ConsenSys News and Product Updates at Devcon 5 Osaka
Osaka, Japan — Since the launch of the Ethereum Network in 2014, Devcon has served as a meeting ground for the thousands of open-source developers, designers, researchers, infrastructure operators, community organizers, economists, and enthusiasts to discuss a new financial and data infrastructure for the web.
With the impending launch of Ethereum 2.0, new types of standards, plugins, tools, and business models are being built to serve a diversity of scaling strategies and new smart contract protocols.
Many of ConsenSys’ products, initiatives, and portfolio companies came to Osaka to share the updates throughout the week.
Product launches and new features
- ConsenSys Product Suite Forms Software-as-a-Service Freemium Models
- MetaMask Plugin System
- Japan Bounties Network launches
- Kaleido solves key obstacle to enterprise blockchain adoption with launch of native smart contract management, and partnership with MythX
Standards Work and Open-Source Software Support
- Joseph Lubin DevCon Call-to-Action: OneMillionDevs.com
- ConsenSys Grants Funds 11 projects for $155,000
- The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) releases new client specifications, hosts first Mainnet Meetup
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ConsenSys Product Suite Offers Software-as-a-Service Freemium Models
In Q3 2019, ConsenSys-owned products, announced new Software-as-a-Service models for improved customer service-level agreements, and to meet the demands of a maturing market for Ethereum infrastructure, analysis, and developer tooling.
As the market for feature-rich services and tooling in Ethereum has advanced, so have customers’ needs. Infura, MythX and Alethio, launched subscription services to support a range of offerings — from beginner to enterprise level usage some of the most widely-used security and infrastructure services on Ethereum Network with infrastructure, data analytics and security audit software.
- On July 17th, Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura launched Infura+, a premium subscription service for Infura’s Ethereum API, providing enhanced Ethereum infrastructure support for applications of all sizes. Users can choose from tiered service options—Core, Developer, Team, and Growth—to enable the right-sized plan for bringing their Ethereum-based project from proof-of-concept into global production.
- MythX, the premier security analysis service for Ethereum smart contracts launched MythX Pro today. Now, users of MythX detect a full range of smart contract vulnerabilities and help prevent security breaches — with a transparent and easy to use DAI-stablecoin subscription service through Daisy Payments.
- On June 20, 2019, Alethio announced the Alethio API PRO as a direct way for developers to get real-time access to indexed, synthesised, on-chain Ethereum data in a robust and reliable way. Alethio’s API solves Ethereum’s data fragmentation problem, which keeps many mainnet users from reliably and cleanly accessing blockchain-based data.
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MetaMask Plugin System
Over the last four years, MetaMask has helped a large community of Web3 developers usher in a new computing paradigm — where users control their own accounts, and where accounts control their own funds.
The MetaMask extension for browsers brought Ethereum to normal web applications, but new extensions are necessary for new types of scaling strategies and smart contract protocols — many of which require interacting with a user’s account and running a persistent script on the user’s behalf to monitor state or pre-process transactions. Rather than decide one which features should be released, MetaMask built a permissionless plugin system.
A MetaMask Plugin is a script, typically served over ENS and IPFS, adds functionality to MetaMask, and it’s all made possible with our new permissions system.
- auditAddress plugin API can add warnings or endorsements of accounts wherever MetaMask displays them to ensure smart contract security.
- resolveName plugin API means MetaMask won’t dictate what name systems a user can subscribe to for Decentralized Name Systems (DNS).
- A suite of plugin APIs for Layer 2 scaling solutions to help dapps develop decentralized agreements off of the main Ethereum chain.
- ShareAPI makes it easy for any plugin author to create their own API for the sites a user visits, whether a simple RPC style API, or an advanced event-driven API.
- Sample plugins for developers to study to get started, including IPFS, Starkware, and Blocknative plugins. You can view more samples here.
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Japan Bounties Network launches
For DevCon 5 in Osaka, the Bounties Network built a special explorer — available in Japanese — for conference attendees to easily create and fulfill bounties. From proving that you are doing it “big” and signing in karaoke booths, to solving security bugs for Kickback, japan.bounties.network is the place to interact on Ethereum during DevCon. As a platform available on Web3 browsers for the community to come together and interact, the Japan Bounties network is a great example of how local and international communities are evolving through traceable exchanges of value.
