Issue #7: January 2020
Happy 2020, everyone!
Apologies for getting this month’s newsletter out so late!
2020 is shaping up to be a big year for Greymass. Throughout 2019, we were working on a number of different projects— Anchor, our signing prototcol, our API infrastructure, Greymass Fuel, and several more. While each of these projects serves a specific purpose on its own, they all fit into a big picture vision in a cohesive manner.
This year, you’ll hear more from us about how things like our signing protocol and Anchor wallet work together, how Fuel supports free transactions for Anchor users, or how our API infrastructure allows us to help other projects easily spin up free CPU for users with Fuel. There’s so much crossover between these projects, and they all help support an EOSIO ecosystem that’s easier for end-users, better for developers, more usable, and more secure. We can’t wait for you to see all of these projects in action!
We’ve also got a few other exciting things in the works— a Greymass website re-design, a new website for Anchor, a mobile wallet (!!!), the official Anchor release, and much more! As always, if you’d like to support our efforts, the best way to do so is to vote for teamgreymass on the EOS mainnet and WAX. We sincerely appreciate all of the support!
Now, onto the ecosystem news!
EOSIO Ecosystem Updates
New Resource Algorithm Proposal From B1
Dan has been talking for some time about making some serious changes to the resource algorithm for EOSIO. He wrote about some ideas on Medium a while back, but now B1 is moving forward with an actual proposal. You can read more about the proposal on Github.
EOSVC Establishes a Grants Program
EOSVC, the subsidiary of Block.one that seeded several venture funds to invest in the EOSIO ecosystem, has announced a grants program.
The good news is that something like this is very much needed. To date, the EOSVC funds have focused on making large investments in more established companies. They are taking venture-scale bets on big players. This is good in the long term, but it means that smaller projects and developers aren’t really being considered. It’s important for a healthy ecosystem to have both— large companies building super ambitious projects and small developers working on cool experiments. Organizations like the Ethereum Foundation have done a good job of funding grassroots development though their grants program. This led to the creation of important projects like Uniswap that didn’t make sense for a VC investment. So we’re happy to see B1 finally start to do the same.
The bad news is that there seems to be a lot of restrictions on which types of entities can get funding. People and projects connected to BPs seem to be out of consideration. Unfortunately, many of the best developers in the space are connected to BPs, as that has historically been the best source of funding for their projects. We’d love to see B1 expand the eligibility criteria in the future. Regardless, we’re looking forward to seeing more capital put to work to fund teams building on EOSIO. That’s good for everyone.
B1 Announces New Voice CEO
Following last month’s announcement of a February 14th release date for Voice beta, Block.one just announced that they have officially brought on board a new Voice CEO— Salah Zalatimo. Zalatimo previously worked as Forbes’ global Chief Digital Officer, so he brings plenty of experience to the table.
Interestingly, the press release describes Voice as both a “decentralized media network,” and a social network. It will be interesting to see how B1 positions Voice relative to other players in the media/social space as the beta launch approaches. From the article:
In June 2019, Block.one introduced Voice with the goal of bringing integrity to social media. Learning from the successes and troubles of familiar platforms, Voice will add verified identity to encourage real content from real people and a blockchain backbone to enhance transparency and provable data integrity. Voice tokens will be rewarded for different forms of engagement, aligning the interests of users, content creators and advertisers. Voice will establish a new economic model as opposed to the traditional, where selling personal data and targeted ads come at the expense of users.
You can follow Salah Zalatimo on Twitter here.
B1 Releases EOSIO 2.0
As promised at their June event, Block.one has been diligently working on the second version of the EOSIO software. You can read the official release here and find more information on Github. There’s a lot to unpack here, but if you’re a developer or someone interested in learning more about EOS from a technical perspective, we recommend reading B1’s entire article.
Greymass Updates
Greymass Fuel Explained
Last month we introduced Greymass Fuel, our latest major project. Aaron from our team wrote up a great explanation of fuel that goes into more detail that the Twitter thread we originally posted. You can read the article here.
If you’re a team that’s building on top of EOS, we’d love to speak with you to see if Greymass Fuel is a good fit to help you cover resource costs for users. Feel free to reach out to us at team@greymass.com .
Anchor Release Candidate 2
After quietly releasing the first two Anchor release candidates, we’ve now published a third update. You can download it here. We’ve added native support for Greymass Fuel, added a few new features, and addressed some bugs. If you are an early Anchor user and want to offer feedback, feel free to join our Anchor Telegram group!
Integrating Anchor and Greymass Fuel
As we mentioned in the newsletter’s intro, we’re really excited to show the EOS community how the various projects we’ve been working on fit together. Here is a great example— we’ve built support for Greymass Fuel directly into Anchor! Anchor users can now get 5ms worth of free transactions through the wallet. You can read more about the integration in this article.
Coffee with Greymass Podcast: All About Greymass Fuel
Aaron and Myles from our team recorded a new episode of the Coffee with Greymass podcast discussing all things Greymass Fuel.
If you want to learn more about the genesis of the project, how it works, and what’s in store for the future, you’ll enjoy this episode!