Distributed Digest: Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Wednesday, January 9, 2019:

Let’s Meet Veil

Launching on the Ethereum mainnet on Tuesday, January 15, is the P2P prediction market and derivatives platform Veil, which is built atop Augur, 0x, and – of course – Ethereum. One of Veil’s goals is to bring the Augur prediction market protocol to a mainstream audience.

Veil will use the 0x protocol for quicker transactions, as order creation and cancellation occur off chain with 0x. Additionally, the platform will employ Augur’s oracle system to help ensure proper market resolution, but because this process can take weeks to finalize, Veil will also include instant settlement based on reported prices rather than waiting for finalization from Augur. However, instant settlement will only be an option, meaning users can decide how much “trustlessness,” so to speak, they want from the platform.

The Veil alpha has been live on the Kovan testnet since September 2018. Interested individuals can try out the alpha to get a sense of what the mainnet launch will offer.

Let’s Deploy the Görli Testnet

Sister to the Kovan testnet is Görli, which developers can deploy by following the tutorial published yesterday by ChainSafe Systems’ Priom Chowdhury. The walkthrough includes several steps to run Görli, but a few tools are required to deploy the testnet, including a UNIX system (like Mac or Linux), a Google Cloud Platform account, and the open-source modular infrastructure tool Terraform.

Parity’s Afri Schoedon and ChainSafe Systems initially demonstrated the Görli testnet at ETHBerlin in September 2018. Since then, several clients have included support for the network: Geth, Parity, Pantheon, Nethermind, and EthereumJS.

Görli was spearheaded by Schoedon and ChainSafe Systems to provide a universal proof-of-authority testnet for Ethereum developers. In Schoedon’s call for participation, he noted that there was a lack of “consistent availability and high reliability” vis-à-vis current cross-client test networks.

Let’s Survive Crypto Winter with ShapeShift

Coupled with the positive developments from Veil and Görli is the sobering news that cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift has downsized, laying off 37 employees (or a third of its team). CEO and founder Erik Voorhees noted that the company has “felt the bitter frost” of crypto winter.

Voorhees discussed some of the lessons the crew has learned from its mistakes. For instance, he said the company diversified too early in the process. “Product diversification is fine,” he continued, but the secondary products ShapeShift has developed ultimately diverted the organization’s resources.

Voorhees remains optimistic, though, as he looks to the future. He said the company, the crypto community altogether, and he as an individual are “all on a journey of growth” as they move “toward a world of borderless, apolitical finance for all humans.”

Dani Putney 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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