BlockChain, Virtual Currencies and Smart Contracts

With blockchain already being implemented within various unique scientific and industrial domains, this latest announcement firmly cements its position as being one of the most innovative digital breakthroughs of the 21st century.

NASA Ethereum

NASA plans to use the Ethereum blockchain for deep space exploration. As per a post published on the official UA website, it was revealed that a faculty member from their Electrical and Computer Engineering department, Jin Kocsis, received a grant in excess of $330,000 for her research on the topic of “Resilient Networking and Computing Paradigm (RNCP)”.

Kocsis mentioned that this new project envisions the creation of a technology that will allow spacecrafts to not only become more efficient while in orbit but to also collect/transmit more data in a seamless manner.

She went on to add that the technology will provide scientists and researchers with the ability to “foreshadow and respond to environmental threats” in a timely manner, thereby preventing many avoidable disasters.

In an official blog post, Kocsis was noted as saying:

“With this project, we will exploit (the power of) Ethereum-based blockchain technology to develop a decentralized, secure, and cognitive networking and computing infrastructure for deep space exploration. The blockchain consensus protocols will be further explored to improve the resilience of the infrastructure.”

Similarly, Thomas Kacpura, Communications Program Manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, said that this ongoing project is a “first of its kind” and that blockchain has immense potential within the domain of space-navigation.

In a recent interview he mentioned:

“This latest effort would support decentralized processing amongst NASA space network nodes in a secure fashion, resulting in a more responsive, resilient scalable network that can integrate current and future networks in a consistent manner. It is expected that this project will contribute towards the next generation of space networks, and will allow for the tech transition of these algorithms for commercial systems (to take place even more smoothly)”.

Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant's cloud computing arm, has unveiled a new service for launching out-of-the-box blockchain networks for the ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric protocols.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote that the newly available "templates" allow clients to "launch an ethereum (either public or private) or Hyperledger Fabric (private) network in a matter of minutes and with just a few clicks."

He went on to explain:

"The templates create and configure all of the AWS resources needed to get you going in a robust and scalable fashion."

The post provides detailed instructions for setting up an ethereum template, which supports mining, as well as an EthStats page that provides network metrics and an EthExplorer tool that displays the transactions and smart contracts entered into the ledger.

AWS is a fast-growing segment of Amazon's business, which saw sales increase 55 percent in 2016 and 43 percent in 2017. The division is in fierce competition with other tech giants' cloud computing arms, including Microsoft Azure, which showed an early interest in providing blockchain as a service when it partnered with the ethereum startup ConsenSys in 2015.

Google, according to a Bloomberg report published in March, is also working on a blockchain solution for its cloud business.

AWS announced back in 2016 that it would start working with blockchain startups, offering dedicated technical support and infrastructure for the firms involved.

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) intends to release a set of common blockchain standards for businesses in 2018, one of the consortium's leading members said Thursday.

Onstage at Blockchain Expo in London, Jeremy Millar, a founding board member of the 450-member group, which boasts Accenture, JP Morgan and UBS among its ranks, provided the update as part of a talk that sought to give an overview of the general progress made by the consortium since it was first founded in 2017.

In his talk, Millar began by stressing to the audience the importance of setting common standards when it comes to technology adoption.

Millar told the crowd:

"We need interfaces to plug into. Now this might sound boring. It might not be top of mind for developers looking to launch a white paper and promote their ICO on Telegram."

Millar went on to cite the addition of former WiMAX Forum president Ron Resnick as EEA executive director as a hire that would bolster the consortium, which now has 15 employees looking at architecture and technical specifications.

Elsewhere, he said the group has seen progress on setting standards and specs relating to "oracles," or smart contracts meant to feed external data into blockchain systems.

Overall, it was a timely appearance, as EEA rival R3 has recently sought to call out the group for a supposed lack of delivery on promises, with the startup even calling the state of the EEA code "moribund." (Like the EEA, R3 is also a consortium and technology provider seeking to bring blockchain applications to global enterprises.)

The EEA would later pen a sarcastic Medium post that sought to highlight the benefits of its approach, which it has long argued is more aligned with the open-source developer movement that has sprung up around ethereum, the world's second largest public blockchain by total value.

In this way, Millar added that it's likely some EEA features will be taken back into the code for the public ethereum blockchain in the form of ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs).

"Next phase will be a testnet. And once we start seeing code coming out, we need certification," said Millar.

Still, he sought to galvanize support for the effort, concluding:

A TechStars-incubated startup has launched what looks like the first production-ready platform designed to increase the capacity of ethereum.

Called Loom Network, the little-known company is today releasing a developer toolkit that makes it possible to deploy scalable ethereum apps on the second-largest cryptocurrency network, effectively leapfrogging ongoing efforts such as Raiden Network and Plasma.

For network users, the timing of the release couldn't be more welcome. Scaling has long been top of mind for stakeholders of major cryptocurrencies, and on ethereum ever since CryptoKitties congested the network late last year.

