Forem: ETHPlanet

Meet the Building the Next Digital World Hackathon Winner

ETHPlanet — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 04:23:57 +0000

The Building the Next Digital World Hackathon (also the Hacktober festival) has come to an end. The theme for the hackathon was about projects that focus on helping people during this difficult time and beyond. We encouraged all kinds of builders to join us and create a reciprocal world, with the power of blockchain technology.

Builders from countries across Asia and Europe coming together to launch something innovative or create unique solutions for real-life problems. We were truly impressed with all of the projects that came out of this hackathon.

Now it’s time to announce the winners!

🏆 Most Social Value: Intoo TV

P2P live streaming platform powered by the blockchain
We often see YouTube or Facebook users being judged on their content by the company itself. That’s why we need decentralized alternatives. If you’re familiar with Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook Live, you’re no stranger to Intoo TV. Unlike the centralized platforms, Intoo TV is an Ethereum-based live streaming platform that allows you to design, share, and monetize your real-life experiences — you can literally earn ETH every time you go live.

“Love the handsome idea that can already be implemented and offer a social aspect we all need in times of pandemic,” our judge said in the comment.

🏆 Most Potential: VerityNet

Fairness apps and architectures for DeFi
In many ways, 2020 is the year of DeFi (or shall we say DeFi-ned or DeFi’ed the year?). VerityNet is trying to solve the problem in the decentralized financial world by building fairness apps and architectures with the help of Aave, zkSnark, zkRollups, and Chainlink Oracle. People can use VerityNet to verify whether the loans are tokenized based on valid proofs, and much more. Also, people can swap between NFT collateral backed loans and fungible collateral backed loans in a seamless manner on VerityNet.

VerityNet is currently on Matic testnet and we can’t wait to see it go live on the mainnet.

🏆 Best Speculative Design: XPLOR

A user-owned satellite with a crypto twist
As a satellite-as-a-service platform, XPLOR empowers a community of people to create satellites or gathering accurate weather data from higher altitudes where users can get precise weather data and be able to forecast weather.

Here’s how it works: With the help of XPLOR app and a relatively small cost (around 0.04 ETH as of October 22), you can launch your personal satellite and monitor weather data. You can also choose to make the weather data public or private.

Huge thanks to all of you who signed up, crafted ideas, built the projects, and embraced the challenges during the 47 days hackathon, you are incredible💪

See you next year!

If you'd like to check out more hackathon projects, please head over here.

ETHPlanet Hackathon Workshop 2: Dapp Data Analysis Using On-Chain Data

ETHPlanet — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 05:13:10 +0000

Are you looking to monitor dapp (decentralized apps) activity and report on the behavior of its users? Benefit from the availability of on-chain transactions to analyze activity.

As part of the ETHPlanet Hackathon: Building the Next Digital World, in this dapp data workshop, we will take a look at what data sources and tools are available to report on on-chain transactions.

📅 Workshop Date: 10/8 (Thursday) at 10 AM EST / 10 PM SGT / 4 PM CET; 20 mins presentation and 15 mins Q&A.
🎙️ Mentor:Joris Bontje, founder of State of the DApps

📍 RSVP: Click HERE

About Joris Bontje: Joris is a Big Data Hacker & Software Engineer, Decentralized Autonomous Technologist and founder of the State of the DApps platform.

About State of the DApps: A not-for-profit curated directory of Decentralized Applications, also called DApps, which run on various blockchains.

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Join ETHPlanet Building the Next Digital World Hackathon here>> https://ethplanet-hackathon.devfolio.co/

ETHPlanet Hackathon Workshop 1: Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)

ETHPlanet — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 06:12:35 +0000

As part of the ETHPlanet Hackathon: Building the Next Digital World, the EIP workshop will be a journey of process improvement with an overview of EIP and network upgrade in Ethereum.

📅 Workshop Date: 10/1 (Thursday) at 10 AM EST / 10 PM SGT / 4 PM CET; 20 mins presentation and 15 mins Q&A.

🎙️ Mentor: Pooja Ranjan from Ethereum Cat Herders

📍 RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ethplanet-hackathon-workshop-1-ethereum-improvement-proposal-eip-tickets-122656223065

Workshop overview: From the early stages of development, Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are the core component for continuous growth. This workshop aims to familiarize the present and proposed changes to the EIP and network upgrade process to new contributors of the ecosystem.

About Pooja Ranjan: Working towards creating awareness and promotion of Ethereum for several years with EtherWorld, she is the proud Herder-in-chief of Ethereum Cat Herders, helping the Ethereum community with decentralized project management.

