 4 to ~8.  


Tokens/Business/Regulation

Mass panic like with Corona is always a perfect moment to add bills on as riders to must-pass bills, so look for anti-encryption hawks to try to do this in the name of “safety.”  Maybe even to bailout bills.

Kinda interesting to see CMC finally add Uniswap volume.  They’ve been quite slow to add dexes generally; it seems like Bitcoiners often have a hard time adjusting to decentralization when they’ve been used to all the centralized BTC tradeoffs.

And Circle is now all-in on USDC.  From Santander prototype at Devcon2 to $600m now printed, and this doesn’t even count Tether belatedly realizing that BTC was a terrible choice to secure Tether.


General

Ryan Sean Adams’ “how to” on using ProtonMail or equivalent is the 2nd most clicked, showing how he’s one of the most important people in Ethereum right now.  He takes concepts them and popularizes them.  

The random browser fingerprints is huge, and a big step up in privacy.  

Meanwhile if you have 2gb or 3gb GPUs, you can fold some proteins which may have an impact on COVID-19.  I’m always skeptical, but it seems likely to be worth the cost.  Especially if you’re like me and get super cheap electricity in Texas through GridPlus!  Crypto is not cancelled in Texas.

Posted at 1:27 PM
Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Annotated edition for latest Week in Ethereum News


Original Week in Ethereum News issue that this post provides annotations for.

One thing that surprises me as I’m out talking to people is how many folks bought the NFT but haven’t discovered that I’m now putting out these annotated editions un-paywalled here.  In general, communication in a decentralized ecosystem is difficult, which was a theme of my EthCC talk.

The big news this morning is that an EthLondon/EthCC attendee has tested positive for corona.  Stay safe out there.


Once upon a time I used to do a “top stories” in the weekly newsletter.  Arguably this week the big stories are 1) Baseline Protocol, 2) Semaphore, 3) ProgPoW appears to be dead for now (though of course proponents would disagree), 4) iden3′s zk-rollup on testnet.

Why do these things matter: Baseline matters because increasingly enterprises are realizing that private chains don’t make much sense, but instead using mainnet as a message bus (nod to John Wolpert’s Magic Bus) is the way to go.  EY has done great work with Nightfall allowing privacy in transactions, and this is an extension of that.

Semaphore is similar because it allows devs to build privacy into apps.  

ProgPoW appears to be dead for now since core devs seemed to back away from the idea of a chain split, though I think running it on a testnet makes a lot of sense, just in case.  However it’s not clear under what circumstances the community would come together.

Finally, iden3′s zk-rollup is just about scaling ETH and token transfers so that a few thousand per second can be done.  Layer2 scaling has been hyped for a long time in ETH (and BTC before it) but it’s finally really happening - Loopring’s zk-rollup exchange went live on mainnet last week!


Eth1

What curve precompiles to add is almost as contentious as ProgPoW, but more esoteric than GPU v ASIC, so it doesn’t get as much attention.  We’ve put some precompiles in that didn’t get heavy usage, so trying to figure out the threshold 



Eth2

Not much to say here, the usual combination of clients doing the heavy lifting to get phase0 into production.  Obviously you should read Ben’s What’s New in Eth2 for more commentary - as is often the case, it is the most clicked link in this week’s newsletter.


Layer2

  • iden3’s zk-rollup is live on Goerli testnet, ongoing work to reduce the proof generation bottleneck


Stuff for developers

The usual grab bag.  Interesting to see how many people are building things with flashloans.


Ecosystem

I love how EthCC got their videos online immediately, with same day turnaround.  Getting videos online is a public good - if you organize a conference, you generally feel like you’re done when the conference is over, which is why videos often don’t get online until weeks later.  But the broader community who isn’t at the conference cares the most about videos getting online - and EthCC did that and streamed them live.  Bravo to Jerome, Bettina and the rest of the Ethereum France team.


Enterprise

The structurer is called Cadence, it will be interesting to see if they hit their 500m goal.  


Governance, DAOs, and standards

  • An update on EIP1559 – predictable transaction fees and intrinsically tying ETH to the protocol
  • OracleDAO – a MolochDAO style booster of Augur/REP
  • 0x governance update, progressing toward full decentralization

Some form of 1559 is definitely going to happen, but nailing down the details for a non-minimal change has taken longer than expected.


Application layer

I like to occasionally check and see how much of what I put in the app layer section is DeFi.  It’s an interesting check on what was released - but of course what everyone counts as DeFi is not obvious when in some sense Ethereum is the value transfer layer that we were promised decades ago for the internet. 


Tokens/Business/Regulation

A few years ago I considered doing a token for Week in Ethereum, so I’m quite curious to see how it goes for Decrypt.


General


That’s it for my notes this week.  I tried to focus less on saying something for each section and instead try to highlight things for those who pay a little less attention to this space.

Apologies for not getting a chance to do the annotated edition last week during EthCC.

