Distributed Digest: Friday, March 1, 2019

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Friday, March 1, 2019:

Happy Hard Fork!

The Constantinople hard fork was successfully activated yesterday on the Ethereum mainnet. Core developer Hudson Jameson noted in today’s all core devs meeting that there have not been any issues reported with the upgrade. According to information provided by Ethernodes.org, as of press, around 29 percent of Geth and Parity clients have been updated.

Plapps, Plapps, Plapps

The Plasma Group announced yesterday that it has built a general-purpose Plasma design allowing developers “to build a broad class of smart contracts.” These contracts are known as plapps, short for Plasma apps.

The team maintains that creating a plapp “is as simple as writing a special type of smart contract” – a predicate contract – and then “deploying it to Ethereum.” These plapps would exist on a generalized Plasma chain.

Back at ETHDenver last month, the Plasma Group used its plapp framework to develop Bitcoin Lightning contracts on its Plasma chain. Moving forward, the team encourages developers to become early adopters of its plapp architecture so that the Plasma Group can better understand the community’s Plasma needs.

Which Crypto Camp Are You in?

Google engineer Casey Caruso recently wrote an article about what she (and her apparently lethargic co-author) see as the five camps of crypto: sound money, payments, open finance, Web3, and decentralized ledger technology. Each camp has its own motivations and lingo. For example, the open finance camp “is motivated by providing access to an open financial system” and features commons phrases like “financial freedom” and “bank the unbanked.”

Caruso and her co-author also provide example projects for each camp, ranging from Zcash in the sound money camp to (parts of) Ethereum in the Web3 camp. Of course, crypto Twitter being the entity it is, some community members questioned the placement of companies in certain camps, especially Zcash existing in the sound money camp. Caruso admitted that the placement of Zcash “was a tough call.”

Further, Caruso indicated that these crypto camps are not mutually exclusive, with many projects between camps. “Don’t get mad,” she advised community members.

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.

Like what you read? Follow us on X @Bitnewsbot to receive the latest Constantinople, hard fork or other Ethereum ecosystem news.