After almost three months into the “reboot” of the C++ team, I would like to give an update about the team itself, what we did and what we plan to do.

Team update

The so-called C++ team currently consists of Paweł Bylica (@chfast), Greg Colvin (@gcolvin), Liana Husikyan (@LianaHus), Dimitry Khokhlov (@winsvega), Yann Levreau (@yann300), Bob Summerwill (@bobsummerwill), me (@chriseth) and (kindly “donated” by Eris Industries) RJ (@VoR0220).

Paweł is the original author of the llvm-based EVM-to-native just-in-time compiler, re-joined in April and will continue improving the JIT.

Greg joined in February and already achieved substantial speedups for the C++ implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, using his experience from implementing the Java Virtual Machine for his former employer Oracle.

Liana and Yann are working on Solidity and its IDEs (yes, plural, see below!).

Dimitry is in charge of the consensus tests and is also working on the C++ core.

Bob joined in February (having been part of the community for a longer time) and is currently leading the ambitious effort of disentangling the C++ codebase. He was also a major contributor to the homestead guide.

RJ joined Eris industries in March and is working on the Solidity compiler.

Furthermore, the coordination and co-operation between the C++ and the Go teams is on a completely different level than before. One of the reasons why we improve the interpreter is to get a water mark for the go-ethereum interpreter and lessons learnt during that process will directly feed into the go interpreter, just to name one example.

Announcing Remix

Developing Solidity itself and providing resources and tools for people writing smart contracts and dapps is one of the largest areas of work for the C++ team. An essential such tool is a debugger for Solidity and the Ethereum Virtual Machine so that developers can “look inside” the virtual machine and find the exact spot in their code that is not doing what they expect it to do. Our IDE Mix is a wonderful piece of software that provides exactly this. Unfortunately, most people do not use it and prefer browser-solidity or just some unit testing tools.

This is understandable, people do not want to switch editors (I guess this is also why we got a vast number of Solidity plugins for existing IDEs in the past months) or install extra software. Furthermore, the relative amount of external contributions we received for the html5+js-based minimalistic IDE browser-solidity compared to C++/Qt-based Mix is just overwhelming.

Because of that and also in an effort to increase modularity, reusability and openness, we decided to rethink the way we want to provide developer tools: With the remix project we will create a set of reusable html5+js modules for developing and debugging smart contracts.

This means that it will be possible to integrate a debugger for EVM and Solidity into browser-solidity (which will also move to a more prominent place in the future), but also into visual studio code, atom, sublime, basically any IDE that is html5+js-based. You will even be able to fire up the debugger inside Mist, also for transactions in the past!

It is probably a bit too early to try out remix, but if you want, follow the instructions in the repository, but be sure to use the latest develop version of cpp-ethereum as backend node.

For everyone else: Here is a screenshot of an early proof of concept version:

Other Tasks

Concerning the current focus for other projects, we are improving the runtime performance of the virtual machine. Greg already made great progress in that area and still has a lot of ideas. We are currently setting up general benchmarks, so that we can compare the performance of different implementations and the difference between interpreters and just-in-time compilers. We plan to make the just-in-time compiler available to other implementations like py-ethereum and of course go-ethereum.

For Solidity, the main areas of work are currently fixed-point types, structs as part of the ABI and extending the usefulness of libraries via “inlineable” functions and templates. Furthermore, we would like to invite the community to write and publish useful libraries. Special thanks to Alex Beregszaszi (@axic), Nick Johnson (@Arachnid) and Andreas Olofsson (@androlo) for making a great start there!

Finally, we want to reduce the pain that is currently caused when working with the C++ codebase, especially due to external and intra-dependencies. We are already almost at the point where Solidity can be compiled in isolation and the goal is to move back to our old home, the ethereum/cpp-ethereum repository, splitting parts off only where it makes sense, namely for Mix, Solidity and EVMJIT.

We have long recognized that in order for cryptocurrency to reach mass adoption, a form of cryptocurrency that has higher price stability than existing cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH would be needed so that people can use the currency to store funds and engage in commerce without worrying about their monthly salary dropping by 57% between the time they receive it and the time they can use the money to buy products. Unfortunately, we’ve found that the existing stablecoins all have various flaws; Tether is unauditable, Nubits has already once collapsed in price, Seignorage Shares is after three years still just a whitepaper and MakerDAO is an inadequate joke because…. reasons. As a result, we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands, and issue our own officially branded stablecoin, and use this as an opportunity to make another ICO.

