Vitalik Buterin: Proof of stake will make Ethereum safer

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin claimed today that Ethereum will run on a more secure consensus mechanism than Bitcoin when it moves to proof of stake over the next few years. In his keynote address at Devon 5 here, he said that the new consensus mechanism will make it safer, by making attacks against the network more costly to run.

Ethereum, one of the most ambitious blockchain platforms, is undergoing huge changes over the next few years that should make it scalable, and able to support many more users. To do so, it’s changing from proof of work (where miners use computational resources to create new blocks) to proof of stake (where people put up a chunk of funds as collateral while they keep the network running).

Taking Ethereum mainstream: Social media app Pepo goes live at Devcon 5

Pepo, a Tencent-funded social media app that pays you when people upvote your 30-second videos, launched at Devcon 5 today. It’s live on Android devices, and is coming to iOS shortly.

Pepo has already attracted attention. In beta, over the last six days, 500 Devcon users have already made 11,500 transactions, using it to connect and collaborate. But it's set to attract a much wider audience.

The app is a kind of crossover between TikTok and Instagram, but enhanced by—and shockingly, not encumbered by—blockchain. You can send crypto (using Pepo tokens) to people you know on the app, you can use Pepo tokens to upvote other people’s videos, and they can upvote yours. Further, if you end up with enough money on the app, you can cash out with gift cards, such as Amazon vouchers.

Here are the biggest stories in the cryptoverse:

• Binance supports WeChat and Alipay for buying Bitcoin.
• Finastra to offer Ripple's cross-border payment technology.
• US lawmakers call on Libra partners to abandon the project.
• Poloniex delists 6 altcoins.

Plasma Group and Uniswap release new Ethereum scaling solution at Devcon

What you need to know

“The Ethereum blockchain is almost full,” said Vitalik Buterin in an interview with Canadian newspaper The Star earlier last month. He told no lie; Ethereum’s network utilization has been ominously bubbling north of 90 percent over the past couple months, according to tracker Etherscan.io.

Why it's important

That’s a big problem—if there’s no more space on the Ethereum blockchain, the network could become too slow for people to build on it, or force people to rely on solutions that compromise on security or decentralization by, for instance, delegating certain processes to trusted third parties. At that point, why even develop on blockchain at all? 

Emirati backs Ethereum

Two Emirati royals are backing an obscure crypto token billing itself as the “first” to have won the endorsement of a royal family.  

Khalfan Saeed Khalfan Al Mazrouei and Sheikh Abdullah Bin Rashed Al Sharqi are both shareholders of the company behind Crypto Price Index, a cryptocurrency whose value supposedly represents the aggregate of the top 200 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. 

Read more here.