Distributed Digest: Friday, February 22, 2019

February 22, 2019 7:41 PM

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Friday, February 22, 2019:

Nice to Meet You, Electric Coin Company

The Zcash Company will now be referred to as the Electric Coin Company, according to a February 21 blog post from Josh Swihart. Although the group has always been, legally, the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company LLC, team members have referred to themselves as part of the Zcash Company.

However, to prevent conflation with the cryptocurrency Zcash itself, which is what the company builds and supports, the team decided to change its name. Swihart also maintains that the Electric Coin Company is not the Zcash Foundation, which is a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Despite its name change, the Electric Coin Company is still the same team with the same mission.

Observing Earth from a Flyingcarpet

One of the projects funded through the Gnosis Ecosystem Fund is the Flyingcarpet Network, which is “building a decentralised geospatial layer for Earth Observation.” The team aims to incentivize data scientists to develop “an open library of geospatial analytics-extraction models,” which would be made available to paying organizations through Flyingcarpet’s API.

Further, Flyingcarpet is building two prediction markets on top of Gnosis’ Mercury EDCCs (aka smart contracts). The first is a dashboard to enable anybody to make predictions on Flyingcarpet’s model insights, and the second is a conditional prediction market to allow users to bet on models that have not been developed yet.

Flyingcarpet decided to build its network so that organizations could gain access to otherwise expensive Earth observation satellite imagery. Many groups that could benefit from this information, including nonprofits and humanitarian efforts, are priced out. The team’s goal is “to ensure that the value of Earth observation is open to everyone.”

To Increase or Not to Increase the Dai Stability Fee

At 4 p.m. UTC today, the Maker Foundation Risk Team placed a proposal to increase the Dai Stability Fee from 1 percent to 1.5 percent into MakerDAO’s voting structure. If the proposal receives the requisite number of votes, it will be implemented into the system.

The increased fee proposal was discussed during Maker’s governance call yesterday. Some of the main considerations brought up were an exchange rate persisting below $1 and high inventory levels, among other reasons.

Dani is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

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