Distributed Digest: Thursday, February 21, 2019

February 21, 2019 7:42 PM

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Thursday, February 21, 2019:

ETH Grants, Wave 5

The Ethereum Foundation today announced its fifth wave of grant recipients, marking the foundation’s first distribution of grants for 2019. Although the Grants Program has expanded to include security, usability, privacy, and education, the most recent wave returns to the program’s core focus on scalability efforts.

Seven projects were awarded grants, from LeapDAO’s work on “Plasma Leap,” which is a More Viable Plasma model, to the Görli testnet, which launched at GörliCon at the end of January and has been previously funded by the ETC Cooperative. However, the foundation is “open to any grant proposal which addresses urgent, important and unique improvements which further the Ethereum vision.”

Further, the announcement of grant recipients does not include the amounts awarded to each project, nor does it feature a wishlist for efforts the foundation hopes to see. Justifying this change, the foundation said it does “not want applicants to be prejudiced by previous wishlists and award amounts.”

Meet Helena

ConsenSys-incubated prediction market platform Helena recently went live on Ethereum. Users can earn bounties based on certain events in the crypto industry, ranging from when the Constantinople hard fork will occur (at block number 7,280,000?) to what the total capacity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network will be toward the end of February. Bounties are distributed at the end of each month.

Helena joins crypto-focused prediction market platforms such as Augur and Stox. However, much like another project, Gnosis, Helena is part of ConsenSys Labs, ConsenSys’ investment and accelerator arm.

Huobi Global for Constantinople

The team at digital asset exchange Huobi Global tweeted earlier today that it will support the Constantinople (including Petersburg) hard fork. The exchange will also help its users “resolve any technical issues” that arise as a result of the transition.

Some individuals took to reddit to discuss the announcement. One redditor said, “Of course [Huobi] will. This isn’t a contentious fork.” However, others chimed in, saying that more signaling in general was good.

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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