“With the mainnet launch of the first phase of eth2.0 (called the “beacon chain”) expected later this year, we can imagine a number of exciting use cases leveraging interoperability between the two networks (ahead of merging eth1 into eth2).
Validators in eth2 (analogous to eth1’s miners) use the BLS signature scheme working over a different elliptic curve known as BLS12-381. Work has been underway for these BLS precompiles [to be incorporated in eth1] seen in the current draft EIP-2537.
The EIP-2537 precompiles will immediately help with the eth2 launch by enhancing the deposit contract user experience and lays the ground work for the construction of an eth2 light client inside eth1. The BLS12-381 curve itself can be used to construct zk-SNARKs and the use of BLS in other blockchains paves the way to interoperability with those networks.” [See article for full details.]
See Also: EIP-2537 Accepted for ‘Berlin’ Upgrade
See Also: The 1.x Files: The Updated Stateless Tech Tree
Recommended read.
“tBTC will launch on Ethereum mainnet on April 27th, 2020. The launch will provide users with the ability to deposit BTC, mint and redeem tBTC, and use it in Ethereum DeFi apps.
tBTC will not overtake Ether as trustless economic bandwidth on Ethereum, it will consume it. The design behind tBTC relies on over-collateralizing Ether to secure every tBTC on the network (150%).
Looking at BTC’s liquid market cap (or total economic bandwidth) of $134B, tokenizing 1% of the outstanding supply would net $1.34B in tBTC. In turn, this would require at least $2.01B in Ether as trustless collateral to support the asset, consuming roughly 10% of current trustless economic bandwidth on Ethereum. At 5% of the liquid supply? tBTC requires $10.5B of collateralized Ether or 56% of available economic bandwidth.
The key takeaway here is that if tBTC does succeed on DeFi, the it’s likely to drive value to Ether given it requires over-collateralized ETH to mint tBTC.
And importantly, the future implementation of mechanisms like EIP 1559 further entrench ETH as an essential asset to the network. From this vantage point, tokenized BTC is symbiotic to ETH value accrual, not parasitic.“
See Also: Chico Crypto Breaks Down Projects Bringing BTC to ETH (Video)
“If you’re a virus and you want to spread, one of your biggest assets is not being taken seriously, fast enough. Decentralized prediction markets will soon make this harder by helping surface, signal, and hedge pandemic risk…fast.
Prediction markets shine in cases where you have disparate information spread among many actors and malincentives to suppress or distort this information.
It’s early days for open prediction markets, but I expect that in the next year, we will start to see glimmers of the potential of these markets to forecast and hedge risk around everything from the economy to elections to the spread of infectious disease. When the next Coronavirus strikes, it may face a fresh and formidable foe: open prediction markets.”
Quick overview of some of the top DeFi projects. Recommended read.
“To summon a DAO is an expensive operation as far ETH contracts go, costing 6.5m gas, which is about $4 at standard gas rates of 3.5 gwei. But consider you just summoned a globally accessible digital company complete with legal documents, bank accounts, and capital coordination tools!
OpenLaw markup language can also quickly spin legal wrappers to Moloch DAO functions, and pretty much any DAO or Ethereum actions for that matter.”
“One of the use cases of VDFs is generating public and unbiasable randomness without a trusted third party. This randomness can be used to enable more secure and scalable consensus protocols [will be used in Eth2].
This project, as part of the VDF Alliance, began in early 2019 to evaluate the feasibility of developing fast, open, hardware for computing verifiable delay functions.”
“The Lien protocol allows anyone to create an ETH derivative in a simple, elegant way.
The innovative features of this protocol include providing a secure derivatives market with no liquidation involved and enabling a fully decentralized stable coin designed to function without over-collateralization and a cumbersome governance mechanism.”
See Also: Lien Protocol
See Also: ENS Roadmap Update
See Also: RocketPool Development Update
See Also: What are Reddit’s blockchain-based community points?
“The HTC executive claimed that the crypto world is “under threat” from hashrate dominance by giant mining pools, so he believes democratizing access via mobile phones is one way to eliminate the problem.
Mining on mobile is an important research topic in understanding the development of secure crypto networks. The number of mobile phones in 2020 is approaching 3.5 Billion, which would further decentralize and distribute the hash rate and mining power of such crypto networks.“
The Disrupt 