From the Front Page - The Ether Review
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The Third Web #4 - DFINITY Consensus
January 23rd, 2018 by
Arthur S. Falls "The DFINITY project was formed to research ways of enabling public decentralized networks to host a virtual computer of unlimited capacity. This rests upon a new blockchain computer that is similar in concept to Ethereum but has vastly improved performance and, ultimately, unlimited capacity. The starting requirement was that the systems developed should be useful in joining 1 million or more mining clients."
Huge claims, but the DFINITY project is indeed one of the most interesting infrastr...
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Third Web #3 - SingularityNet
January 23rd, 2018 by Arthur S. Falls Artificial Intelligence Researcher Ben Goertzal and Blockchain Solution Architect, Simone Vulpem discuss the SingularityNet artificial intelligence marketplace. Currently, the market for artificial intelligence is dominated by industry giants with huge monolithic offerings with features far beyond the often niche applications may businesses have a need for.
Smaller organisations provide bespoke solutions but these can be expensive and configuration heavy.
SingularityNet gives independent d...
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The Third Web Micro - Economies #2 - SpankChain
December 10th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In today’s episode we look at spank chain, an adult industry cryptocurrency payment system built using Ethereum. Currently, financial intermediaries in the adult entertainment industry exploiting their position to impose arbitrary rules on content by refusing to serve participants who produce content a specific payment processor finds objectionable.
The effect of this is to persecute already marginalized groups like trans men and women and as well as severing the income of both individuals ...
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The Third Web #2 - Quantifying Gaze
November 20th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Today we are taking a quick look at a range of problems and their solutions through the lens of a little known project known as Gazecoin. Under the gaze coin banner are a range of projects, among them, a virtual world with purchasable real estate which serves as a content delivery channel.
I first encountered Gazecoin when founder Jonny peters invited me to check out the project’s pilot content-creation studio in Sydney.
Jonny is an accomplished entrepreneur who made his first move in ...
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Third Web Micro-Economies #1 - The Props Project by YouNow
November 12th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Video, mobile first, open APIs, an existing two sided market, and a 40 million strong userbase already transacting digitally. The YouNow live video platform is an ideal candidate for a monetary network based business. YouNow’s Props project aims to achieve just this.
Decentralized economies will reshape digital media.
Decentralized monetary networks work well when applied to existing producer-consumer networks. Today digital media is a producer-consumer network with despotic intermediar...
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The Third Web #1 - Re-examining the Legality of ICOs
November 6th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Joshua Ashley Klayman, co-founded the blockchain and smart contracts working group at the law firm Morrison and Foerster and leads the WSBA’s Legal Working Group. We caught up in person at a Cafe in Central Park to discuss gender disparity in tech and ICO regulation - a subject of considerable significance right now.
Women in blockchain: Social barriers to entry, Counterproductive responses to gender disparity in blockchain, Public displays of bigotry.
ICO Regulation: ...
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Third Web #0 - The Ether Review Final Episode
October 31st, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Today we’re wrapping up The Ether Review and kicking off The Third Web. Some of the remarks I make in this episode are overstated and under qualified. Please feel free to critique any views you disagree with in the comments and if there is sufficient intelligent controversy I’ll revisit the subjects in question in subsequent episodes.
This podcast is targeted at industry observers looking for a technical examination of issues on the frontier of what has become known as the blockchain spac...
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The Ether Review #76 — Attores & Indorse, Smart Contracts as a Service
October 17th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls The founders of Attores, Gorang Torvekar and David Moskowitz discuss their notion of “smart contracts as a service”.
The platform is currently being piloted by nanyang polytechnic in Singapore as a digital diploma registry. This is being extended into a full professional network platform called Indorse, which ran an ICO earlier this year.
In addition to the above we discuss the birth of the Ethereum Kovan testnet, which has it’s origins in a pub, just outside the Attores/Ethereum Fou...
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The Ether Review #75 — Streamr, Completing the Data Services Trifecta
October 11th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Current solutions for decentralized data processing like Golem or Truebit provide part of a data services solution. Storj, Filecoin, Sia, and others offer storage solutions.
Streamer tokenizes the value in streams of Data. Using the same interface for both data delivery and payment, Streamr hopes to create a two sided market for data. This rounds out the basic data services portfolio, operating synergistically with existing projects.
CEO Henri Pihkala and COO Risto Karjalainen explain.
...
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The Ether Review #74 —An Emerging Capital Market
October 9th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Element Group is a full service investment bank for the crypto-token markets.
Stan Miroshnik has a background in traditional finance. After watching the crypto-markets form, Stan and his colleagues began working to understand these new markets and build a traditional finance business to serve the space.
We discuss the maturity of the companies using the token launch fundraising mechanism, and those investing in the tokens. Stan sees an emerging market with strong similarities to traditiona...
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The Ether Review #73 — Kik, Establishing a Micro-economy
October 3rd, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Today we hear from Ted Livingston, who founded Kik interactive in 2009 to address the problem of chat between blackberry, android and iPhone. Since then their chat app, Kik, has exploded in popularity, experiencing use by up to 40% of US teenagers.
