Distributed Digest: Tuesday, February 26, 2019

February 26, 2019 6:49 PM

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Tuesday, February 26, 2019:

Further ENS Integration with DNSSEC

Nick Johnson, lead developer at the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), posted on Medium yesterday that the team is “comfortable with the robustness of [its] DNSSEC integration” and plans to “roll it out more widely.” Last year, the ENS launched support for the top-level domain (TLD) .xyz to test integration with the DNSSEC, which provides specifications for internet domains.

Now, with greater integration, about 90 percent of TLDs will be available to use within ENS. For example, an internet TLD such as ethereum.org would be able to, once configured, receive funds just as the ENS-equivalent address, ethereum.eth, could do so today.

However, the ENS root is presently owned by the ENS multisig, which is controlled by seven root keyholders. These individuals would have to manually approve every TLD. Because of this anticipated burden, Johnson said the ENS intends to deploy another EDCC (aka smart contract) that “will replace the ENS root multisig as owner of the ENS root,” allowing anybody to configure a TLD provided they have a valid DNSSEC proof. The additional contract will be, in turn, owned by the ENS multisig.

“Waterloo, Knowing My Fate Is to Be with You”

The Kyber Network today introduced Waterloo, a bridge between EOS and Ethereum to enable users to implement an EOS light client as an Ethereum contract and vice versa, thereby allowing individuals to transfer digital assets cross-chain. Kyber maintains that “[s]uch cross-chain interoperability [has] … potential applications in finance, scalability and privacy.”

Kyber has developed a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation of the bridge on the Ethereum Kovan testnet. The PoC tests both EOS-ETH and ETH-EOS relays. The code for the PoC can be found on Kyber’s GitHub.

Other groups are interested in cross-chain bridges as well. Last August, the alpha for a Dogecoin-Ethereum bridge was released. A little later in November, POA Network launched its TokenBridge to enable ERC20-to-ERC20 token swapping.

TCR Party, 3 Weeks In

Alpine, the team behind the Twitter-based token-curated registry (TCR) experiment known as TCR Party, yesterday reflected on the project’s progress. After several weeks of TCR Party out in the wild, the team has learned various lessons, especially related to user interaction.

One important insight Alpine has gleaned from the experiment is that “cartelization is natural.” The team has observed that social cartels naturally form around keeping certain members on the registry and kicking others out. The formation of these groups has ultimately led to increased activity, as participants recruit their friends and collude to remove certain friends from the list – all in good fun, of course.

Because of this natural cartelization, Alpine intends to later implement a sort of cartels-as-a-service model. Within this system, participants could delegate 30 percent of their tokens to a cartel leader who would vote on cartel members’ behalf during challenges. Leaders would be able to establish cartels so long as they attracted the required minimum number of followers. “We decided [we wanted] to ease the process [of cartelization] and essentially automate it,” the team noted.

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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