Posted at 9:53 AM
Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Annotated edition for latest Week in Ethereum News

So last week I mentioned the annotated editions and then…didn’t do one.  Just got too busy.  So we’ll see how this one goes.

One thing to note: Edcon and EthParis both got cancelled.

Original Week in Ethereum News issue.


Eth1

Literally nobody: 

A few people on core devs call: ProgPoW!

I don’t really get it.  The reason ProgPoW keeps being so controversial is that core devs don’t publicize it much, and then they suddenly announce that it’s going in a hard fork.  Add to that the fact that every time miners advocate for ProgPoW, they show themselves to be outside of the Ethereum community, and you can understand why it produces such strong reactions.

Add to this the fact that one ProgPoW proponent (though oddly he sometimes says he isn’t) has told me explicitly that he doesn’t think the community can evaluate ProgPoW so he doesn’t even try to convince the larger ecosystem.  

I go back to what I wrote a few weeks ago:

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.  

It only gets worse when you just announce forks and don’t try to set a process and make sure people are heard.

I have more thoughts on governance, but that’s it for now.

Meanwhile, lots of very interesting work going on for stateless Eth1, which is currently necessary to turn off proof of work (though I don’t think it should be)


image


Eth2

Lots of phase2 stuff this week.   An overview is that we’re still not particularly close to phase2 as there are plenty of research and design decisions to be made even before all the nitty gritty of engineering tradeoffs.

The flipside that I don’t think many people understand is that once we get data availability on phase1, then we have all the scalability we need for years and years.  64 shards which can each process 3000 rollup transactions per second, means we get to 200,000 transactions per second.  and 3000 is probably low, as we can further reduce the gas cost of opcodes used by rollup, and add a few more shards too if we need to.   [Caveat: we still don’t have a rollup chain live, but….soon™.  Check out Daniel Goldman’s state of optimistic rollup below]

Furthermore, when we have phase1, we can turn off PoW which will cut issuance way down and stop wasting so much electricity.

tldr: phase2 is hard and not near, but phase0 is imminent and phase1 has a spec for review. 

Required reading: Casey Detrio’s phase1 and done, which was the first writing of this.


Layer2

Rollups are all the rage right now, as indicated above, but state channels are still happening.  They’re hard as we’ve found out over the years from attempts on Bitcoin and Ethereum - doing channels is easy but channel networks are hard.


Stuff for developers

This week’s issue was pretty late.  One thing I often do is roughly group things by subtopic under a header.  This week that didn’t happen, things just got thrown into “stuff for devs” with no rhyme or reason to placement.

I’m very interested to see if people check out the eth2 list for ETHLondon.

That Sam Sun is a machine!


Ecosystem

The DAObacle of EthDenver judging means the submissions got put together today, so they will be in next week’s issue, along with here.   I don’t think anyone was shocked that the DAO judging didn’t work, but if you never have a few failures, you aren’t taking enough risks.  Cheers to John Paller and all the EthDenver stewards for making the American Devcon a great event year after year.

Check out EF’s wishlist and see if EF wants to fund something you want to work on.

Enterprise

Enterprise on mainnet means that the line between enterprise and app layer is blurring.  I should probably move this section.


Governance, DAOs, and standards

It’s fairly well known that I was a skeptic of TheDAO in q2 2016, but I’m very interested to see how these reincarnations of TheDAO go.  

bZx hacks

This section took a surprisingly long time to put together, but it’s definitely what people in the community were talking about all week.

I’d say it’s bullish for NexusMutual to pay out, especially because the mutual members first denied the claim but then paid out the claim when the facts of the matter became clear.  It’s also bullish for Opyn - NexusMutual and Opyn aren’t competitors exactly, they have different tradeoffs for people looking to hedge or protect themselves from risks.


Application layer

Meanwhile the flashloans made Maker’s holders decide to add the time delay to prevent any flashloan governance attack.

Compound hit a big number and now they’re decentralizing their governance, which means that the value accrual will probably be voted on by its token holders.  Fascinating stuff.

Cheers to Decentraland and Enjin for going live, and Synthetix adding ETH as collateral should be big for them.


Tokens/Business/Regulation

Enigma wasn’t necessarily who I thought the SEC would go after next.  

Simon’s personal gratitude tokens are very interesting to me.  It’s like challenge coins but with intrinsic value.  


General

The general section is becoming the cryptography section.

One odd thing about Mastering Ethereum is that Ethereum is still under construction.  Writing that book ensures lots of future work for it to be kept up to date.  Or a second volume.  But in the meantime, let’s get it translated!

Posted at 3:51 PM
Tuesday, February 11, 2020

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

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

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

A relatively straightforward section this week. 

Stuff for developers

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

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

Governance and standards

Live on mainnet

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 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:






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

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

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.