But while other developers have been tinkering away on several off-chain solutions, which are in the testing phase right now, Loom Network's platform uses so-called "dappchains," which can be thought of as mini blockchains, that they say are ready today.

Loom Network head of business development Michael Cullinan told CoinDesk:

"Basically, the Loom platform is a developer platform to make it simple to make highly-scalable apps on the blockchain."

Creating chains

To do that, Loom Network - which raised $25 million in a private token sale -takes a bit of a different approach than other scaling projects.

When a developer creates a new program, Loom Network spins up a new blockchain - a "sidechain" of sorts - that's made specifically for the app and then connects to the ethereum blockchain.

The process has noticeable parallels to several other cryptocurrency projects out there - sidechains have been touted as a way to tie different features to bitcoin's main network, and researchers speculate that a new type of fork, called a velvet fork, might one day enable similar functionality.

However, Loom Network's sidechains are different in that they're specifically made for scaling, lifting capacity from the main ethereum network.

Yet, there's a catch, one that Cullinan admitted. "It's not going to have the same level of security that the main ethereum network will have," he said.

And that's because while these sidechains work, they're centralized under Loom Network's control (for the time being). As such, not every action needs to be sent over the ethereum blockchain and Loom will keep track of those actions that aren't.

"Commenting or changing a profile picture doesn't necessarily require the security of the ethereum mainchain," Cullinan said. "That's what would happen on the sidechain."

Although, other actions will need the security and censorship resistance that ethereum offers.

Knowing that transactions are different and that they should be handled differently is one of the reasons Cullinan believes Loom will be successful since the startup offers a "spectrum" of options. It's up to developers to decide how much of their app data they want to be routed over the ethereum network.

Plus, Loom Network plans to "open" the network over time in an attempt to decentralize it further.

Centralization first

This centralization-first approach isn't a new idea in the blockchain world.

Bitcoin sidechain project RSK and even CryptoKitties are examples of projects that are centralized today, but their developers hope, with technological progress, they'll be able to decentralize over time.

However, Loom Network is the first ethereum scalability project to start with the more centralized model first.

That said, some might argue this centralized approach might be worth it, since the apps built on Loom Network so far work well, showing how easy spinning up ethereum-based blockchain apps might be one day.

For instance, earlier this week, the team launched its first test app, DelegateCall, on top of their technology. The web app mirrors StackOverflow, the popular developer question-and-answer forum, yet it's tied to the ethereum blockchain. The team has also launched three other apps on the Loom Network.

While the startup is announcing its product as production ready, not everyone can start deploying apps yet.

For now, the platform is in closed-beta, open to just a few select ethereum developers who want to take a stab at building apps on the platform. Soon that will change, though, when team open-sources the code so that more developers can check it for bugs, Cullinan said.

Despite the caveats around the scalability mechanism's security, the company's recent Reddit threads have carried a lot of excitement, with one user exclaiming:

Despite the recent plunge in market price, Bitcoin remains the most valuable cryptocurrency on the market… or does it?

After all there are many ways to measure the value of a commodity, especially one as nebulous as digital currency.

Ethereum Logo Blue With Digital Code Overlay

Whilst Bitcoin may still have the edge (for now) in terms of monetary worth, it is Ethereum that has really stolen ahead of the pack in terms of versatility and application.

You see, it’s all about the blockchain. As any investor will tell you, assets come and assets go, but ideas are a harder thing to shift. While some look at the meteoric rise of Bitcoin’s fortunes and see nothing but dollar signs, others look to the tech beneath it all and imagine to what other purposes it can be put.

However, even the most loyal Bitcoin customer would admit that their blockchain is rudimentary to say the least. It does what it needs to do (i.e. record transactions between Bitcoin users) but that’s pretty much it.

The Ethereum Network, on the other hand, is much more versatile. Aside from allowing third-party developers to create their own altcoins and piggyback on the network, recent developments in its token standards mean that the instantaneous, secure, and anonymous transferring of data is also possible, which has far wider-reaching ramifications than mere financial considerations.

Physical Ethereum Coin Sitting on Money And Wallet

With the formation of the EEA (that’s the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) in February of last year, the company allowed organisations of various sizes to trial and evolve their blockchain at different speeds and capacities. Over 200 companies around the world, from small start-ups to major players, signed up to the initiative and, between them, have discovered, or proposed, all manner of possible applications.

Of particular interest has been the notion of blockchain-based identification, which could be incorporated into voting machines to cut electoral fraud at a stroke. Logistics industries have also expressed an interest in the blockchain’s ability to manage supply chain, providing a permanent and inviolable link between producer, wholesaler, distributor, and retailer (and, of course, customer).

Blockchain technology is the underlying framework upon which most cryptocurrencies operate and it has become one of the most important technological advances in the 21st century.

Simply put, a Blockchain is a secure system that stores information. This is typically done in individual blocks which are encrypted, together forming a chain of secure data.

Bitcoin’s Blockchain pioneered the technology as a transactional system. Its Blockchain is an electronic accounting ledger, with each block holding a finite amount of transactions made with the cryptocurrency. It is completely decentralized, with transactions verified by a worldwide network of miners.

