Distributed Digest: Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Google Quietly Develops Blockchain Data Tool

Googler Allen Day, along with a small crew of open-source developers, loaded data for the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains onto Google’s big-data analytics platform, BigQuery. Day then teamed up with lead developer Evgeny Medvedev to build a suite of software to search the data.

Called Blockchain ETL, the project was developed last year “[i]n spite of a total lack of publicity,” though word of it spread among the crypto development community. Indeed, over 500 projects have been built using Blockchain ETL’s tools.

To show how Blockchain ETL could benefit the cryptospace, Day used the suite of software to analyze the bitcoin cash hard fork. Through the data, Day could see that bitcoin cash was being hoarded by large holders of the coin, rather than being spent in fast micro-transactions, which was a key reason why the bitcoin cash community wanted to fork in the first place.

No Party Like a TCR Party

Steve Gattuso, tech lead of the ConsenSys circle Alpine, posted on Medium yesterday that the team’s token-curated registry (TCR) experiment, TCR Party, is open to everybody with a Twitter account. A TCR Party Leaderboard has also been created as a kind of directory for the registry’s users.

Prior to launching TCR Party 1.0, as Gattuso refers to it, the project’s pre-registration period included around 50 participants. With feedback from the community, Gattuso and his team were able to identify some bugs and needed improvements before “opening up the floodgates” of TCR Party.

Although the experiment is now open to the masses, Gattuso maintains that it “will likely [still] have its bug and issues.”

ENS, Meet EIP 1577

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) manager, recently redesigned with non-technical users in mind, is compatible with EIP 1577 via ENS’ newly deployed Resolver contract. Proposed by Dean Eigenmann and Nick Johnson, the EIP introduces the contenthash field for ENS resolvers. Thus, it’s now possible for the ENS to support names with IPFS or Swarm hashes.

Users can set the new resolver by selecting “Use Public Resolver” on the manager’s interface. However, the team notes that changing the resolver of existing names is a time-consuming process, so the ENS continues to support the old resolver.

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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