Check it out: https://japan.bounties.network/
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Kaleido solves key obstacle to enterprise blockchain adoption with launch of native smart contract management, and partnership with MythX
At DevCon 5, Kaleido announced the addition of enterprise smart contract management as a native component on the Kaleido platform. Governing smart contracts, which contain shared business logic across companies, is a difficult obstacle for blockchain consortia to manage. Kaleido now gives an “enterprise deploy” option for contracts with governance, workflow, versioning, security and firewall protection built in. The capability also supports Truffle and is integrated with Github.
For the first time ever on an Ethereum-based network, users can now verify and audit which lines of code were executed for every transaction. Coupled with Kaleido’s partnership with MythX for the new addition of MythX’s smart contract analysis techniques, enterprises now have the push-button simple solution for smart contract management, deployment, and analytics. Kaleido, the Blockchain Business Cloud for modern business networks, offers a full-stack blockchain platform built on Enterprise Ethereum.
Read more here.
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Joseph Lubin DevCon Call-to-Action: OneMillionDevs.com
During his keynote address at DevCon 5, Joseph Lubin announced a call to action to build the Ethereum developer community, and launched an ecosystem initiative to inspire one million blockchain developers, technologists, and hackers to see how their skills can be applied to writing smart contracts and developing applications on the Ethereum Network.
There are an estimated 24 million software developers globally, yet the number of blockchain developers is in the several hundred thousands — with the highest number developing on Ethereum. As tooling, documentation, libraries, and onramps improve, Lubin challenges the community to refer new programmers and grow Ethereum’s developer mindshare to a million in the next year.
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ConsenSys Grants distributes $175,000 in its Second Wave
At DevCon 4 in 2018, Joseph Lubin announced a $500,000 grant fund to be distributed to projects building open source software to solve technical issues on the Ethereum network. Since its inception, the ConsenSys Grants program has funded 15 projects with a total of $330,000. Today, the ConsenSys Grants program announced its second wave of grantees to receive funding.
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- Security:
- Lighthouse: A security-focused Ethereum Serenity client awarded a follow-on grant of $25,000 to continue its superb work in proof of stake + sharding.
- Lighthouse: A security-focused Ethereum Serenity client awarded a follow-on grant of $25,000 to continue its superb work in proof of stake + sharding.
- Infrastructure:
- Zeropool: A fully anonymous and non-trackable transactions on Ethereum supporting multiple ERC20 tokens, ethers and anonymous atomic swaps – $25,000
- PISA: Real scalability of crypto, by alleviating the assumption, 99% of transactions can remain local amongst the parties instead of the global network – $25,000
- Tellor: A decentralized oracle that provides an efficient, trustless and decentralized alternative for off-chain data – $25,000
- DappNode: A decentralized network of personally-owned nodes with and user-friendly interface – $25,000
- InfrastructureUsability and Dev Tooling
- Security:
ConsenSys Grants funds open-source projects that benefit the greater Ethereum ecosystem. Projects supported include critical areas such as core infrastructure, improved developer tooling and UX, security, and access to knowledge for developers, users, and social impact. ConsenSys Grants Wave 3 is now open for applications and winners will be announced at EthDenver in Feb 2020. The deadline to submit applications is January 14, 2020.
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The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) releases new client specifications, hosts first Mainnet Meetup
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a member-led industry organization represented by hundreds of companies around the world. Today they released two new specifications, available for download here.
- The EEA Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification V4 further optimizes privacy and permissioning based on the implementation experiences of contributing members.
- The EEA Off-Chain Trusted Compute Specification V1.1 adds improvements derived from its open-source reference implementation of the standard. Read EEA member blogs on this specification from iExec and Intel.
The EEA also will hold its first Mainnet meetup for an interactive discussion on topics like privacy, transaction throughput, and legal requirements for industries and enterprises need to get the most out of Ethereum. EEA Mainnet Working Group Chair John Wolpert, ConsenSys Web3Studio’s Senior Product Executive, led the discussion.
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About ConsenSys:
ConsenSys is transforming our present digital architecture toward a more open, inclusive, and secure internet of value, commonly called Web3. With a more trustworthy internet architecture, we are helping individuals, enterprises, and governments unlock new business models and value, gain efficiencies through a shared IT infrastructure, and utilize cutting-edge cryptographic methods to safeguard private user data. Through our unique global business comprised of a venture fund and startup incubator, Enterprise Ethereum consulting arm, and an educational Academy, ConsenSys is building for the decentralized future.
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