Introducing World Trade Francs.

World Trade Francs is a decentralized 4.0 stablecoin based on next-generation blockchain technology. World Trade Francs strives to construct a free trade and economic interaction system, utilizing next-generation blockchain and hypercube tangle technology. The protocol allows each user to freely buy, sell and hold stable tokens. The issuance, circulation, and trading of WTF, though decentralized self-governance, lay the foundation for the distribution and subscription of economic value, thereby empowering content creators as well as forming a decentralized free trade and economic interaction ecosystem. The app partners of WTF protocol include Peiwo, Obike, Gifto, Uplive, with a total of 4 millions users, making WTF a blockchain protocol with the most DAPP users in the world.

World Trade Francs will allow humanity to escape political oppression and achieve true individual self-sovereignty and global free trade, using permissionless global network, and a World Decentral Bank, which will be able to implement Perfect Monetary Policy that can allow the world to live together in harmony, all without any central points of censorship or control. By being decentralized, WTF will combine all benefits of capitalism and socialism with none of the downsides of either, creating a forward-thinking economic model for humanity in the twenty first century. Users will be able to hodl and trade WTF, the stablecoin, and FTW, the corresponding volatile coin that represents something economically equivalent to shares of future revenue from the WTF system, but technically a utility token because governments seem to really care about us falling on that side of the distinction for some reason.

We have already started talking to sketchy Pacific island nations national governments about integrating use of World Trade Francs as a reserve currency for international agreements, and plan to soon become the first currency to be explicitly endorsed for use in an international treaty. The World Decentral Bank also includes a basic income mechanism where member nations can apply to join and receive a share of WTF issuance on condition that they distribute it to their citizens. The condition for qualifying as a nation is approval from 100,000 internet libertarians, and so we are proud to welcome Sealand, Catalonia, Texas, six provinces of India and China, Nationy McNationFace and Harambe among our initial batch of 1576 member nations. Price stability of the WTF will be ensured via Oracles.

We strive to create a decentralized economy that allows everyone to freely buy, sell and hold stable tokens, without relying on centralized services. The legislative power will be transferred from an opaque centralized authority to transparent codes. Rules and platforms will be entirely transparent and based on faithfully executed smart contracts. By empowering the users, we will transform the economy on a global scale.

Expected price trajectory

Vitallk Vuterin	Barack Obama	Moose
Twitter scamming veteran. Raised over 4500 ETH from running a scam far more direct and honest than this one.	44th president of the United States. Not an advisor, we just think his face would be cool to have visible on here.	A literal moose.

The Swarm Team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Swarm client v0.3, the third proof-of-concept release (POC3) of the Ethereum Swarm client. The POC3 code is now merged into the official go-ethereum repository’s master branch.

Swarm 0.3 has been deployed to the public Testnet, and the Ethereum Foundation is running a 50-node strong cluster of Swarm nodes together with a public web gateway on https://swarm-gateways.net. We welcome everyone to try it out or commit to operate stable nodes.

The past year

It has been a year and a half since the first release of the POC2 series was deployed and the Swarm project launched its public alpha network.
Two Swarm summits, two orange papers and forty thousand lines of code later, it is time to take stock.

In the past year the Swarm team has grown in size and is now on fire delivering the vision. We have been busy redesigning the network layer, rewriting the retrieval protocol using a stream abstraction, rewriting connectivity management and the overlay network code as well as developed a sophisticated network simulation framework to test algorithmic correctness, scalability and fault tolerance of various subsystems.
POC3 code was finalised just in time for the Swarm Orange Summit in Ljubljana, where we had 80 participants and a very inspiring and creative week (watch this two-minute video hosted on Swarm) of talks and coding. It is inspiring to see a growing number of contributors and companies that want to build on swarm.

Swarm 0.3

Swarm content storage is a lot more than just “bittorrent on steroids”. The technical details can be found in the chapter on architecture in the new and improved Swarm guide. You’ll find a more thorough academic presentation of Swarm’s components in the orange papers or learn more about Swarm through the recorded conference talks.

In an earlier blog post, we introduced the basics of Swarm storage and content distribution.

At its core, Swarm is a service that provides APIs to upload and download content to the cloud and through URL-based addressing offers virtual hosting of websites and decentralised applications (dapps) without webservers, using decentralised peer-to-peer distributed infrastructure. The vision is that of a new internet which is not only fault-tolerant, has zero downtime and offers censorship resistance but is also economically self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. By compensating nodes for contributing their bandwidth and disk space, these incentives aim to achieve reliable low-latency scalable retrieval of popular content on the one hand and guarantees persistence of important yet rarely accessed data like archives or backups on the other. For smooth delivery Swarm will use the SWAP protocol (planned for POC3.1) while for storage guarantees it will use a two-tiered insurance system (planned for POC4).

