Distributed Digest: Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Wednesday, January 30, 2019:

Watermelon Governance

Mona El Isa, CEO and co-founder of Melonport, announced yesterday at AraCon that the watermelon protocol’s forthcoming governance organization, the watermelon Council, will be powered by Aragon’s Solidity framework, AragonOS. The watermelon Council DAO will be able to, among other features, vote watermelon Council members in or out, vote on the asset management gas unit price, and vote on both protocol parameters and ENS subdomains.

El Isa’s announcement comes as Melonport prepares to wind down in February. The watermelon protocol, though built by Melonport, is meant to be decentralized with no owner. The goal of the watermelon Council, then, is to promote the protocol’s user-centric governance and maintenance rather than unilaterally control it.

Web3 Foundation Issues Grant to ChainSafe

The Web3 Foundation announced via Medium yesterday that it has awarded its first grant (as part of the W3F Grants program) to blockchain company ChainSafe Systems. ChainSafe will use the grant funds to “develop the next node implementation of the Polkadot Runtime Environment (PRE) in the Golang programming language.”

The PRE framework allows developers to build and run different blockchain implementations. The foundation believes it’s “critically important” to develop various implementations of the Polkadot protocol to promote its decentralization and dispersion. Indeed, with Golang’s popularity and accessibility in the decentralized technology industry, Web3 hopes to bring on more developers who can contribute to Polkadot.

Besides ChainSafe’s forthcoming Golang implementation, Parity Technologies is developing a Rust implementation of Polkadot.

Kraken, Rebranded

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has recently rebranded, including a new color palette and adventure-themed illustrations. “[N]ot afraid to be different,” Kraken believes its brand “should strongly reflect [its] values and personality.”

The team specifically intends to stand “out in a sea of boring blue.” Apparently, many companies in the technology and financial services realms choose to use blue for their products, as the color is safe, popular, and associated with trust. Kraken’s new color palette centers an off-blue color, sort of like a deep periwinkle, along with pinks and other pastels.

Further, Kraken asserts that its rebellious and dramatic artwork conveys the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-esque “rabbit hole” of crypto. “Crypto is a grand adventure that keeps you on the edge of your seat,” the team elaborates. Indeed.

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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