About Ethereum Cat Herders: Decentralizing Ethereum project management, aiming to bring the minimum amount of order that chaos needs to move Ethereum forward.

Join ETHPlanet Building the Next Digital World Hackathon here>> https://ethplanet-hackathon.devfolio.co/

ETHPlanet Hackathon: Building the Next Digital World

ETHPlanet — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 07:03:18 +0000

ETHPlanet Hackathon: Building the Next Digital World

The hackathon is to encourage a reciprocal world in the next digital generation, envisioned with the power of blockchain technology. This hackathon will be the ultimate platform for hackers, builders, artists, designers, and anyone else from all backgrounds who want to build, create, and move forward, together.

📅 Date: Sept. 9 - Oct. 25
🌐 Organizers: ETHPlanet, CAC, Chainlink, Kaiyuanshe, and CSDN
💰Prize: $20K

Check out the challenges and join the hackathon: Click HERE

We’re welcoming everyone to participate in the hackathon. Hope you can learn something and win some money — it could be your first fair launch fund or some seed money for you to start a side hustle.

Also, it is going to be a wonderful opportunity for connecting with fellow builders and building cool stuff together.

Hope you can join us and we can't wait to see what you build!

Zero-Knowledge Proofs, zkRollups, and Ethereum Layer 2 Scaling Solutions

ETHPlanet — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 07:04:15 +0000

Zero-knowledge techniques are mathematical methods used to verify things without sharing or revealing underlying data.

"Zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that they know a value x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that they know the value x." -- Wikipedia

In the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem, Matter Labs is bridging the gap between cutting-edge academic research on Zero-Knowledge Proofs and their applications in usable products. It started out of scientific curiosity, the joy of engineering, and a deep conviction: The most impactful way to improve the world today is to provide an open and free alternative to its existing, deeply flawed financial system. Recently, Matter Labs helped Reddit with their bake-off scaling challenge.

If you're interested in ZKP or just curious to learn the possible scaling solution for Ethereum, we have an AMA with Matter Labs' CEO Alex Gluchowski on Thursday at 8:30 AM ET.

Hope you can join us!

More details: https://medium.com/ethplanet/ethplanet-ama-with-alex-gluchowski-from-matter-labs-6364d2257d52

EDCON 2020: A Recap of Everything You Need to Know

ETHPlanet — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 07:34:51 +0000

From eth2 updates to thought-provoking discussions to key insights by the leaders and builders

EDCON 2020 took place virtually for the first time last week. It was a packed three days of development updates, announcements, insights, and demos. More than 2,000 Ethereumers and blockchain enthusiasts attended EDCON online and we pride ourselves on bringing together leaders and builders from around the Ethereum world who are shaping the way we live, work, and innovate.

All the keynotes and panels can be replayed on LinkTime and ETHPlanet YouTube channel.

Vitalik Buterin: From ETH1 to ETH2, Opportunities and Challenges

“Yay, 5 candles for 5 years,” Ethereum founder Vitalik wished Ethereum blockchain Happy Birthday at the beginning of his keynote. Then he gave us a general overview of Ethereum 2.0, from the goal to the history, from proof-of-stake philosophy to the eth2 Medalla testnet to the long-term roadmap. “To reduce risks, eth2 deployment process is split into phases,” said Vitalik. Testing is one of the “remaining challenges” — “Testing is hard and we know that from the experience we had in eth1.” As for the “unknowns”, he said, “I am confident that proof-of-stake is going to be better, but at the same time, we have to admit that proof-of-stake and sharding these two both contain these unknown unknowns.”

Ethereum 2.0: The Journey, the Excitement, the Gas Price, the Staking, and the Testnet

Eth2 is one of those topics that gets people curious and excited at the same time. Whether you’re new to eth2, or you’re just getting started and setting up and running a validator on the Prysm testnet, the Day 1 of EDCON packed out everything you need to know about eth2.

Danny Ryan, the core researcher at Ethereum Foundation, talked about the state of the eth1 and eth2 merger. “One really exciting part of this is what we’ve been building eth2 over the past two years is it’s essentially a piece of software that is a highly sophisticated consensus mechanism — it can handle hundreds of thousands of validators and it can handle dozens of shards,” Danny said. “So in the phase 1.5 version of the software, these two pieces of software (eth1 and eth2) live and work together.” “Eth1 is like the user layer and eth2 is the system layer,” Danny further explained. In the end, he showed us a demo of eth mainnet running on eth2’s beacon chain.