Beyond the basics of data storage and delivery, the POC 3 release includes some new and experimental features.

PSS

The same p2p connections that are used for data storage and delivery can also be used for node-to-node messaging. PSS combines Swarm routing (bzz) with the Whisper (shh) encrypted message format (bzz+shh=pss). In short, PSS is a messaging protocol with strong privacy features running on top of the Swarm network. This messaging infrastructure can be the foundation of a whole new system of internode communication services (the email, tweet, newsletter of the future), hence, can be referred to as Postal Service over Swarm.

PSS is fully featured yet experimental on the new POC3 network and dapps can interact with it using a JSON RPC API. We are collaborating closely with companies and projects that want to use pss to build second-layer infrastructure. Mainframe is building a slack-alternative collaborative group communications tool (Onyx) and their web3 SDK, and Status have expressed interest in building it into their mobile chat.

Mutability

Another experimental new feature in POC3 is the Swarm Mutable Resource.
Typical in p2p storage systems, content is addressed by its digital fingerprint (hash) and any changes to the content results in a change of this address. Users of the web, however, are accustomed to mutable resources: when visiting URLs we expect to see the most up-to-date version of the ‘site’. In order to make it easy to access changing content at permanent human-readable addresses, Swarm integrates with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) on the Ethereum blockchain. This is what allows us to reference Swarm content by names like bzz://theswarm.eth.

Swarm POC3 adds another layer in the form of Mutable Resource Updates (MRU). These allow off-chain updates of content associated with an address at a potentially faster pace than ENS updates on the blockchain could support and without incurring the cost of on-chain transactions.

MRU is an experimental feature in current POC3 testnet and is still undergoing changes.

FUSE support

FUSE enables users to integrate Swarm data directly into their local file systems (only on Linux and Mac). Using this system, users can “mount a Swarm manifest” as if it were a regular directory. It supports file system read and write operations, in which all content is automatically synced with the Swarm.
In future, combining FUSE with Swarm Mutable Resources, it should be possible, for example, to sync your entire home folder between devices – the backend to a decentralised storage with a Dropbox-like functionality.

Encryption support

Swarm 0.3 comes with built-in encryption allowing for secure uploads of private data. The way encryption works users can upload a directory privately and still ‘share’ a subdirectory with specific peers.

Access Control Trees (Swarm 0.3.2) will offer an API for users to manage access to content independently of publishing it. Granted access will work across versions of resources.

The year ahead

The year ahead will be both exciting and challenging. As part of the POC3 series we are planning to switch on a revamped SWAP accounting system (Swarm 0.3.1) and enable ‘light’ Swarm nodes (Swarm 0.3.2).
Implementing erasure coding, proof of custody, insurance are also on the roadmap.
We are on target delivering Swarm POC4 (production beta prerelease) in 2019.

We keep on building a community with our allies who champion the values of web3 and actively collaborate through working groups, building the foundational infrastructure, the backbone of second-layer services such as databases (http://wolk.com), private data management (http://datafund.io), rights and creative works licensing (http://jaak.io), decentralised version control (ethergit, http://epiclabs.io), video transcoding and streaming service (http://livepeer.org), communication and collaboration (https://mainframe.com) and the list is growing.

Contact Us

We welcome your feedback and contribution. Come find us in our gitter channel or our github repository.

The Taipei Ethereum Meetup recently hosted Crosslink Taiwan 2019. It was a wonderful event and a perfect opportunity for the Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) to provide a Taiwan-specific wave of grants! The recipients are as follows.

Group 1: Ethereum-based Technical Projects: USD$5,000 awarded to each project

• Eauth (License: MIT): An OAuth-compatible service based on Ethereum credentials to authenticate users on a website.
• Ethereum Wallet SDK (License: LGPL-3.0): An SDK enabling Dapps to connect with different wallets.
• SOLL (License: Apache-2.0): A new compiler for generating Ewasm code from Solidity code.

The ceremony at Crosslink Taiwan. The pineapple is a pun of good luck in Taiwanese. Thanks to Vitalik for giving away pineapples.

