TheDAO has seen its first proposal expire without making it to the required voting threshold. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 23:
- Voting has ended for TheDAO’s first serious proposals, the call for a “moratorium on proposals until the DAO contract is upgraded (via newContract proposal), fixing most serious issues with voting and splitting”. The proposal expired on June 11 2016, not making it to the required voting threshold of 20 percent. As the voting ended, 92 million votes had accepted the proposal, while 10 million votes rejected it. In total, only 8.84 percent of all DAO tokens had actively been involved with the proposal. This is well short of the voting threshold, and also shows why there are concerns that participation in TheDAO will be too low for it to work. One other proposal, the proposal to “raise the deposit required to make a Proposal to The DAO from 2 ETH to 11 ETH” is currently half-way to the required 20 percent with two more days to go. It seems unlikely that these additional two days will be sufficient to make it there, resulting in TheDAO being off to a poor start.
- Consensys Media has published an examination of RSK Labs’ Rootstock technology following the interview it recently had with RSK Labs founder Sergio Demian Lerner. The latter Bitcoin blockchain startups is intending to bring Ethereum’s smart contract technology to Bitcoin via its Rootstock platform. The examinitation notes that, even though RSK Labs claims to feature superior technology compared to Ethereum, “by the time Rootstock is released in December, Ethereum’s development will have progressed, rendering predictions of Rootstock’s improved functionality spurious.” It also adds that “Ethereum’s current security model has been tested in the wild for almost a year now without consensus failure, much of that time securing a monetary base valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Rootstock’s security model is complex, appears to be flawed, and has never been tested in the wild while bearing value.”
- Rootstock isn’t the only one trying to bring Ethereum smart contract technology to the Bitcoin blockchain. Counterparty, the technology for decentralized financial tools on the Bitcoin blockchain, has started running Ethereum smart contracts this week. The market price of Counterparty’s currency immediately climbed by 25 percent, although the overall market enthusiasm appears to be quite low as Ethereum was unaffected by the move and the total market capitalization of Counterparty is still only a fraction of Ethereum’s value.
- Apart from China hackers are also helping to increase the price of Bitcoin. One hacker is reportedly selling one quarter of a million driver license records on the dark web, accepting payment in Bitcoin for those interested. This is far from the first case, and another hacker even put up 32 million Twitter account password for sale for just 10 Bitcoins in the same week. The hacker that is selling this data is also linked to the recent high profile hacks of MySpace, LinkedIn, Tumblr.
- The price of Bitcoin moved closer to $600 per coin, increasing by more than two percent compared to the previous week to a current exchange rate of about $582 per BTC. Ethereum’s currency, the popular alternative to Bitcoin, also experienced a good week with its price increasing by a similar percentage to $14.03 per ETH.