Here is where the issue of energy enters the picture. The truth is, cryptocurrency mining uses a lot of energy. That has put a spotlight on mainstream power production, which is mostly unclean and unsustainable.

This has led to a new wave of Blockchain technology that looks to provide applications and innovations to the way we use energy and how we go about providing efficient data and transaction systems in the sector.

By the numbers

According to a research done by the event and consulting company Solarplaza, of the 90 companies included in its analysis, over 50 percent of Blockchain projects working within the energy space are based in Europe. The top three countries include the US, Germany and the Netherlands.

Peer to peer trading projects account for the most use cases, while around 50 percent of these projects are using the Ethereum Blockchain.

As an indicator of just how new this movement is, over 70 percent of these projects were formed between 2016 and 2017 - and one in four of the projects are planning an initial coin offering or token sale.

P2P, utility, cryptocurrency, platforms, E-Vehicles The majority of these companies have peer-to-peer Blockchain systems that offer a plethora of industry related services.

A number of projects are offering decentralized energy trading services. The likes of LO3 Energy, which developed the Brooklyn Microgrid which enables the community to buy energy through the platform. Producers of solar energy can sell excess green energy to other consumers connected on the platform.

This is just one example of a multitude of ground-breaking offerings by companies providing platforms for people, businesses and industries to trade energy. It’s interesting to note energy giants BP, Shell and Statoil are part of a consortium developing an in-house Blockchain platform form energy commodities trade.

Blockchain technology is also reforming energy utilities functions.

A number of companies have pioneered Blockchain platforms. WEF award winners Electron set up platforms for energy meters, from user registrations to meter data privacy. A number of other utility-based projects are offering customers platforms that track energy consumption and provide cheaper energy prices available on the grid.

This includes the likes of IBM, who teamed up with TenneT to create a pilot platform using Blockchain technology to balance supply and demand of electricity to ensure a supply of electricity.

Of course, a number of cryptocurrencies have been created to facilitate energy trading platforms. A straightforward use case is Spectral energy’s Juliette coin, which is used by residents in an Amsterdam community to pay for electricity.

ElectriCChain has created SolarCoin, which is a reward-based cryptocurrency for a network of affiliated solar power generators. For every MWh of electricity produced, you get one SolarCoin, which is roughly worth $0.50.

A number of online energy platforms will also be present at the conference in Amsterdam. Many of these platforms offer global networks to create better communication between energy producers.

They also offer a variety of applications that allow the industry to monitor energy production and consumption - for consumers and producers. There are platforms that offer supply chain solutions for energy commodities like oil and gas. Some offer platforms for consumers to browse the cheapest available energy options available in their country.

Four projects in the report are directly aimed at the electric vehicle industry using Blockchain to help users manage and pay for charging stations and more specific needs like car sharing and rental.

To top it off a number of projects are providing people with cutting-edge opportunities thanks to Blockchain technology. The Sun Exchange is an example of this. The project enables people to own solar panels in ideal locations around the world. The panels are then leased out, with the owners paid income in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Blockchain2Business

While the list of energy projects involved into Blockchain becomes too long to list in one article, people that have a keen interest in Blockchain projects reforming the way we look at energy have now an interesting platform to participate in.

Even those who are not familiar with blockchain are likely to have heard about Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency and payment system that uses the technology. Another platform called Ethereum, that also uses blockchain, is predicted by some experts to overtake Bitcoin this year.

What is Ethereum?

Ethereum is an open-source public service that uses blockchain technology to facilitate smart contracts and cryptocurrency trading securely without a third party. There are two accounts available through Ethereum: externally owned accounts (controlled by private keys influenced by human users) and contract accounts. Ethereum allows developers to deploy all kinds of decentralized apps. Even though Bitcoin remains the most popular cryptocurrency, it’s Ethereum’s aggressive growth that has many speculating it will soon overtake Bitcoin in usage.

How is Ethereum different than Bitcoin?

While there are many similarities between Ethereum and Bitcoin, there are also significant differences. Here are a few:

Bitcoin trades in cryptocurrency, while Ethereum offers several methods of exchange, including cryptocurrency (Ethereum’s is called Ether), smart contracts and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). They are based on different security protocols: Ethereum uses a "proof of stake" system as opposed the "proof of work" system used by Bitcoin.

Bitcoin allows only public (permissionless or censor-proof) transactions to take place; Ethereum allows both permissioned and permissionless transactions.

The average block time for Ethereum is significantly less than Bitcoin’s: 12 seconds versus 10 minutes. This translates into more block confirmations, which allows Ethereum’s miners to complete more blocks and receive more Ether.

It is estimated that by 2021 only half of the Ether coins will be mined (a supply of more than 90 million tokens), but the majority of Bitcoins already have been mined (its supply is capped at 21 million).

For Bitcoin, the computers (called miners) running the platform and verifying the transactions receive rewards. Basically, the first computer that solves each new block gets Bitcoins (or a fraction of one) as a reward. Ethereum does not offer block rewards and instead allows miners to take a transaction fee.

