Jun 21, 2018 2 min read

Around the Block, Issue Nº14: IDENTITY featuring distributed banks, quadratic voting

This week, several ideas that appeared early in ICOs like “decentralized banks” or “blockchain based art certification” are slowly starting to get developed by competent teams looking to use existing building blocks.

A first infrastructure/base protocol layer is beginning to get referenced frequently (Infura, Gnosis, Metamask are among some of the tools mentioned this week) and making these ideas much more attainable than before.

Usually with new pieces of building blocks, even more complicated and unintuitive ideas start to form. The FOAM protocol is a particularly counter-intuitive example for me and I look forward to more examples of ground-breaking protocols.

💎 Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin develops an interest in quadratic voting

Vitalik Buterin has recently taken interest in a book called Radical Markets. The book, written by Microsoft Research employee Glen Weyl covers the idea of Quadratic voting where a certain amount of voting credits are allocated among multiple individuals. The system gives individuals the flexibility to “vote” their credits for the issues they care the most about. It is unclear if Vitalik’s interest is motivated by finding a better governance mechanism for Ethereum or as a way to improve on modern democracy.

Ever since Cellarius launched, they have alluded to building a trans-media franchise using blockchain technology. The practical challenges of making that possible have intrigued me and this post has some answers. Metamask will provide identity in Cellarius and a Metadata task force has been established within ConsenSys to figure out content ownership, tagging, etc.

Pawel Chudzinski maps the non-fungible token landscape

NFTs have emerged with Cryptokitties, but have many possible applications. Beyond collectible card games, they can be used to tokenize all forms of assets (real or digital). The current end-user landscape is dominated by games and supported by trading marketplaces and infrastructure tools.

📚 Blockchain Science

MultiChain scale blockchains with off-chain data

The simplest way of storing data on the blockchain (directly via transactions) suffers from confidentiality and scalability problems. Confidentiality can be solved via encryption, but scalability is limited for storage of large data. Hashing can support off-chain data storage and on-chain metadata verification. MultiChain 2.0 supports off-chain data.

Doug Petkanics proposes inflation funding as a way to reward contributions

Existing token holders are incentivized to participate in infrastructure development, but new contributors don’t have existing incentives. Inflation is used to attract miners to secure PoW networks and could be adapted to reward code contributions. Existing token holders could vote on proposals and award a certain portion of their tokens in an inflationary fashion.

⚡️ Protocols and DApps

Richard Burton envisions Distributed Autonomous Banks

There needs to be an open source interface to the open financial system. This bank will consist from a number of pieces. One of the most important is the ability to reset a password potentially implemented by the Gnosis team and their multi-sig wallet.

😅 Misc

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