Distributed Digest: Monday, January 14, 2019

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Monday, January 14, 2019:

ProgPoW Reviewed by Nvidia, AMD

The ProgPoW team (collectively known as IfDefElse) recently posted an FAQ to answer some of the Ethereum community’s questions about the proposed proof-of-work algorithm. The FAQ revealed that several months ago, IfDefElse received feedback via email from engineers at Nvidia and AMD, two major GPU manufacturers.

Because of this “revelation,” folks in the community have begun to cry conspiracy and troll Kristy-Leigh Minehan, a key member of IfDefElse. One redditor believes that Minehan is “being showered in goodies” from Nvidia. However, she maintains that ProgPoW is not funded by Nvidia or AMD, nor is the team “admitting” to any conspiracy with its recent FAQ, as some have argued.

“It’s transparency,” said Minehan.

Nodes Making Progress Toward Constantinople

In other ecosystem news, recent data from a Constantinople-tracking API – maintained by the Ethereum node explorer ethernodes.org – shows that around 40 percent of Parity and Geth clients have upgraded to Constantinople. As of press, about 78 percent of Parity clients and about 43 percent of Geth clients have been updated.

There is a discrepancy with the data, however, as ethernodes.org published an overview earlier noting that less than 16 percent of the clients had upgraded. But according to information relayed by Parity’s Afri Schoedon, the API only parses Geth and Parity clients that are part of the main Ethereum network. The 16 percent statistic, on the other hand, includes non-Ethereum chains and some non-nodes, meaning the data is less representative of actual node progress.

In any case, Ethereum nodes are slowly but steadily transitioning to Constantinople.

0x Announces Market Maker Program

The 0x team is back at it again with another development: Last week, 0x announced the launch of its Market Maker Program. The program aims to onboard market makers so that they can add liquidity to the 0x ecosystem.

To aid the onboarding process, 0x has “created a set of comprehensive tutorials to inform market makers how both Ethereum and 0x function.” Plus, applicants accepted into the Market Maker Program can earn up to $15,000 “for building and running their own market making bot on 0x relayers.”

The market-making bots specified by 0x hearken to the automated market makers seen in other protocols, such as Bancor. These automated systems have built-in liquidity mechanisms that allow tokens to always be bought or sold, regardless of the number of participants within the network.

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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