What are the advantages of Ethereum?

Proponents of Ethereum believe its main advantage over Bitcoin is that it allows individuals and companies to do much more than just transfer money between entities leading Bloomberg to write it’s “the hottest platform in the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains” and companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Intel and Microsoft to invest in it.

History of Ethereum

Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin said, “I thought [those in the Bitcoin community] weren’t approaching the problem in the right way. I thought they were going after individual applications; they were trying to kind of explicitly support each [use case] in a sort of Swiss Army knife protocol.”

He envisioned a different way.

Buterin was introduced and intrigued by blockchain technology when he got involved in Bitcoin as a 17-year-old programmer in 2011 and co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. He started to imagine a platform that went beyond the financial use cases allowed by Bitcoin and released a white paper in 2013 describing what would ultimately become Ethereum using a general scripting language.

The key differentiator from Bitcoin was the platform’s ability to trade more than just cryptocurrency.

In 2014, Buterin and the other co-founders of Ethereum launched a crowdsourcing campaign where they sold participants Ether (Ethereum tokens) to get their vision off the ground and raised more than $18 million. The first live release of Ethereum known as Frontier was launched in 2015. Since then, the platform has grown rapidly and today there are hundreds of developers involved.

Ultimately, Buterin hopes Ethereum will be the solution for all use cases of blockchain that don’t have a specialized system to turn to.

Ethereum is still experiencing growing pains and suffers from some of the same issues that Bitcoin does primarily in its scalability. In 2016, $50 million in Ether was stolen by an anonymous hacker which resulted in questions about the platform’s security. This caused a split within the Ethereum community and it broke off into two blockchains: Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

There have been dramatic fluctuations in the price of Ether, but the Ethereum currency grew more than 13,000 percent in 2017. This tremendous growth is attractive to many investors, but the volatility makes other investors cautious.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF ARTISTS

We live in an age where music creators aren’t getting paid the revenue they deserve for their work. The most recent lawsuit against Spotify is great evidence of that, with Wixen Music Publishing launching a $1.6 billion case. The company represents popular artists who are being taken advantage of, such as Neil Young, The Black Keys, and Tom Petty. And this is only the most recent accusation. Spotify has been plagued for over a year with people upset about how they compensate the artists that make up their entire company.

This is where Voise looks to innovate. Their platform is based on the Ethereum blockchain and provides an avenue for artists to publish their work for fans and make 100% of the revenue. It runs via a smart contract, so once the platform is launched people will be able to verify the software for themselves.

HOW VOISE WORKS

On the Voise platform, artists have complete control. If they decide to publish their work to the network, they upload the file and it is published over a peer-to-peer network. People can browse the uploads to find music to their liking, and can even listen to samples before purchasing.

VOISE tokens can be used to pay the artists for their content, with every transaction being published to the Ethereum blockchain. Once the transaction is confirmed, the funds will subsequently be sent to the artist’s wallet. The artist will be getting every single penny paid, minus a small transaction fee to broadcast the transaction.

How Voise Works

On Voise, an artist can set their own prices and decide how they want to offer samples to their fans. They can even set up a “donation” system, with a small 30-second clip being available initially and after a donation the entire song becomes available. This music library will be open to everyone around the world, subverting the banning of some established music providers in some countries.

The key piece here is the decentralized nature of the network. Unlike a traditional streaming service where, if it shuts down, your music is gone, with Voise the entire music library will be hosted via a peer-to-peer network, so your music will always be accessible.

Unlike many crypto projects, the team behind Voise recognizes that this service is not only in demand for digital currency enthusiasts, but the rest of the technically illiterate public. Most people around the world have no idea what Bitcoin is, let alone how to buy, store, and use it. In time, the Voise platform is also set to integrate fiat payments to further open the platform to as many people as possible.

Another nifty feature of Voise is the DAO Radio. This feature allows users to vote on music via the blockchain, letting people rate current songs on a public playlist and vote for new songs to get added. A leaderless radio station, if you will

The National Research Council of Canada (NRC), a government initiative, is trialing the ethereum blockchain for recording government contracts.

For the pilot, the NRC is using the Catena platform from blockchain startup Bitaccess for publishing information on government grants and contributions over the open-source blockchain.

The effort is part of a move to make the government's administration boost transparency, according to a press release. The NRC's Industrial Research Assistance Program is the first entity to test the technology, and is already releasing contributions information. The group will also assess how the government can apply blockchain technology in other areas.

Bitaccess co-founder Moe Adham said in a blog post that the company built its Catena Blockchain Suite to help organizations become familiar with using the technology.

He explained:

"Our goal is to enable institutions to become fully transparent, and enable constituents to participate in the verification and validation of public information."

While notable, this is not the first official body in the country to foray into blockchain technology. The Canadian central bank has already begun experimenting with blockchain-based platforms, particularly with settlement systems, as previously reported by CoinDesk.

The Ethereum blockchain infrastructure will automate all stages of the order-to-cash process associated with field services in upstream, midstream and downstream markets.