• Ironman-Blockchain: New Web3.js and Solidity tutorials for 30 consecutive days!
• Open teaching materials: Open sourcing the materials for an Ethereum DApp Development course at National Chengchi University (NCCU).

Free Devcon Ticket Award

This award was designed to recognize long-term contributions made by local community members. Juin Chiu and Kimi Wu have interpreted and translated numerous hard research ideas from English to Mandarin, helping greatly with reducing language barriers and accelerating the spread of Ethereum knowledge. We were delighted to host Juin and Kimi at Devcon in Osaka and to see both of them again in Taipei shortly thereafter.

What’s Next?

One of Ethereum’s superpowers is the independent flourishing that occurs throughout its vast and vibrant ecosystem. Countless local Ethereum communities around the world are a big part of why Ethereum feels simultaneously global and personal for so many people.

Accordingly, the EF is continuously experimenting with ways to support communities around the world. We’re excited to apply what we’ve learned with our recent Korea, Japan, and now Taiwan focused grants programs in order to expand this concept even further.

Thank you to all of the community contributors who help make blockchain knowledge more accessible, thereby facilitating innovation, Ethereum adoption, and sharing Ethereum’s spirit around the world!

Thanks to Ethereum Foundation Special Projects team for the regional logo!
(From the back row, left) Albert (EF), Chang-Wu Chen (Open teaching materials), Vitalik Buterin (EF), Hung-Ying Tai (SOLL), and Ping Chen (Eauth). (From the front row, left) Juin Chiu, Anderson Chen (Ethereum Wallet SDK), and Ailin Liou (Ironman-Blockchain).

Coinbase has announced plans to raise $2 billion by issuing convertible senior notes to qualified institutional buyers, according to a statement released on Aug. 5.

The offering consists of two separate tranches: $1 billion in notes due 2029 and $1 billion in notes due 2032. These will be sold privately to institutional investors who meet specific qualification criteria.

Offering details

Coinbase stated that the initial purchasers of the notes will have a 13-day option to buy up to an additional $150 million of the 2029 and 2032 notes.

These notes are unsecured senior obligations that will accrue interest paid semi-annually. The 2029 notes will mature on Oct. 1, 2029, and the 2032 notes on Oct. 1, 2032, unless they are repurchased, converted, or redeemed before these dates.

The notes will be convertible into a mix of cash and Coinbase’s Class A common stock, at the company’s discretion. The specific terms, including the interest and initial conversion rates, will be determined when the offering is priced.

Coinbase has also structured capped call transactions for both series of notes, which are designed to minimize any dilution to its Class A shares when the notes are converted. These transactions aim to offset any additional cash payments the company may need to make beyond the converted note’s principal amount, subject to certain limits.

A portion of the net proceeds from the offering will be used to fund the capped call transactions. If the purchasers exercise their options to buy additional notes, Coinbase plans to use some of the additional proceeds to enter into further capped call agreements.

The remainder of the funds raised will be used for general corporate purposes, which may include working capital, capital expenditures, and investments in other companies or technologies.

Additionally, Coinbase may use part of the proceeds to repurchase its Class A common stock shares or repay its outstanding notes as market conditions allow.

Coinbase stock falls

According to Yahoo Finance data, Coinbase’s stock price fell by more than 2% during pre-market trading in response to the announcement. This decline came as part of the mixed reaction to the exchange’s recent quarterly earnings report, which failed to meet analyst expectations.

Compass Point analysts downgraded Coinbase’s stock from “Neutral” to “Sell,” citing growing competition from stablecoins and investor fatigue as key challenges for the company.

Additionally, they lowered their price target for Coinbase from $330 to $248 following a weaker-than-expected revenue performance in Q2.

On the flip side, Benchmark analysts expressed optimism about Coinbase’s prospects. They reiterated their “Buy” rating and raised their target price to $421, noting the company’s expanding services and influence in the institutional crypto sector.

Mentioned in this article

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Strategy’s co-founder, Michael Saylor, has again displayed his company’s Bitcoin portfolio tracker, highlighting the current value of its BTC holdings. This comes amid plans to raise up to $2.5 billion through a stock offering for more BTC purchases. 

Michael Saylor Showcases Strategy’s Bitcoin Holdings

In an X post, Michael Saylor shared an image of the company’s Bitcoin portfolio tracker, which showed that its 607,770 BTC holdings were currently worth around $71.8 billion. Saylor captioned the post, saying, “It all began with a quarter billion in bitcoin.” This refers to the amount the company initially invested to initiate this Bitcoin Strategy. 

