Around the Block, Issue Nº8: LEDGERS Corda explained, ERC721 dissected and Kin+Stellar?
It’s sunny Bank Holiday Week ☀️ in the UK, so Around the Block is coming out a day late. For reading to go with the weather or on the flight to Consensus 2018, I recommend MultiChain’s clear articulation of Corda’s design and motivating problems.
More seriously, Corda’s ever-merging nature, relentless IOTA experiments to prove the Tangle’s stability and Kin’s decision to evolve their own version of Stellar is evidence that we are only touching the tip of the iceberg for possible distributed ledger models.
💎 Ethereum
Karen Scarbrough explained the ERC721 asset model
tl:dr; This is a true deep-dive in the source code of the ERC721 implementation. It compares it to the fungible and simpler ERC20 standard at each key step. Notable amendments include the need for safe transfer.
⚡️ Protocols and DApps
MultiChain did a deep-dive of R3 Corda
tl:dr; Private blockchains have advanced steadily, with first live deployments in 2017. Unique confidentiality, scalability and governance requirements compared to public blockchains influence different design decisions. Corda departs radically from public blockchains. In Corda, there is no unified blockchain which contains all of the transactions confirmed. Nodes only see those transactions in which they are directly involved, or upon which they depend historically. Nodes are responsible for checking transaction correctness and authorization but rely on trusted notaries to verify uniqueness. This gives Corda networks full interoperability as two chains can merge simply by transacting.
Kin explained their decision to build a Stellar fork
tl:dr; Kin’s original multi-chain approach to work on Ethereum and Stellar proved challenging when planning for scale (Kin’s intention is to support significant transaction volumes). The new blockchain will be a fork of Stellar and is designed to overcome “business scale challenges” of the Stellar MainNet.
Note: For all of Stellar’s appeal and adoption, I wish more people would explain the security of the validator model, would happily feature in Around the Block.
😅 Misc
- New “Strange Loop” proposal for more structured forking governance in Ethereum
- Bamboo a new language for smart contracts in Ethereum
- Zastrin Ethereum primer released
- FOAM launch Cliquebait, an Ethereum testing container
- Parr, a query tool for Ethereum
- IOTA share research simulations of the tangle
- First release of Casper, Ethereum’s Proof of Stake implementation
🚀 Releases
🙏 Feedback
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