Another core researcher Hsiao-Wei Wang gave us an introduction about eth2 phase 1. Hsiao-Wei said they’re planning to introduce an EIP-1559 style approach for the fee market to adjust the gas price. She also talked about crosslinking, custody games, shard networking, the challenges, and more.

Afri Schoedon, the blockchain operations at Byzantine Fault joined us and talked about the final road to Ethereum 2.0 and gave us a little bit of background about how seven client teams gathered together last September and decided to make clients “talk” and work on single-client and multi-client testnets. Afri thinks the final milestones will be around October and November this year, “if everything works out.”

The eth2 Medalla testnet went live right before the EDCON 2020. We had Terence Tsao from Prysmatic Labs shared with us the 8 lessons that he and his team have learned from building the Onyx testnet, including accounts UX improvements, initial syncing improvements, and more. And as you probably already know that in the past weekend, a bug almost crashed the network and Terence’s team released an update to fix the bug within a short period of time.

Gas prices surged to an all-time high last week, so there’s no better time to take a deep look into the gas price and explore the possible solution. Tomasz Kajetan Stańczak, the founder of Nethermind, shared his new improvement proposal — EIP-1559 for the Ethereum gas price. “The most important thing for me is that the basefee will be observable on-chain, so something that you really don’t have access to at the moment from the perspective of the virtual machine will be available for the smart contracts… so the gas price that can no longer be manipulated by the miners,” Tomasz said. “We should see less volatility of gas price much and more predictability.”

Rolling up on Layer 2

Karl Floersch, CTO of Ethereum Optimism, opened his talk very positively by saying “Today we’re gonna talk about a lot of optimistic stuff.” “The current latency is 15 seconds in the best case and that is too high, we want it to be 5 seconds… and we need to increase the throughput.” He talked about how we can use Optimistic Rollup and the OVM (Optimistic VM) to safely increase Ethereum throughput and L2 scalability. Then he shared how to reduce time to transaction confirmation with transaction sequencers and use MEVA (miner extractable value auction) to redirect miner fees to support the network.

The co-founder of Fuel Labs John Adler shared his thoughts on scaling Ethereum with Optimistic Rollups, too. “Number of consensus nodes has nothing to do with throughput. Because consensus is not the bottleneck,” said John. “Decentralization is measured by the cost to run a full node, it is not the number of the full nodes or the number of nodes in general and this is a social contract.” The design paradigm of Rollup is you do execution off-chain and you only use Ethereum for data availability. With Rollups, “the consensus nodes (miners) and so on and also non-consensus nodes (users) only need to make data available and order it and they don’t have to execute the transactions” — that’s why can Rollups scale. And John did a comparison for Optimistic Rollup and zkRollup and told us what’re the unique benefits of Optimistic Rollup.

“Scalability = Increasing throughput without increasing node load,” said Alex Gluchowski, the CEO of Matter Labs, the team behind the zkSnyc.

Alex compared the multiple scaling solutions and also did a side-by-side comparison for zkRollup and Optimistic Rollup. Then Alex gave us an update on zkSnyc — the zkRollup protocol implementation, and their Reddit scaling challenge submission with a demo showcase of how zkSnyc works in the end.

Cross-Chain Composability and a Multichain World

“Regardless of whatever vision you subscribe to for the future of this space, whether that’s eth2 with a bunch of different shards or layer 1 or layer 2 with a bunch of different layer 2 options, we’re going to end up in a multi-chain world,” said Arjun Bhuptani, the co-founder of Connext. The current experience completely takes away the interoperability and composability, so we need 3 things: Users can transfer funds across chains, users can call contracts on other chains, and contracts can call contracts on other chains. That’s why Arjun and the team are building Connext — “a point-to-point network that allows you to make unbreakable commitments off-chain”. They also built a simple swap UI Spacefold so you can instantly transfer assets across different L2s and it looks pretty cool.

DeFi: The Current State of the DeFi and the Path to Mass Adoption

Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Aave (Aavesome) kicked off Day 0, the first day of EDCON. “Aave started in January, we basically started from ‘zero’ and as same for Compound and Maker. And today in terms of the size, it has grown a lot. This is good in a sense of adoption,” Stani said. “DeFi is risky business… and smart contract audits do not guarantee safety.” That’s why Aave has been building Aave protocol with incentive design to empower and improve safety. “There is a lot of things happening now in the liquidity and the mining space and you should not compromise your security on that (reward programs that you’re participating), you should think twice and think about what are the risks involved and how the risks handled, and this is really important.”

“Our goal in DeFi is not to create a system that is just generating risk, I think the goal is to basically create a system that interoperable anyone can deploy things and new products, but at the same time, the risk is mitigated that everyone can participate into the protocols,” said Stani.

