Blockchain Newsletter: What does $200 Ether mean? [2017W23]

Altcademy Team wrote on 7 February 2018

This Week's Update on Bitcoin and Blockchain [2017W23]

Issue: Week 23 of 2017

Markets

Price per Bitcoin BTC is at ~$2500 USD (+19% from last Monday)
Price per Ethereum ETH is at ~$240 USD (+46% from last Monday)

Articles

Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new internet by TechCrunch
What does $200 Ether mean? by Vinay Gupta
Tokens are early today, but will transform technology tomorrow By Balaji S. Srinivasan
Omise to raise $19M in first cryptocurrency sale from a major VC-backed startup by TechCrunch
WTF is an ICO? By TechCrunch
How to stage an ICO (and answers to other lingering questions you might have) by TechCrunch
Rare Pepe by Fred Wilson
Introducing Token by Token and Token by Fred Wilson
It’s not just a Ponzi, it’s a ‘smart’ Ponzi by Financial Times
Bitcoin mining companies face shutdown in southwest China by People.Cn
This Blockchain Bubble Might Be a Good Thing by Bloomberg

This week’s new initial coin offerings (ICOs)

Brave ($35 Million in 30 Seconds: Token Sale for Internet Browser Brave Sells Out)
Brave is planning to build a blockchain based digital advertising platform that tracks user attention anonymously on the Brave internet browser and rewards publishers accordingly.
Basic Attention Token (BAT) is the digital token used for transactions on this platform. Advertisers pay for the ads in BAT and rewards for publishers are calculated based on user Attention on the content page. In other words, the longer a user view a page on an active tab in the Brave browser, the higher the rewards for the publisher of that page.
The current attention metric in place is the concave score, w, which calculates a score for user attention depending on the time spent with an open and active page. The minimum score is 1 and the maximum score is 7. To achieve a score of 1, the user must have active attention on the content for minimum of 25 seconds. To achieve a score of 7, the user must actively spend at least 12 minutes on a page. The higher the score, the more reward for the publisher.
Part of the advertisement cost will be rewarded to users viewing the page and to the Brave platform, with the majority share going to publishers. The Brave browser is currently available for download on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.
The BAT crowdsale began on Wednesday, May 31, 2017 and ended within 30 seconds. A total of 1.5 billion BAT was created and 1 billion of which was sold in the crowdsale. The crowdsale raised 156,250 ETH at a rate of 1 ETH to 6,400 BAT. The total fund raised is about 35 million USD at the time of the sale.
OmiseGo (Crowdfund White Paper Draft)
OmiseGo is planning to build a decentralized exchange that allows eWallet users (Venmo, Alipay, etc.) to send and receive fiat currency (USD, RMB, etc) to and from each other.
eWallet providers will need to use the white-label wallet SDK provided by Omise to use the OmiseGo network. The OmiseGo network will be holding fund balances across many currency / commodities for each eWallet services. OmiseGo will also facilitate trading of those currency / commodities between eWallet services. The final settlement for transactions between different eWallet providers is primarily facilitated in Ether using Ethereum Smart Contracts.
All transactions and activities on OmiseGo will incur a transaction fee and OMG token holders earn the right to win those transaction fees by validating the blockchain. The OmiseGo token value is derived from the transaction fees derived from activities on OmiseGo.
The OmiseGo crowdfund campaign is selling 65.1% of OMG tokens issued to raise a maximum of $19 million USD equivalent in Ether. The minimum cap is set at $8 million USD and the crowdfunding period is 1 calendar month. If the crowdfund fails to raise the minimum cap within this time period, each backer will have the possibility to transfer their fund from the crowdfund smart contract back to their account. Crowdfund date will be announced on June 7.
Kin by Kik Mobile Chat App (White Paper)
Kik is an existing mobile chat app that has millions of monthly users. Kin is an Ethereum based digital token that Kik Interactive (the founding company) is developing to be used as the primary transactional currency on the Kik chat platform.
Kik users will be able to earn Kin by providing value to other members through curation, content creation and commerce. Kik users will be able to spend Kin on products, services, and other valuable assets offered by merchants, developers, influencers, and other participants.
Example use cases include premium user or brand generated content that need to be unlocked with Kin, tipping and payments between users, commerce between users and services, paid push notifications from user/brand to user groups, brand to user rewards for completing missions.
Kik is planning to sell 10% or 1 trillion Kin out of 10 trillion Kin issued in a crowdfund. 30% of the total Kin issued will be given to Kik chat platform under a vested schedule over 10 quarters at 10% each quarter. The remaining 60% of Kin will be locked in an Ethereum smart contract called the Kin Rewards Engine.
“Periodically, the Engine will unlock and distribute a specific amount of Kin to be shared among digital service providers in the Kin Ecosystem. The reward that each partner receives will be proportional to a measure of the utilization of Kin within that digital service."
The Engine is set to distribute 20% of the remaining allocation (6 trillion Kin initially) every year perpetually. With the number on Kin released decreasing year after year until all Kin is distributed. Up to 5 percent of each year’s Reward allocation will be used by the Kin Foundation for operations and marketing. Part of this will be used to seed millions of Kik users with a nominal amount of Kin to kick start the ecosystem.
“The principal functions of the Kin Foundation will include the open governance of its resources together with other ecosystem partners, the support and advancement of the technology related to Kin’s implementation, and all matters related to ecosystem membership, including the Kin Rewards Engine."
The Kin team has not released a timeline for the crowdsale or the exchange rate of the sale.
DCORP (White Paper)
DCORP, short for Decentralised Corporation, is a DAO like organization that is controlled by its shareholders to invest its Eth in decentralized projects to achieve profit. Shareholders are based on ownership of DRP tokens which has voting power on investment and operation decisions.
The first seed project DCORP is planning to invest and operate is the DEP, a decentralized Derivatives Exchange that allows users to trade options and futures in multiple tokens.
The Crowd sale began on June 1, it will last for 29 days and the exchange rate is divided into 5 tiers. The first week will offer 550 DRP for 1 ETH invested. The rate decreases gradually until it reaches 400 DRP for 1 ETH in the 4th week.
Cofound.it
Cofound.it is a platform that offers mentorships and resources such as legal, accounting, business strategy, public relations to mature startups planning to raise capital through an ICO crowdsale.
Teams compete to join the platform and selected teams will be audited by Deloitte for investor assurance. The CFI token will be used as the transaction currency on the platform.
Use cases include payment for project submissions, since each project submission requires expert evaluation, CFI is distributed amongst evaluators as a payment.
Users can use CFI to access exclusive pre-release project information or a more in-depth look at the projects during the evaluation stage. 25% of the CFI tokens will be sold in a crowdsale starting on June 7 with a min cap at $1 million USD and a max cap at $12.5 million USD.

Technical Updates

Ethereum
Roundup Round III (Main takeaways)
Release date of Metropolis to be finalised only when all tests on major clients have passed.
Average block times continue to rise as difficulty increases rapidly. Current estimate "is that block times will not exceed 20s until July 12, and will not exceed 30s until Sep 12."
Adding generation and signing with private keys right into web3.js. So that developers can easily create wallets and sign messages in their dapps. You can find the current experimental docs here: http://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/1.0/web3-eth-accounts.html
Geth v1.6.5 released to counter on ongoing attack on mainnet
Bitcoin
Bitcoin Core 0.14.1 Released (Breaking changes)
The first positional argument of createrawtransaction was renamed from transactions to inputs.
The argument of disconnectnode was renamed from node to address