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CENTRAL CONCERN: Ethereum might have a centralized point of failure right now: Infura, a popular technology which handles some 13 billion code requests each day. The service is thought to underpin the majority of decentralized applications (dapps) in the ecosystem, and is operated by a single provider, ethereum development studio ConsenSys.
Afri Schoedon, release manager for the Parity client, said two months ago that “if we don’t stop relying on Infura, the vision of ethereum failed,” expressing the need for a decentralized alternative, reiterating the point in subsequent tweets as well.
Nor is Schoedon alone. Infura co-founder Michael Wuehler called Schoedon’s view “a valid concern” in an interview with CoinDesk, adding that “if every single dapp in the world is pointed to Infura, and we decided to turn that off, then we could, and the dapps would stop working.”
At present, Infura is believed to account for somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the 11,803 ethereum full nodes operating. However, because Infura nodes are highly reliable, it may be supporting a disproportionate amount of traffic on the network.
To combat this, a number of efforts are being made to find a viable alternative. Parity Technologies, for example, released a new code library to aid developers in building light clients, negating the need to rely on Infura. Full Story
CONSENSYS 2.0: Ethereum development studio ConsenSys is eyeing a strategic shift to reduce its dependency on the crypto market's prices. Founder Joseph Lubin told CoinDesk in an interview that the company is "refocusing [its] priorities," after announcing a series of reforms.
Dubbed ConsenSys 2.0, the shift means the firm will focus its funding "more rigorously" on projects with viable business models, rather than "cool projects" as it has done in the past.
“We will more quickly declare projects a ‘learning success’ and disband them, enabling their elements – technology, technologists, and entrepreneurs – to diffuse back into the sea of potentiality and reconstitute into another project with the benefit of greater experience," he said.
And while ConsenSys has yet to follow other crypto startups in cutting staff and downsizing in light of the bear market, Lubin did not rule out future layoffs, saying "there's nothing I want to say concretely about that at this point." Full Story
TECH TRANSPLANT: One of the top-five hospitals in the U.S., Massachusetts General Hospital, is partnering with Korean blockchain startup MediBloc in the hopes of finding better ways to store and share patient data.
Synho Do, director of the Laboratory of Medical Imaging and Computation, a joint venture between the hospital and Harvard Medical School, told CoinDesk that the partnership is aimed at exploring the “potentials of blockchain technology to provide secure solutions for health information exchange,” as well as other purposes.
The trouble with patient data is that multiple entities – hospitals, research bodies, insurance and pharmaceutical companies – need the information about those that are receiving medical help. But currently, they’re all keeping their own data, and it can’t be shared securely and is often in incompatible formats.
MediBloc will look to develop a distributed ledger platform capable of easily transferring information from one terminal to another, as well as quickly converting data from an existing format to a more universal standard, CEO Allen Wookyun Kho explained. Full Story
OPENING THE KIMONO: Aion Foundation has published the first in a series of reports detailing its financials, providing a rare degree of transparency for a token project.
The non-profit has has sold off nearly half of the crypto it raised (then worth $23 million) during a token sale in October 2017, and now boasts some $14 billion in total assets, not counting the Aion tokens it holds in reserve. That's after spending more than $10 billion launching its blockchain platform.
CEO Matt Spoke explained that the startup “liquidated a decent amount of” bitcoin and ether to ensure it remained “stable” during the ongoing bear market.
Spoke estimates that the foundation has sufficient funding for the next 18 months of operation, and may seek additional funds in that time. Full Story |
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 Cryptocurrencies are in a bear market right now, but some fundamentals show reason for optimism. Our recently released State of Blockchains report provides a holistic understanding of the growth and decline of the market. Here are a few highlights: - The entire market lost about 11 percent, falling from $243 bn to $215 bn. However, when analyzing MoM, we find that the negative growth is diminishing. September saw -7 percent compared to prior months this year being in the negative double digits.
- Bitcoin’s (BTC) price grew by 3 percent with news of positive adoption development on the Lightning Network and Square Cash, however, the ETF rejection might have slowed growth.
- EOS transaction counts grew 7255 percent in July. This is the result of its blockchain launching in June. It hit negative growth of 68 percent in September.
- ICO funding for Q3 settled at a total of $2.3 bn, which was down 68 percent since the last quarter.
- 52 percent of survey respondents agreed that we are in a bear market, but 58 percent consider prices undervalued.
Learn more about the crypto market in Q3 across price, network, exchange, developer, and social fundamental metrics in our recently released State of Blockchains report here. |
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| ANNUS HORRIBILLIS: Down 72 percent from its yearly opening price, BTC looks set to post its biggest annual loss on record – unless the bulls can push prices back above $6,000, that is. That seems a tall task right now. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST NEW YORK TIMES: More than merely the tech behind bitcoin, blockchain promises to “decentralize the structures governing all economic transactions and, in the process, redefine our concept of trust,” according to a guest piece in the NYT. However, one important factor threatens to undermine that potential, it says. As distributed markets scale in size, user trust often drops proportionally. This can be tackled by stemming user growth or by centralizing control. Unfortunately, the author, Paolo Tasca of the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies, opines, “the blockchain community seems to favor increased centralization.” All public blockchain networks are centralized, he says, with small groups making and enforcing any rules. Such governance issues “undermine the credibility of blockchain as a trust machine for the new P2P economy,” according to Tasca, and have led to a war for the control of blockchain systems rather than a “new common good.” THE REST OPENSECRETS: Is an alt-right activist behind a “ dark money" bitcoin contribution to Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz? That’s a possibility raised in an article by Open Secrets, which suggests that the activist and accused Holocaust denier, Chuck Johnson, is linked to a firm that made a $25,000 bitcoin contribution to a conservative political fundraising committee that “spent at least $44,700 in support of Gaetz’s reelection campaign.” The bitcoin donation was reportedly made in the name of “Castar Capital,” a now-dissolved firm of which Johnson is listed as CEO in public filings. Other evidence also points to a link between the two. FEC filings for Gaetz don’t list any contributions from Johnson, the article says. FORBES: With the crypto bear market rampaging on, investors in China are getting jittery. The growing skepticism around the tech has reached such levels that blockchain startups are now starting to struggle to find injections of capital, according to a piece from Forbes. And while blockchain is still seen as having potential, its community’s claims of disruption across industries and economies are now being perceived to be exaggerated. "It is a period of disillusionment. As much as I am a believer in the long term disruptive power of blockchain, it cannot solve all the problems in the world," Bonnie Cheung, venture partner at 500 Startups, told the news source. The problems in finding investment now mean that a large number of young firms are failing. According to an expert cited in the piece, a figure of 40 percent may be conservative. However, the downturn may also be good for the industry, said the CEO of Huobi China, with “poor-quality” projects being “flushed” from the space and stronger ones continuing to develop, little affected by the market woes. |
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