Avalanche co-founder, Emin Gün Sirer told us a “story” of trapped exotic instruments on blockchain — DeFi King, and of course, the computer science professor at Cornell had to dress up as Joe Exotic for a little while. He told us that the current state of the DeFi has two problems, one is “the infrastructure is abysmal” and the other one is “it is inward-facing”. He started exploring the solutions to enhance the performance and scalability by showing us three case studies: DEX, prediction markets, and corporate debt.

In his summary, “DeFi can fix this, but only if its infrastructure problems are fixed…the performance problem, the scale problem, and the difference between these two and I alluded to some of the control problems that DeFi faces today,” said Emin. “We believe that a chain design for low latency, high throughput, and control over the network will open up the stage for fast competitive, externally-facing DeFi instruments.”

Jordan Lyall, the DeFi product lead at ConsenSys, shared about his work on DeFi Score, a community-driven effort to bring transparency and accountability to DeFi. Jordan also gave us some great advice on how to approach risk as a DeFi user: You need to realize that security is on a sliding scale, don’t expect someone else to educate you and do your own research, and when it doubt sit it out. And how to approach risk as a DeFi developer? Jordan suggested that you can create a culture of vigilance, focus on the user, and build in safety by default.

Compound founder Robert Leshner, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, Curve founder Michael Egorov, and fintech strategist Hao Wei had a panel discussion about how to take DeFi mainstream. The moderator, Dragonfly Capital founding partner Alexander Pack asked tons of great questions during the one-hour-long panel and one of them was “one single thing could move DeFi forward the most if happen today?” Robert and Hao said it’s “time”, and Michael and Kain’s agreed on “scalability”.

“Heroes drive stories.” — Camila Russo, Founder of The Defiant

That’s it from this year’s EDCON and THANK YOU everyone for tuning in. We really hope to see each of you at EDCON 2021 and we can’t wait to hear more stories from you!

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Read more here

EDCON, the Community Ethereum Development Conference to Take Place Virtually on August 9–11

ETHPlanet — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 06:53:15 +0000

EDCON happens every year, from EDCON 2017 Paris Edition to EDCON 2018 Toronto, to last year’s Sydney Edition. This year, in early February, we decided to cancel EDCON Vienna due to the impact that the COVID-19 crisis has had on the world and we were hoping that we could resume EDCON sometime soon.

And here we go:

Beginning next Sunday, August 9, over 50 speakers (and more to be announced) will present at EDCON 2020 Online Edition.

We know it’s not the same as one of those EDCONs that you went to, and also the online conference is certainly not the same as meeting people in real life. But it will be the first time that all the EDCON keynotes and sessions will be made publicly available, without any charge, and everyone who is interested in Ethereum technology or blockchain in general is welcome to join us.

EDCON 2020 Online Edition will feature a keynote address by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, core researchers and developers Karl Floersch, Danny Ryan, Hsiao-Wei Wang, and others from across Ethereum core development team, Ethereum Foundation, and the Ethereum community.

The Preliminary Agenda

EDCON 2020 Online Edition starts at 8:00 AM Eastern Time every day from August 9 through 11, streaming at https://next.brella.io/join/edcon2020.

Day 0: DeFi talks with top-notch speakers
Day 1: Development updates from Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum core developers
Day 2: Dapps, DAO, new products and etc updates from Ethereum community and ecosystem

How to RSVP

You can save your spot at https://next.brella.io/join/edcon2020.

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It seems like all Ethereum-related conferences were canceled in 2020, leaving EDCON — the only existing large-scale conference that brings together the Ethereum community. We’re deeply grateful to all the Ethereum community members — from wherever you are — for staying connected with us — THANK YOU, and we hope to see you all at EDCON 2020 Online Edition!

About EDCON

EDCON is a non-profit global Ethereum conference that is held annually in different countries, and it is mainly committed to serving the Ethereum ecosystem, boosting the communication of Ethereum communities worldwide. For more information, visit https://edcon.io/.

Ethereum Summer Camp 2020 Week 3: Women in Ethereum

ETHPlanet — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 05:48:35 +0000

This week, we would like to set up a stage dedicated to elevating and empowering all the builders — who happened to be women — we’re here to support diversity in the industry.

How the blockchain industry is rethinking diversity, inclusion, and belonging in 2020? What are those women builders working on and what have they contributed to the ecosystem? What is the practical advice would they give to someone thinking about joining the industry?
Join us for insightful talks with women builders from the Ethereum community, followed by Q&A with the speakers.

