Perhaps one of the most popular projects of 2017 was Cryptokitties.
The idea behind Cryptokitties was to allow users to purchase, collect, breed, and sell various types of virtual cats in a virtual game run on the Ethereum blockchain.
Each Cryptokitty is unique and ownership is validated through the blockchain.
Initially presented as a hackathon project at EthWaterloo in October 2017, Cryptokitties launched at the end of November 2017 and its popularity quickly skyrocketed — so much so that in December, Cryptokitties was responsible for an all-time high transaction volume, congesting and significantly slowing down the Ethereum network.
Some have blamed Cryptokitties for blocking out “more serious” transactions on the Ethereum network, and some have compared Cryptokitties to the Beanie Baby craze, saying that both are naturally devoid of value.
On the bright side, however, some people think that cryptokitties contributed to the popularity of ethereum and brought public awareness to the cryptocurrency space, which is helpful for the public adoption of cryptocurrencies.
It’s clear that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are hugely popular now.
Whether or not its mainstream spotlight and growing popularity is a good thing is another question.
[Parity] With the growing popularity of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it’s important to have good wallet software.
Parity wallet is a popular multisignature wallet, which requires multiple people to sign off on transactions, and was created by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and his team at Parity Technologies.
Parity marketed itself as the fastest and most secure way of interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, but in November 2017, this happened…
[Parity 2] A user by the name of devops199 accidentally locked up 300 million US dollars worth of ether that had been owned by users of Parity multisig wallet.
One note: by the time I went to GitHub to take a screenshot of the issue devops199 opened up, they had already deleted their account — which is why it says “Ghost,” which is what it says for deleted users.
Parity had relied on an external smart contract to use as a software library for more heavy computation, and this smart contract had not had an extensive security audit before launch on the public Ethereum network.
All it took was for one curious learner to call the “kill” function — and then 300 million was lost.
Due to Ethereum architecture, and the immutability of public blockchains, code that is published is hard to take down, so it’s important that smart contracts do not have bugs.
This was a huge eye-opening moment for the Ethereum community as a whole, and taught developers — especially open source developers — to fully audit the security of mission critical code.
[Coincheck] Coincheck was marketed as one of the largest and most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in Asia — at least up until a hack in January 2018 that after the dust had settled turned out to be the largest cryptocurrency hack in history.
More than half a billion US dollars were stolen in the Coincheck hack of January 2018.
Compare this to the already immense Mt. Gox hack in 2014 that resulted in 400 million US dollars stolen or lost.
Coincheck estimated that upwards of 250,000 (two hundred fifty thousand) users were affected by the hack, and reassured users that it was not an inside job, but a legitimate breach and hack.
Most of the cryptocurrency stolen in the Coincheck hack was lost in a single event.
And compare this with Mt. Gox, which we had mentioned lost a majority of its cryptocurrency through multiple thefts across a span of multiple years.
The landscape for crypto and blockchain is pretty wild in the current day.
There are a lot of exchanges, wallet software, and other blockchain utility applications, and an even greater number of ICOs out there.
Since blockchain is still young, it’s important to do your own due diligence when using blockchain software.
Looking at the broader picture, that’s one of the goals of this course — to get you to start thinking critically about blockchain fundamentals and the more technical aspects about the technology that can then help inform your own personal decisions.