NEWS
Grin mainnet launch
Grin, a cryptocurrency that leverages the mimblewimble privacy technology, has just gone live on mainnet.
Named after the tongue-tying curse in the Harry Potter book series, mimblewimble is a protocol that fuses transactions together such that they are indecipherable – even on a public digital ledger.
Wyoming introduces bill offering cryptocurrencies legal clarity
In a significant move for the advancement and legitimization of cryptocurrencies and blockchain businesses in the United States, Wyoming has introduced a bill that aims to clarify the legal position of digital assets, as well as offer digital asset custody through banks rather than financial institutions.
The Bill offers three classifications of digital assets; digital securities, digital assets, and most importantly, virtual currencies which give cryptocurrencies the same treatment as money within the state.
Bitfury launches suite of Lightning Network business products
The Bitfury Group today released a product bundle designed to make the Lightning Network easier for vendors and consumers to use.
The product list includes an open-source Lightning Network-enabled bitcoin wallet, a hardware terminal and e-commerce software for merchants and payment processors to accept Lightning Network payments, a suite of developer tools, and a public Lightning Network node to help bitcoin users open and create payment channels. The products were created and are supported by Bitfury’s Lightning Network engineering and research team, Lightning Peach.
QtumX reaches 10,000 TPS in benchmark tests
Recently we did some benchmark testing on QtumX. It illustrates that QtumX can handle more than 10,000 TPS. This paper shares the method, process, and results on how we achieved this throughput level.
New Ethereum dev tools from 0x
Today we’re releasing four new tools to help Ethereum developers working on smart contracts. We’re excited to finally release these tools publicly, as we have been using them for a while internally at 0x and have shared them with a few other projects in the community.
Waffle 2.0 released
After weeks of hard work, I am glad to announce the release of Waffle version 2.0, with a dozen new functionalities.
FEED
Ethereum is (arguably) doomed to be centralized
I will preface this blog post by saying that my aim here is to set out and list some suggestive, not definitive, evidence I see of increased centralization in the Ethereum ecosystem. It sets out a hunch, not a mathematical proof. If you disagree with my opinion, that’s your prerogative. If you want to convince me otherwise, go dig up the hard data and prove me wrong.
96 theses for Crypto in 2019
There have been a few good predictions pieces so far this year. This one is my encore from last year, with a little help from my colleagues at Messari, who are building the industry’s best market intelligence platform.
Without further adieu…
The Moloch DAO: Collapsing the firm
Organisations come in many shapes and sizes. The blockchain allows us to experiment with radical new ways to organise around collective goals. We’ve seen the ICO boom (and bust, for now). For many, it was a novel way to re-imagine how certain projects can come to fruition and exist. ICO’s, however, are only the start and tip of the iceberg of what’s to come. In this article, I will detail thoughts around the Moloch DAO. It’s a new type of organisation that blurs and redefines the definition of a firm.
Architecture design of Ethereum-based private Katinrun Foundation token
Katinrun is the first open source blockchain community in Thailand. We are developing an Ethereum-based donation platform where a donee who needs some support and a donor who wants to give support can meet together. We are aiming at creating a donation platform that provides transparency and accountability to every donation campaign. The platform we are creating, moreover, must be fully driven by an open community.
Bitcoin mining attacks are overblown
Mining attacks are overblown, mostly by people that are trying to print their own money (or at least be the elite in the new currency). 51% attacks are too costly to be economical, have too little a payoff to generate much money and are too limited to hurt more than perhaps a few companies or individuals.
It’s even possible that a 51% attack that screws an exchange out of 100 BTC or so wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing for Bitcoin. Much like the BCH hard fork, it’s possible such an event would prove Bitcoin’s antifragility and cause a large rally.
“Fake Stake” attacks on chain-based Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies
This article is the public disclosure of a series of resource exhaustion vulnerabilities investigated by a team of students. These vulnerabilities have affected 26+ Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies in total and would allow a network attacker with a very small amount of stake to crash any of the network nodes running the corresponding software.
Why 2019 will be the year of the DAO
Once we understand what DAOs are useful for and what types of organizations they tend to beget, the next question becomes what are the global macro trends that would lead people to want to build those types of organizations or have those types of use cases? A set of trends stand out.
BLOCKCHAIN FOR NEWBIES
The case for Ethereum scalability
Over the past few months, we have noticed a significant number of articles proclaiming the imminent failure and collapse of the Ethereum platform due to its inability to scale and its overall lack of user traction. This is hardly a surprise; with many new emerging technologies, we see a similar hype cycle: the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” is followed rapidly by the “Trough of Disillusionment”. In the case of Ethereum, we have passed the former and are well on our way through the latter.
Everything (and even more) you need to know about Lightning Network
The Lightning Network has incredible momentum heading into 2019 with upgrades across liquidity provisioning, privacy, security, and usability. The first apps are starting to be built as developer confidence improves and barriers to entry drop.
Ethereum essentials: Node nuances
In order to be an active block and transaction verifying participant in the Ethereum network (a majority of dapps, miners, Infura, etc.), the disk size required to run a full node currently sits at ~130 – 150GB.
The growth in Ethereum’s chain size is well known (+200% Y/Y), however the size itself isn’t the only friction, as fully synced nodes require constant cryptographic-linked verification in order to confirm transactions.
The cost to run a full node will vary dramatically across an end-user. For many, users can run a full node on AWS for anywhere from $50-$100 a month, or even a local instance (~300 GB of SSD) for as low as ~$30/month.
Considering the rapid decline in active Ethereum nodes (down ~66% since the start of 2018), the costs of minimizing trust may be getting too high for the average active network participant.
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