Posted at 3:11 PM
Monday, February 3, 2020

Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News Feb 2, 2020

Eth1

  • Stateless Ethereum: how all the research pieces fit together
  • Parity v2.7.1 – no more dual-track releases, breaking database changes
  • Nethermind v1.5.8 – Nethermind is constantly releasing improvements

If there is one thing to read this week, it’s probably the stateless Ethereum piece.  It’s a big idea maze to traverse to get eth1 being stateless, though there appear to be quite a few reasonable paths.


Eth2

We’re at the point where Eth2 clients are digging into the optimizations and getting ready to dig into the interoperability/networking details to find whether any of them have interpreted the spec differently.  

Meanwhile the last link is a Vitalik idea for phase2.


Stuff for developers

Bit of a monster section here this week. 

Sam Sun has been catching bugs and having it pay off handsomely from bug bounties.  Over the last year, he’s caught a number of things - really impressive stuff, so the Q&A with him was something I was interested to read.

Tons of tooling in this issue, especially for security and frontend stuff, but also it’s worth noting that Solidity debugging was long a weak point but has been rapidly improving with Tenderly, Buidlr and and the web3j work as well.


Ecosystem

Private transactions on Ethereum!   This should unlock lots of uses, particuarly enterprise, where you don’t mind that someone knows you work with someone, you just don’t want them to know how much you’re paying them.  Aztec has a lot more coming too.   If the newsletter still had a “top news of the week,” then this would undoubtedly have been it.

But with privacy solutions, if you use a frontend, then you also need to cognizant of how information can leak.  While the Tornado.cash frontend vulnerability appears to be more theoretical than anything, privacy services tend to worry about the worst threat models, and rightly so.  If your life depends on a rogue nation state (or a jealous ex-lover) not knowing something, you need to be able to depend on privacy guarantees.


Enterprise

Governance and standards

Not much to say, seems fairly self-explanatory.  Better tooling for private chains, even as the current push is to help enterprises realize that mainnet is already often the best decision.

Meanwhile, standards for the babyjubjub curve popular in zk, and a liquid democracy standard


Application layer

PoolTogether hit 1 million DAI and just announced a USDC pool.  It will be interesting to see to what extent PoolTogether brings in new people.  People do love to gamble and dream of upside.  I’ll always remember my surprise when a distant family member who is a medical doctor told me about buying lottery tickets each week.  Doing this in a no-loss way will become quite attractive to people, especially as the lottery begins to grow in size.  Liquidity has its own network effect.

On the other hand, government use lotteries as a voluntary form of taxation - and governments tend to get quite prickly when someone competes with their lines of business.  This will be interesting to see in the long-term.

With things like stablecoin.services and wallets like Argent/Gnosis Safe, it’s quite possible to imagine a new wave of less technical users being able to easily use PoolTogether.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

Joel Monegro returns with the sequel to Fat Protocols.  How long until this starts showing up in decks of fund managers trying to raise capital?

It’s starting to seem like Keynes’ animal spirits are turning bullish in crypto, and particularly on Eth.  Things like payments migrating to Eth from Bitcoin (it was a bit surprising they were ever on BTC) certainly don’t seem to have been priced into the market at all, as markets tend to overshoot quite a bit.   Must be the animal spirits.


General

And general is its usual glorious mismash of things.  Polynomial commitment papers to satirizing the self-important crypto thought leaders.

Do most people in crypto understand that their hardware wallet is not safe against a sophisticated attacker with physical access?   I feel like most people don’t.  There is a solution that is close to shipping: the GridPlus Lattice agent is tampering resistant.  It’s a little more expensive, but it’s one thing that could actually make it practical to own and use crypto.

Posted at 11:08 AM
Saturday, February 1, 2020

I quit caffeine for 30 days for Prysmatic Labs

I quit caffeine for 30 days.  As I type this, I am sipping mate.

I finished my 30 days because of a challenge from WeTrust:

image


I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it, but the pledged amount is about $560 USD given current ETH spot prices.  How could I not do my part for one of Eth2′s client implementation teams?


image


Plus, I had an ace up my sleeve: on day 0, I had surgery, so for the first few days I was in too much pain to notice the lack of caffeine. Can you tell which Week in Ethereum News issue I did under excruciating pain?

A few observations

  • I had my my first mate about 5 minutes after I completed 30 days.  Surprisingly I did not have any great “oh wow, caffeine is so efficacious again” moments on returning to it.
  • As such, I never really struggled with forgoing caffeine, per se.
  • But I had a few days where I felt pretty blue.  Certainly this was partly in response to some negative events in my life (nothing too serious, but a whole series of annoying things.)  In retrospect, I don’t think those days would have been quite so blue with a little caffeine.
  • I finished the 30 days almost two weeks ago. Since then I went without caffeine for two days.  One of those days I felt like I never got started.
  • This mate I’m drinking right now is fantastic.


Quitting caffeine occasionally is a worthwhile experience  I did it in mid-Jan last year, whereas this year I finished in mid-January.  I’ll try to make caffeine fasts a more regular occurrence.  Of course I said that last year and then I didn’t do it again for almost a year…

Posted at 4:32 PM