From the Front Page - The Ether Review
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The Ether Review #76 — Attores, 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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State Change #44 — A New Approach to Ending Slavery
June 30th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Today, we look at the problem of modern slavery and how it intersects with wildlife conservation. This subject is brought to the fore by growing interest in using blockchain technologies to illuminate the business processes which conceal the presence of slavery. Our guests are Brian Iselin, founder of SlaveFreeTrade.org, and Bubba Cook, Western and Central Pacific Tuna Programme Manager for the World Wildlife Fund.
This episode was co-hosted and edited by Alexis Kenyon. Inevitably, some of th...
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Ether Review Legal Discussion #2 The Legality of Raising Money Using Tokens
June 28th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In today’s discussion we look at the legality of raising money through token launches, the potential risks involved, and approaches to improving the safety of these new bearer assets. We also examine the term ICO in depth and find that terminology, while relevant is second to the nature of the offer and state of the project involved. Following the discussion is an interview With Peter Van Vaulkenburg recorded at Devcon 2, applying the Howy test to TheDAO.
weekinethereum.com
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The Ether Review #67 — Celebrating Erik Voorhees Week with Erik Voorhees!
June 11th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In this, the sixty seventh episode of The Ether Review, we set out to understand Prism, Shapeshift’s new non-custodial synthetic asset built on the Ethereum network. In reviewing this episode I feel I was unsuccessful in achieving this. However, the peripheral conversation about Erik’s view of the space is extremely enlightening, especially writ large in his positioning of Shapeshift. The Bitcoin scaling debate, the future of digital assets, the financial world’s response — it’s al...
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State Change #43 - The Battle for your attention, Meher Roy, Simon de la Rouviere
June 6th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Recalling State Change #40 Weaponized AI propaganda machine, we discussed at length the value of attention. Today we take this subject to it’s maximum extend. Software engineer Simon de la Rouviere and biochemical engineer Meher Roy shed light on how the battle for our attention is the basis for the online economy. We see it in the business models of two of the biggest companies on earth — Facebook and Google. That ever present question of how blockchain will affect these dynamics hangs...
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The Ether Review #66 - Gnosis, Martin Köppelmann
May 28th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls After a stunning token launch Gnosis has become a classic example of the hope for greater and more powerful decentralized applications. Founder Martin Köppelmann walks us through the project's genesis, growth, and road to success
https://twitter.com/koeppelmann itunes.apple.com/podcast/the-ethe…id899090462?mt=2
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State Change #42 The Use of Knowledge in Society, Jeffrey Tucker, Kirk Dameron, Stephen Macaskill
May 24th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls While today decentralization seems like a revelation, one thinker more than any other stands as its chief proponent. In 1945 Friedrich Hayek bucked the post war fashion of command-control thinking and announced the futility of central economic or societal planning. His essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society, is a concise and accurate argument for the organizing principles of the internet, horizontal organizations, and blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Guests: Jeffrey Tucker: CLO...
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State Change #41 Unpacking Digital Identity - Christian Lundkvist, Stephen Wilson
May 19th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Today we compare in-depth the self-sovereign and federated models of identity. Why is our means of proving who we are important? Well, for one thing, relying on an authority which doesn’t have our best interests at heart to manage our identity is one of the many problems exploited by the decentralized propaganda machine described last episode.
Our guests today are Christian Lundkvist, senior technologist at ConsenSys and Chief Architect and Researcher of the uPort self sovereign identity pl...
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