Distributed Digest: Monday, March 18, 2019

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Monday, March 18, 2019:

The ETH Network Is Lava

Ever thought it would be convenient to pay gas fees in a cryptocurrency other than Ether? With Lava Protocol, that’s now an option.

The new ERC20 token transaction standard allows individuals to sign typed data with a fee paid in tokens, not ETH. This process is like signing a check in the analog world (called a lava packet within the protocol).

Although a sender can pay the gas fee with an ERC20 token, payment to the Ethereum network’s miners still occurs in ETH. A Lava relayer processes an individual’s transaction and pays the requisite ETH fee on the sender’s behalf. Because there’s an intermediary processor, it costs a few cents more to transfer ERC20 tokens; however, one redditor said this process would be valuable regardless of the upcharge because it would help to encourage crypto mass adoption.

Dean Eigenmann Does Something

Dean Eigenmann, Ethereum’s favorite misanthrope, has decided to part ways with ZK Labs, where he was a security researcher and auditor. Eigenmann said he’s “super excited for whatever comes next.”

Also, the Etherean today proposed a solution to counteract what he calls “[t]he broken EIP security incentive.” In his Medium post, he noted that, had the broader Ethereum community actively looked at EIP 1283, its bug would have been discovered earlier, thus avoiding the last-minute Constantinople delay. However, there’s presently limited incentive to detect and report issues within an EIP draft.

The solution? Eigenmann believes there should be enough economic incentives early in an EIP’s implementation timeline to compensate for the incentives that would come later. This could be accomplished through an exponential decay in bounty value whereby the initial compensation for detecting a bug would be double the current rate. The bounty value would start to decay toward the current rate right when the EIP was accepted.

Istanbul: Business as Usual

At the latest Ethereum core developers meeting this past Friday, March 15, Hudson Jameson indicated that people seemed to like Afri Schoedon’s proposed Istanbul roadmap, which set mid-October 2019 as the hard fork date. Jameson said he was not sure if everybody agreed to this roadmap, but he also noted that he does not see why the core devs would choose not to follow it.

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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