Many of the said processes, for instance, field ticketing or bill of lading, are still largely manual and paper-based, and primed for the blockchain revolution.

Joe Lubin, the Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded the cryptocurrency Ethereum and started ConsenSys, described the move as a seminal moment for the building up of an Ethereum ecosystem and one that's supportive of new use cases across all industries.

"As one of our first ventures into the oil and gas supply chain industry, Ondiflo will offer a solution where all operators and service companies can benefit from digitization, automation and the seamless exchange of data and immutability of their records, made possible by the Ethereum platform," Lubin added.

Jean Pierre Foehn, Chief Executive Officer of Amalto, said: "By seamlessly managing data from IoT [Internet of Things] sensors at the well site or the storage terminal to the fulfillment stage - and, eventually, to the payment stage, and by bringing all stakeholders and trading partners to the blockchain, Ondiflo is going to radically change how the industry manages its back-office."

It will also increase the level of trust between operators and suppliers, and improve regulatory compliance, Foehn added.

Ondiflo, which also sees the involvement of Sandro Giannetti, an entrepreneur and start-up investor, will be launched as a consortium with operators, suppliers and financial services industry players expected to partake in the initial endeavor.

Key stakeholders would be meeting in Houston on 15 February to work on the final make-up of the consortium.

Fire Lotto is a simple and intuitive online lottery, but with a powerful smart contract engine underneath. A simple, understandable sale of tickets accrues a large pool, starting at $1 million. Fire Lotto will set aside 70% of ticket sales to the prize pool.

A smart contract will govern the jackpot pooling, as well as payouts and rounds of the lotto. The prize distributions would be absolutely transparent and broadcast over the Ethereum network. When a prize is won, the payout from Fire Lotto is almost immediate.

The primary aim of the Cyprus-based Fire Lotto was to create a fast and efficient lottery with no barriers to entry.

All of this would be made possible through the FLOT token, soon to be released to the public in an ICO. For a few more days, Fire Lotto is in the private sale stage. Watch out the Twitter and Facebook links of Fire Lotto for updates. For immediate communication, the project communicates through its Telegram channel.

The pre-sale of FLOT tokens will start on January 15 until February 15. The main ICO event is scheduled between March 15 and April 15. Fire Lotto aims for a fair distribution, selling 77 million of the FLOT tokens out of a total supply of 100 million. The sale has detailed terms and conditions for potential backers.

The project is absolutely transparent and can be explored through the GitHub repository.

Fire Lotto has a clear-cut game rules, allowing for maximum participation. Ticket prices start at around $2, and there is a generous referral program, giving back 15% of each ticket sold by referees. Fire Lotto will run four popular games with a heightened chance to win the jackpot.

Aruba is looking to blockchain to take power from travel monopolies and keep tourism revenue on its sandy shores.

No small matter for the Caribbean island, Aruba relies heavily on tourism – with a population of a little more than 100,000, it sees 1.2 million visitors every year. But with the travel industry dominated by the likes of Expedia and Priceline, a few online travel agencies (OTAs) and airlines all controlling pricing, a significant amount of Aruba's tourism revenue gets shipped offshore.

Now, the organization responsible for fostering the island's technical development, the ATECH Foundation, is looking to change that by working with Swiss startup Winding Tree on a blockchain marketplace for travel booking.

Rather than the status quo, the ATECH Foundation would like to use Winding Tree's platform, built on ethereum's public blockchain, to connect tourists directly with travel suppliers, in an effort to eliminate all the middlemen.

And eliminating the third parties in tourism could be especially beneficial for smaller nations, Varelie Croes, ATECH Foundation co-founder, told CoinDesk.

"A platform like this can help countries like Aruba ... bring back some of the profits and tax it and actually keep the income at home," she said, adding:

"The impact is significant to the economy."

If the blockchain system works, it would have a significant effect on Aruba's bottom line, she continued.

The island has been investing heavily in new technologies for some time in an effort to make it better prepared for the future. Its Smart Island Strategy for the tourism industry, for example, has piloted biometric checks at airports and embraced renewable energy.#

Tiny testing ground

Blockchain has been of particular interest in its search. Most notably, the island is exploring its own digital fiat with cryptocurrency startup Bitt, and Aruba’s Central Bank believes this could boost the island’s GDP.

But while blockchain's potential for travel and tourism businesses has been much-vaunted (Winding Tree has previously inked a deal with major airline Lufthansa), its Aruba project is on track to be the first fully implemented blockchain-based marketplace for travel.

Winding Tree will start beta-testing the platform with early adopters early next year, with the hopes of launching commercially by the end of 2018, first with hotels and later with airlines.

But the benefits aren't only Aruba's; the island's small size makes it an ideal area for exploration.

Winding Tree can "use Aruba as a playground for rolling out this new technology on a nationwide basis," said Croes.

The startup has already secured Australian hotel management software firm RoomRanger as a partner, and also plans to announce a major European hotel group in the coming weeks.

