Distributed Digest: Friday, January 18, 2019

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Friday, January 18, 2019:

Constantinople Mainnet Activation in February

Ethereum core developers are targeting Wednesday, February 27, for the Constantinople hard fork. The upgrade should be implemented on or around block number 7,280,000 (though, with the difficulty bomb ticking away, mathematical computation will be more difficult, so there are no guarantees).

After auditing firm ChainSecurity discovered a bug in EIP 1283, one of five Constantinople improvement proposals, discussion arose about whether to exclude it from the upgrade. Based on today’s core devs call, EIP 1283 will not be featured in February’s update, but a patched version may be included in a subsequent fork, pending further discussion and testing.

The modified timeline will first see Constantinople activated on the mainnet, then testnets will undergo forks to remove EIP 1283.

Background on the Constantinople delay can be found here.

Parity Fether Beta, Wild and Free

The beta version of Parity’s light client-based wallet, Fether, has launched. The release marks the wallet’s transition from alpha to beta.

The beta features updates such as support for a BIP39 recovery phrase, which allows for account creation from a word list; integration with Parity Signer, which turns a smartphone into a cold-storage wallet; and the linking of transactions to the POA Network’s block explorer BlockScout as opposed to Etherscan.

Fether’s code is open source, and the team welcomes contributions to it. Further, Parity says it would appreciate feedback regarding any non-technical issues that users spot, such as hard-to-read font and weird app behavior.

MarbleCards: The Internet in Card Form

MarbleCards, a platform for collectible, internet-inspired cards, will launch tomorrow, January 19, according to a Medium post from co-founder Johan Unger. The forthcoming non-fungible tokens will represent three values: aesthetics, scarcity, and utility. These values, maintains Unger, are important to “[g]ame nerds like us.”

Using an Ethereum wallet like MetaMask, individuals will be able to buy existing Marble cards or create their own based on unique webpages. However, during the launch period, the websites available for “marbling,” as it were, will be limited. The team plans to release new sites, called Collections, every other day. The first site for marbling will be KnowYourMeme.

Dani Putney 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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