In 2015 Tencent, the builder of Chinese chat giant Wechat, purchased a 5% stake in the company at a Billion dollar valuation. A move that some are saying has anointed Kik as the Wechat of the west. It’s interesting to see the youth focus with One...
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The Ether Review #72 — Nick Dodson and Governx
September 27th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Between re-constructing TheDAO and building his own governance platform Governx (once Boardroom), ConsenSys developer Nick Dodson is building a portfolio of powerful Ethereum based tools.
Disappointingly, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance instantiation of Governex is not up for discussion. However, we do dig into the abstract structure of governance tools, data-driven design, the flaws of The DAO, and what can be salvaged from that project.
Ares DAO is a joint project between Nick and shado...
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Ether Review Legal #6 — Playing in a Sandbox
September 14th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In today’s long overdue, landmark episode we are joined by an international panel of leaders in fin-tech and blockchain law:
Claire Wivell, Hannah Glass (Australia), Alex Simms (New Zealand), Peter van Valkenburgh (USA), and James Duchenne (USA/Mauritius)
The theme for the discussion was regulatory sandboxes — frameworks for enabling businesses to operate in a deregulated environment. The goal is to allow legislative bodies to develop an understanding of new businesses before regul...
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Ether Review Legal #5 — BernsWeiss Stops the IRS in its Tracks
August 23rd, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Lee Weiss of the US law firm BernsWeiss discusses the Coinbase/IRS dispute. The dispute began in November 2016, when the IRS summoned Coinbase to hand over data about all users who were active on the exchange from 2013 to 2015, with a view to investigating the tax compliance of individuals who have transacted in cryptocurrencies.
On behalf of one or more anonymous Coinbase users, BernsWeiss took the issue to court and was recently granted permission to argue against the summons, which among o...
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Ether Review #71 - David Bailey on Po.et & the MtGox/BTC-e Connection
August 12th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls David Bailey, CEO of BTC Media, discusses the recent shutdown of BTC-e and its mysterious connection to the MtGox hack which led to the exchange’s demise in 2014. He also introduces Po.et, a revolutionary proof-of-existence blockchain platform. The arrest of Alexander Vinnik and seizure of the BTC-e website by the FBI in late July shed some long-awaited light on the cold case of the 650,000 bitcoins which went missing from MtGox over several years from 2011 to 2013. Upon his arrest, WizSec re...
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Ether Review Legal #4 - MME, the Beating Heart of Crypto Valley
August 6th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Luka Müller and Dianne Schepers of MME — the Swiss law firm famous for running the Ethereum crowdsale — discuss jurisdictional constraints, Crypto Valley, novel crypto-asset classes and the “second wave” of tokenization.
With 25 previous “token generating events” and 60 pending projects, MME is a clear leader in the crypto law realm. The firm is now welcoming a “second wave” of clients; companies from the legacy economy which are seeking ways to enter the blockchain w...
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Ether Review Legal #3 - The Simple Agreement for Future Tokens
July 25th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Juan Benet and Jesse Clayburgh of Protocol Labs, and Ryan Zurrer of Polychain Capital, discuss the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT). Inspired by Y Combinator’s “Simple Agreement for Future Equity”, the SAFT standardizes the legal framework surrounding token issuance and governs the nature of the transactions involved (i.e. the deployment of capital and distribution of tokens).
The complex legal environment surrounding tokens, especially in the US, has led many entrepreneurs to ...
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The Ether Review #70 - CoinList Battens down the Hatches with Watertight Token Launch Compliance
July 21st, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Juan Benet and Jesse Clayburgh of Protocol Labs, and Ryan Zurrer of Polychain Capital, discuss CoinList, a platform for token-backed networks to raise money through pre-launch token sales.
While planning the Filecoin token sale, the team at Protocol Labs developed a method of accreditation for US investors in order to comply with securities law. Realising the importance of such a system for the whole ecosystem, they partnered with AngelList to develop this into a platform on which other proje...
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Ether Review #69 — IOTA & the Post-Blockchain Era
July 18th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls David Sønstebø, co-founder of IOTA, discusses this next-generation post-blockchain platform designed to serve as the backbone for the Internet-of-Things (IoT).
IOTA is a groundbreaking new open-source distributed ledger that does not use a blockchain. Its innovative new quantum-proof protocol, known as the Tangle, gives rise to unique new features like zero fees, infinite scalability, fast transactions, secure data transfer and many others.
Because the Tangle uses a Directed Acyclic Grap...
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The Ether Review #68 — Numerai, The Last Hedge Fund
July 6th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Xander Dunn and Richard Craib discuss Numerai, a new kind of hedge fund built by a network of data scientists. The Numerai platform crowdsources machine learning by releasing encrypted data sets to data scientists, incentivising them to develop machine learning algorithms to analyse the data. Scientists then bid their predictions to the hedge fund by staking funds, and are paid returns in Numeraire, the platform’s native cryptocurrency.
By abstracting its financial data to be only machine-...
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