Croes concluded:

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has recently been an outspoken critic of the lack of funding for public open-source projects. In a day and age where ICOs are raising more money than traditional venture capitalism, a need has arisen for alternative funding models for projects that contribute to community.

Public Blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin are different from other Blockchains in that their coins can be mined by the general public. Other Blockchains, usually those of newer startups, don’t have minable coins.

Their coins are instead issued during ICOs which can sell out extremely quickly. In such cases, a few investors could end up owning the majority of the coins. It is easy to fund startups through ICOs, but not nearly as easy to fund public Blockchain improvement projects.

A fundamental problem

The problem with the current market system is that prices for ICO tokens are set by companies arbitrarily, and investors have no room to negotiate. This leads to either massive initial buying by deep-pocketed investors, ICO stall-out when values are justified, or the possibility of fraud charges when companies don’t live up to the expectations of investors.

Many, like Buterin, are hoping that the popularity of ICOs will find its way into public projects, while at the same time providing new ways for investors to have some control over token valuation. While developers are currently making sacrifices for the greater good of the Blockchain community, perhaps there is a better way forward.

ICO balancing act

Buterin recently co-published a paper with TrueBit founder Jason Teusch, in which the industry leaders argue that the issue of ICO valuation is logical fork - ICOs provide a way for everyone to buy coins, and coins are available at a fixed rate.

The problem lies in the fact that, if coins are capped, not everyone may get a chance to buy, since the sale may end in seconds. However, if coins are not capped, and everyone can buy, the ‘total token’ number may simply skyrocket, vastly devaluing the coins.

The solution to this conundrum is not simple, since capped token sales appear value-driven but exclusive, while uncapped sales appear greedy, but open. However, the tech gurus have devised a simple yet elegant system to manage these issues.

The team explains that changing to an ‘interactive coin offering’ would provide a solution that would let the market for a particular coin expand and contract according to true value. Under such a system, buyers are able to make and withdraw bids for a certain amount of tokens at a certain value.

By allowing buyers flexibility which decreases as the ICO close date approaches, interactive offerings would allow free market forces to work while at the same time incentivizing buyers to buy in and stay in at real value propositions.

Open source as win-win

Another option is to turn to platforms that specialize in creating open source peer-to-peer networks. These platforms connect end users who see or experience a bug in the Blockchain they’ve encountered. On the platform, the users can note the problem and post a monetary reward for a fix.

Any developer on the platform can offer a solution to the various issues that have been logged. The most suitable solution is chosen, and the funds are transferred to the appropriate developer. But what’s in it for the users who are fronting the reward? First, they, along with all others, get to experience the speed and smoothness of a debugged Blockchain. Similar to when a local government repaves a highway, all drivers benefit from smoother roads.

Second, the platforms can be used to improve existing Blockchain systems. Users can request features they want to see, not just bugs they want fixed. As more people offer new features, more solutions will arise. This will spur on others to propose their own features, leading to even more resolutions. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

Some living examples

One company is focusing on the latter, building a decentralized marketplace for open-source collaboration. The platform debuts a safe way to fix bugs and build features on any project, including public projects. It doesn’t just work with Blockchain either, but with a variety of other fields. The platform will use cryptocurrencies to incentivize users to offer solutions to problems by giving them the opportunity to be compensated for their suggestions.

Other companies are seeking to do something similar in the gig economy market space by linking together contributors and project managers over peer-to-peer networks. For example, another project raised $5 million in less than a week by providing a similar P2P platform.

Contributors are able to pursue projects directly from project managers, and payment is escrowed in proprietary cryptocurrency. The growth of the gig economy (both from contributors seeking freedom, and project managers seeking specialization) will continue to drive solution-based platforms onto the market.

However, with open source projects, the need for support and feedback often creates substantial gaps in servicing. Monetizing specialized projects will make working on a public project much more enticing. By incentivizing open source solutions, and by allowing project managers freedom for seeking gig-economy talent, the solution market will grow and stabilize. This will yield better results at more attractive pricing.

The United Nations agency in charge of food aid—often billed as the largest aid organization in the world—is betting that an ethereum-based blockchain technology could be the key to delivering aid efficiently to refugees while slashing the costs of doing so.

The agency, known as the World Food Programme (WFP), is the rare example of an organization that has delivered tangible results from its blockchain experiments—unlike the big banks that have experimented with the technology for years.

The WFP says it has transferred $1.4 million in food vouchers to 10,500 Syrian refugees in Jordan since May, and it plans to expand. “We need to bring the project from the current capacity to many, many, more,” says Houman Haddad, the WFP executive leading the project. “By that I mean 1 million transactions per day.” Haddad, in Mexico to speak at the Ethereum Foundation’s annual developer conference, hopes to expand the UN project, called Building Blocks, from providing payment vouchers for one camp to providing vouchers for four camps, covering 100,000 people, by next January. He hopes to attract developers and partners to the UN project from his conference appearance, organized by the foundation, which acts as a steward for the technical development of the ethereum protocol.