Michael Saylor’s Strategy began buying Bitcoin in August 2020, when they first bought 21,454 BTC worth $250 million. Since then, the company has continued to make massive purchases, bringing its total holdings to 607,770 BTC, which it acquired for a total of $43.61 billion at an average price of $71,756 per BTC. Its latest purchase came between July 14 and 20, when it bought 6,220 BTC. 

Thanks to the Bitcoin price appreciation since Strategy began buying BTC, the company now boasts an unrealized gain of around $30 billion on its holdings. It is also worth noting that Michael Saylor’s company is the largest BTC treasury company. The company is well ahead of the other BTC treasury companies, with second-place MARA Holdings holding 50,000 BTC. 

Meanwhile, Michael Saylor’s post again hints that the company likely made another purchase in the week ending July 27. A BTC purchase announcement has most times followed his posts on the portfolio tracker. As such, there is the likelihood that the company will announce another Bitcoin purchase today, which it made between July 21 and 27. 

Strategy To Raise $2.5 Billion To Buy More BTC

Michael Saylor’s Strategy has also announced plans to raise up to $2.5 billion for more Bitcoin purchases. In a press release, the company revealed that it has upsized its STRC IPO from $500 million to $2.5 billion. The company plans to offer 28,011,111 shares of Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock at a public offering price of $90 per share. 

Strategy plans to issue and sell these STRC shares by July 29. As such, it is unlikely that the latest BTC purchase was made with proceeds from the offering. The company estimates that the net proceeds from the offering will be around $2.474 billion. It also confirmed that the net proceeds will be used for the acquisition of BTC. It is worth noting that Michael Saylor and his company have sold mainly MSTR shares to fund their last two Bitcoin purchases. 

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price is trading at around $119,500, up in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Featured image from Pixabay, chart from Tradingview.com

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Today, we (the Devcon organizing team) are excited to make public a new way to get involved in next year’s event, and one that should make Devcon an experience that better represents Ethereum as a whole.

Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs) are a new tool to involve collaborative community input from across the ecosystem. They are aimed at improving the Devcon experience by formalizing a process to get your ideas heard and integrated into the event.

Why now?

In previous posts, we’ve touched on doing more to represent the entire Ethereum ecosystem at Devcon. However, doing so at any one event has become more and more challenging over the years. In many ways, this is a welcome problem to have, since the challenge is thanks to the growth in both size and diversity among builders, presenters, attendees, organizations and everyone else that’s participating.

While there was a time when everyone involved might have easily fit into a classroom, we’ve long since passed a point where demand exceeded supply in more ways than one (e.g. the amount of tickets, talk slots, or dogfooded applications).

So while we took first steps in solving for specific areas of past difficulty in our launch post earlier this year, we’ve also tried to be proactive when thinking about how to factor for things that no one team might think to include on their own. And that’s led us here.

How do DIPs work?

Let’s dig in. The best way to get started with DIPs is by visiting the DIP github repo and by joining the conversation over at the new Devcon Forum.

As a first step, we recommend posting your idea in the Devcon Forum to receive feedback from a wider community. Once things feel a bit more defined, you can submit a formal proposal. From the time of a submission, you’ll be able to receive feedback from our team and others to help refine ideas, to discuss how they might fit into the program, and more.

The process is inspired by the PEP, BIP and EIP processes, and while this new experiment is a bit more centralized (in that the approval of proposals ultimately lies with the Devcon team), we are excited to have a new way to branch out and hope to find consensus on a whole bunch of newly proposed ideas. The goals of DIPs are for everyone to feel heard, to have a more open discussion, and (most importantly) to improve the event by listening to and learning from the innovators around us.

What might DIPs look like?

If this process sounds rather abstract to you so far and you’re wondering what DIPs might actually look like, you’re in luck! DIPs are just being made public today, but the Devcon team has been working with a few teams to trial-run the first proposals in recent weeks.

Some of our first proposals include trying to make Devcon carbon neutral, enabling hotel and flight bookings through a FOSS decentralized travel marketplace, preparing a permissionless treasure hunt, and providing attendees with a smart wallet card during the conference.

Wrapping up

We know that the Ethereum ecosystem has simply grown too large for our team alone to be aware of every great idea out there. With the aid of DIPs, combined with your awesome continued involvement, we can make Devcon more representative of our community than ever before.

For more information, everyone is welcome to check out DIP-0, to take a look at the DIPs already submitted, and to join the forum to participate in new and ongoing discussions. We can’t wait to hear from you!