Women in Ethereum Lightning Talks and Q&A

📅 Friday, July 24 | 12:00 PM to 1:40 PM EST
📺 We will be live streaming from YouTube

About Our Speakers

Isa Kivlighan is Head of Marketing at Aave. Isa was introduced to the blockchain through her Public Policy background, which leads her to discover Decentralized Finance and how blockchain can be used to build an open and equitable financial ecosystem.

Pooja Ranjan: Working towards creating awareness and promotion of Ethereum for several years with EtherWorld, she is the proud Herder-in-chief of Ethereum Cat Herders, helping the Ethereum community with decentralized project management.

Jaye Harrill: Passionate communications manager for blockchain security company Quantstamp. Jaye has a long leadership history in blockchain and Ethereum community spaces. She has dedicated her life to bringing broad visibility to the transformative changes this technology is expected to bring.

Anett Roliková, leading Ethereum Magicians Sessions and Councils at Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians. Doing Magic (Operations) behind all Magic that Ethereum Magicians requires :)

Alexis Gauba: Co-founder of Opyn, which is bringing hedging and risk management to DeFi using options, and is co-founder of she256, a 501c3 nonprofit focused on increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to entry in the crypto space.

Medha Kothari: Software Engineer at cLabs working on the Celo protocol, and Co-founder of she256, a nonprofit aiming to increase diversity and break down barriers to entry in the blockchain space.

Moderator — Annie Huang, a developer advocate for open source community. Currently, work as a community advocate at GitLab. She has dedicated to helping more people to the cutting-edge technology transformation for their daily lives.

More details: https://www.ethplanet.org/ethereum-summer-camp-2020/

Your Invite to the Ethereum Summer Camp 2020

ETHPlanet — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:57:00 +0000

On the day we decided to postpone EDCON — the annual global Ethereum Community Development Conference, a little over 4 months ago, we were hoping that we could resume the event sometime soon in the spring. But the COVID-19 crisis erupted globally and everything changed. It feels true strange to think about all the speakers we’ve already invited and the talks they were going to give, all the people, friends, and partners we were supposed to meet in person, and the dance — oh, we just miss dancing with you and Vitalik while we all “hang out on Zoom”.

Why not turn it virtually? How about a summer-long camping festival and everyone’s invited?

Today, we’re very excited to invite you from all over the world to join us for 8 weeks, 53 days and hundreds of hours of virtual Ethereum Summer Camp, featuring developers building Ethereum together, announcements from the community, updates from the builders and entrepreneurs, artists and DJs, workshops, and much more!

What Is Ethereum Summer Camp?

This year, starting on July 9, the first-ever summer-long Ethereum Summer Camp 2020 will be hosted virtually and free to attend for everyone. The best part? You will be able to attend a series of live-streamed ESC 2020 events, including EDCON, ETAC (powered by one of the largest software developers network in China — CSDN, Chinese Software Developer Network) event, workshops, ETHPlanet Hack, meetups from your home (or your couch), and we will share Ethereum-related resources to bring technology and inspiration to the learners in your life.

Also, we will set up a stage dedicated to elevating and empowering women in Ethereum — we’re here to support diversity in the industry.

The First Week of #ESC 2020 — Deep Dive into Eth 2.0

To kick off the #ESC2020, join us for FREE for a fun morning (or evening, if you’re in the APEC region like us) of insightful talks with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum core researchers Danny Ryan and Karl Floersch, followed by Q&A with speakers!

Deep dive into Eth 2.0 with Vitalik and Ethereum Core Devs

If you’re interested in exploring the potential of Ethereum blockchain and open source technology, ETHPlanet is a place of inspiration, tools, information, and the community you can trust.

► Visit our website here: 🌍 ETHPlanet.org 🌍

New York Blockchain Week Virtual Hackathon with $50K+ in prizes from 12 top projects

ETHPlanet — Tue, 12 May 2020 07:23:06 +0000

New York Blockchain Week Virtual Hackathon is in full swing!

Date: May 6 - 27
Sponsors: From the legendary blockchain projects, including Aave, Stellar, Arweave, ETC Labs, Synthetix, Elastos, Sia, REN, Biconomy, PoolTogether, FOAM, Quantstamp, and Uniswap.
Organizers: Gitcoin, Consensus Distributed, and Ethereal Summit
Check out the challenges and join the hackathon: Click HERE

Hackers will be encouraged to attend Ethereal and Consensus talks. Conference attendees will be encouraged to hack. We can all learn & earn together.

Source: Gitcoin