The WFP currently distributes food vouchers within Jordan’s refugee camps via supermarkets located in the camps. The cashiers are equipped not with cash registers, but with iris scanners, which both identify the customer and settle their entitlement payments by verifying the data with various UN databases. Building Blocks replaced the payment part with a ledger that records the transactions on a private version of ethereum that it developed. “For the beneficiary, nothing has changed,” Haddad says.

The major benefit to the food program so far is a large drop in payments to financial services firms, the usual middlemen for transactions. Such fees have dropped “significantly,” according to Haddad. There are other benefits, like increased privacy for beneficiaries, and quicker reconciliation of accounts because the agency now operates its own payment network instead of waiting for periodic reports from payments firms. The project has been relatively cheap to run, underwritten by a $100,000 grant from the WFP’s startup incubator. “Now we’re doing the payments ourselves and the accounting ourselves,” Haddad says.

The WFP solution is designed to scale. It uses a “fork”of the ethereum codebase that’s been modified by the engineering firm Parity to be private so transactions aren’t exposed. It also means ethereum miners—the people who add new supply of the cryptocurrency—aren’t required to validate those transactions, removing a bottleneck to transaction capacity. The WFP operates the chain itself, although it simulates a scenario where four parties are working together, for future expansion. As a result, the solution can be used by as many beneficiaries and merchants as Haddad can sign on.

Haddad envisions a future where refugees control their own cryptographic keys to access their funds (or “entitlements,” in aid worker jargon). This element may be crucial to making aid more easily and widely available because the keys would unlock data that’s currently stuck in different aid agencies, including medical records from the World Health Organisation, educational certificates at UNICEF, and nutritional data from WFP. “This profile starts to become enriched to become an identity that’s controlled by the beneficiary, which has never happened before,” Haddad says.

One catch: None of the other UN agencies or aid organizations want to play ball so far, Haddad says, thanks to the internecine bureaucracy at the UN and the desire of managers to guard their own turf. “If it’s just WFP, we’re not using the full power of blockchains,” he says.”But if someone wants to come in, we can just let them in.”

The problem of internal bureaucratic warfare, of course, isn’t limited to the UN. Paul Currion, who co-founded Disberse, another blockchain-based aid delivery platform, lauds the speediness of the WFP effort. “It’s fantastic for proving this can work in the field,” he says. But “we’ve found that the hard work is integrating blockchain technology into existing organizational processes—we can’t just hand people a ticket and expect them to get on the high-speed blockchain train; we also need to drive with them to the station,” he says.

What do you do after you've created a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency?

A skinny, 23-year-old hacker in a green "Doge" t-shirt gave us an answer today. At ethereum's flagship conference, Devcon, project creator Vitalik Buterin revealed he has been quietly working on a new long-term plan for the future of the blockchain network. What he called a "modest proposal," is perhaps better described as a three-to-four-year roadmap for ethereum's technical development.

Notably at the heart of the vision is a long-in-the-making technical change to ethereum called "sharding," and while always expected to be included in the protocol's plans, today Buterin proposed what might be his most solidified strategy for the technique to date.

As such, the roadmap hints at problems yet to be solved on the platform, and puts the emphasis on scalability for project developers. As ethereum nodes need to store everything that ever happened on the network, Buterin stressed that there's a need for solutions that mitigate expensive storage costs that could escalate exponentially as the system expands.

It's a topic that's long been top-of-mind for the developer, as Buterin recently released new research into alleviating this problem.

Still, the talk was evidence of his emphasis on finding solutions, and of his efforts to galvanize ethereum developers more broadly to be thinking about the effort.

"The amount of activity on the blockchain is orders of magnitude larger than it was just a couple of years ago," he said, pointing to daily transaction rates and the more than 20,000 nodes now part of the network.

With this, he suggested ethereum is running up against its limits.

Buterin told the crowd:

"Scalability is probably problem number one [...] There’s a graveyard of systems that claim to solve the scalability problem but don't. It's a very significant and hard challenge. These are just known facts."

High-level details

And Buterin believes sharding is the "likely" solution to this problem.

A way of partitioning data into subsets that takes its inspiration from traditional databases, the idea is that each node will only have to store a small chunk of the total network. Yet, the vision is that the underlying math would hold the system accountable, and if they need it, nodes could rely on other nodes for data.

How to execute on this in practice, and securely – without nodes sending other nodes false information – is another question that researchers have been looking into.

But Buterin is proposing a new type of sharding infrastructure that would solve both scalability and governance – ensuring the eventual system is well maintained and that it stays in check.

The proposal revealed today is for ethereum to be split into different types of shards. There will be the main shard, which would comprise today's ethereum network; then there would be other shards, which Buterin calls other "universes."

Crucially, though, Buterin believes the partitioning would allow for more aggressive changes on the smaller shards, and more cautious changes on the main blockchain. That way, ethereum still has platform stability, while developers still have room to test new changes and to experiment and move fast on the other shards.

Or as Buterin put it:

"Other universes where all this stuff we’ve been working on these last few years can be rolled out much much faster."

Looking forward

Buterin's roadmap includes other changes too, though they were less prominent in his talk.

These included planned upgrades to the ethereum virtual machine (EVM), the technology that today compiles smart contract code and communicates it to the network. He also addressed another long-in-the-making tech project, eWASM, for running ethereum in a web browser, one that hints at the necessity of ensuring this system given that the EVM has been implemented in other blockchain projects as well.

Another idea proposed was for so-called "stateless clients," a proposal for how clients could sync with the network more quickly.

"You'll be hearing about this idea more and more," he said. He invited developers to contribute to the effort, much of the research of which is housed on GitHub.

But, all in all, sharding looks to be the biggest change over the next three to four years, and Buterin ended by adding there's already developer work going on in these exploratory areas.

Notably, he hinted work might be further along than widely thought.

Buterin concluded:

It's perhaps no surprise Jacob Eberhardt is being given the stage at ethereum's annual developer conference.

With scalability and privacy top of mind for the blockchain network, now valued in the billions, the Ph.D. researcher at the Technical University of Berlin is set to debut a new programming language at the Cancun, Mexico, event, one designed to help ethereum improve on these key weaknesses.

Called ZoKrates, the goal of the project is to provide developers with a toolkit that could help them realize the potential of a much-anticipated blockchain privacy tool called zk-snarks.

Pioneered by the cryptocurrency zcash, ethereum's recent software update, enacted in October, paved the way for the easier use of the code, and because it effectively unlocks the use of this feature, the implications of ZoKrates are potentially vast.

For one, it's designed to be simple for any ethereum developer to deploy, which could lead privacy features to begin surfacing in decentralized applications and tokens. And second, because zk-snarks compress information, ZoKrates has the potential to help scale the ethereum platform by moving computations off the main blockchain, easing data storage.

In short, ZoKrates allows information to be obscured off the main ethereum blockchain and then uploaded into a smart contract the network can still verify, all without exposing contract information.

Eberhardt told CoinDesk:

"Zk-snarks were discussed a lot, but the gap between the theoretical concept and its practical application seemed huge. This gap, I try to bridge."

Cost benefits

Also of note is how exactly Eberhardt believes he's accomplished the feat.

To start with, ZoKrates is a type of ethereum smart contract. A custom version of the self-executing code that runs on top of the network, the tool serves as a way to transfer a zk-snark operation onto the blockchain and to verify that that information is valid.

As Eberhardt describes it, a ZoKrates contract verifies that a computation, or set of transactions, occurred correctly – or in his words, it "transforms a program into a set of conditions."

This moves ethereum one step closer to offering private transactions on its blockchain. Yet, like bringing privacy to ethereum in the first place, the endeavor is far from simple.

For one, verifying a zk-snark is still expensive. When encrypted information is read and accepted onto the ethereum blockchain, it requires a lot of computational effort, which in ethereum is measured in units of "gas." Crucially, though, the cost of verifying a ZoKrates contract, while high, remains uniform at all times, regardless of the complexity of the computation.

At present, a ZoKrates verification fee is about 1.6 million gas. Put simply for possible users, anything above this figure would be cheaper to run on ZoKrates.

As for what occurs on the blockchain itself, computations would still need to fit in ethereum's block size constraints. However, rather than filling blocks with transaction data, the distributed ledger would feature proof that the verification of any transactions had taken place.

Challenges ahead

While the possibilities are exciting, the project isn't without its hurdles, though.

Eberhardt identified two major challenges: for one, ZoKrates is still very much under development, meaning that while the code has been open-sourced, it's not ready to be used in production applications.

On top of that, Eberhardt is currently working solo on the project, with some input and discussion from ethereum's zk-snarks lead Christian Reitwiessner. For that reason, Eberhardt said, the development timeline can't be predicted.

And, of course, as always in the blockchain world, there are concerns about zk-snarks themselves, and alternative concepts are competing for attention.

Designed to power projects aiming to replace the likes of Google and Facebook, one problem facing ethereum is that growing to such scale would require putting an unimaginable amount of data on the blockchain, a shared ledger every node must download. Further, ethereum is already having enough trouble supporting the relatively small number of users it has today.

As such, Raiden Network has emerged as one piece of the scaling puzzle, aspiring to allow more and potentially cheaper ethereum transactions. Though Raiden Network has released a flurry of updates recently, the project is still a work in progress.

In the meantime, the developers have launched a testnet version of a new product, µRaiden (pronounced "micro Raiden") – a simpler version with fewer features that is almost complete.

In short, rather than route payments through a network of nodes, µRaiden allows users to make micropayments directly between each other. Further, the payments work in just one direction.

The project's introductory blog post argues that, while simpler, µRaiden offers a form of payment channels requested by some decentralized apps (dapps), such as for news and storage.

The post states:

"Talking to dapp developers, we noticed that many of them just want to use the Raiden Network as a robust many-to-one payment channel system; one service provider offering services to many recurring customers. Such systems do not require a full-blown network but instead already benefit greatly from direct payment channels."

Notably, the channels are ERC-20 standard compatible, meaning they work with a range of tokens that have launched recently on top of ethereum.