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Omniex Holdings

omniex

otpyrLast couplec weeks, the hottest crypto market topic was the KuCoin Hack. Hacken Group, the major cryptocurrency exchanges auditor, highly values the need for user awareness of the threats. The issue of preventing such situations is of greater importance at the moment. Therefore, we present the research that was carried out by Hacken specialists. Read the recommendations on what to pay attention to and what to do to avoid such attacks. Background On September 25, 2020, the cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin was hacked. The estimated stolen cryptocurrency amount is more than $275 million in various cryptocurrencies. On the official website, the KuCoin team explained that the hack was made because of a leakage of the private keys of KuCoin hot wallets. As a result, 1,008 BTC was stolen, along with 14,713 BSV, 26,733 LTC, 9,588,383 XLM, Omni, and EOS-based tether (USDT) worth $14 million, $153 million in ether and ERC20s, and over 18 million XRP. All stolen USDT tokens have been blocked by the Tether team. Blocking is good for such hack cases. Thanks to these procedures, the exchange has already been able to return funds equivalent to $64 million. Nevertheless, it contradicts the main idea of cryptocurrencies, namely decentralization. For example, your bitcoins cannot be blocked in any way. The hacker made withdrawals from the KuCoin hot wallets to the following addresses: ETH: https://etherscan.io/address/0xeb31973e0febf3e3d7058234a5ebbae1ab4b8c23 BTC: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1TYyommJW3uhjhcnHhUSuTQFqSBAxBDPV https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/12FACbewf5Fy9nmeaLQtm6Ugo5WS8g2Hay LTC: https://live.blockcypher.com/ltc/address/LQtFoidy5TmLrPP77MZzgMRffqPsmRfMXE/ XRP: https://bithomp.com/explorer/r3mZvvHVLPtRWAujzBsAoXqH11jhwQZvzY BSV: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-sv/address/15mC7zKbLyErSKzGRHpy6gyqS7GyRpWjE XLM: https://stellarchain.io/address/GBM3PJWNB5VKNOFXCDTTNXPMUNBMYTLAAPYDIIKLHUGMKX7ZGN2FNGFU USDT: https://omniexplorer.info/address/1NRsEQRg5EjmJHbPUX7YADVPcPzCQBkyU7 TRX: https://tronscan.org/#/address/TB3j1gUXaLXXq2bstiSMfjQ9R7Yh9DdDgK As we found out from the transactions, the hacker sold the stolen cryptocurrency from the above addresses on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and anonymized the stolen cryptocurrencies through the mixing services. A key advantage of Uniswap, a decentralized exchange, is that it enables users to retain full custody of their digital assets when exchanging them. However, hackers took advantage of its pros and misused the service platform. The fact that a hacker uses decentralized exchanges negatively affects their reputation but at the same time confirms their reliability. Uniswap is completely decentralized and is a reliable service for exchanging cryptocurrencies. Everyone can exchange cryptocurrency without fear of blocking. Why could the hack have happened? This could have been done by someone from the exchange staff who had the appropriate access. Malicious actions of responsible employees. An attacker could gain access to the exchange’s hot wallet services. Nevertheless, we consider such a version unlikely. Attack on web infrastructure. Hackers could obtain access to private keys as a result of a phishing attack by using exploits, viruses, and backdoors on employees who had access to private keys. Social engineering attack. According to the of Johny Lyu, the Kucoin team has found the suspects of the security incident. However, no specific reason was given. twitter Will KuCoin cover the losses? Despite the , we can see that there are not enough funds on the identified KuCoin wallets to pay off the losses caused by the hack. In addition, the exchange did not have a secure asset fund from which to recover losses. Perhaps these funds are kept in bank accounts of the exchange or in “secret” wallets, but we do not have such information. exchange claiming to reimburse all losses to users Talking about other exchanges, we can note that some of them really do have insurance funds, like . Bittrex Digital Asset Insurance Who is at risk? First of all, in the risk group we include exchanges with huge amounts of funds stored in the hot wallets. Some of them: Poloniex: https://etherscan.io/address/0xa910f92acdaf488fa6ef02174fb86208ad7722ba ; Coinoine: https://etherscan.io/address/0x167a9333bf582556f35bd4d16a7e80e191aa6476 ; FTX: https://etherscan.io/address/0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf4ae2a264a776ad2 ; https://etherscan.io/address/0xc098b2a3aa256d2140208c3de6543aaef5cd3a94 ; How to avoid such hacks? Periodically reinitialize the hot wallet. KuCoin’s hot wallet key pairs have not been changed for 3 years. The first transactions were made on September 17, 2017. Two-man rule. Use secret sharing schemes. One of the most popular ways is to use Shamir’s Secret Sharing scheme. Do not store more than 5% of all deposits in the hot wallets. The other 95% must be stored in a cold wallet. Store crypto in several hot wallets for each cryptocurrency platform. Each wallet must have its own private key. Perform regular penetration tests, phishing simulation, red team exercises. Perform audits of the cryptocurrency storage system that is included in SOC2 and/or ISO27000 auditing procedures: https://gemini.com/blog/gemini-completes-soc-2-review-a-worlds-first-for-a-cryptocurrency-exchange-and-custodian Conclusion The KuCoin exchange hack showed us that some exchanges have to pay more attention to common security standards. Some respectable exchanges have already passed SOC-2 audits. SOC 2 examination on an annual basis demonstrates that an exchange cares about the safeguarding of its clients’ data and deposits. Regardless of the reason for the hack, we recommend that exchanges adhere to generally accepted rules for storing client funds and perform regular audits. Also, we can see that a hacker decided to exchange stolen cryptocurrencies on DEX services such as Uniswap. Unlike centralized exchanges, DEXs can’t block their users’ funds — only specific projects can block their tokens (for example Tether). We feel that this increases user confidence in the reliability of decentralized services. Disclaimer: This material is not sponsored by any organization mentioned in the article. Also published on: https://hacken.io/research/researches-and-investigations/kucoin-september-2020-hack-hacken-research/

$275M Research: How was KuCoin, One of the Largest Crypto Exchanges, Hacked?

What happened this week in the Crypto markets? Walk away from the screens There is one flaw with crypto markets remaining open 24/7/52 compared to traditional markets that only allow trading 5 days per week. Without a natural break, it’s difficult for investors to properly digest news. Most veteran market participants will admit that they need to take time away from their screens once in a while to fully absorb all of the inputs coming at them from a variety of directions, which allows them to process and look for viable outputs. Take for example September’s price action thus far. The first week of the month began with huge gains for the first 4 days only to turn on a dime mid-week and end down (-14%) week-over-week. The second week of the month began with a huge selloff (-15–20%), only to turn on a dime and recover by week’s end to finish basically flat. This past week, the 3rd week of the month, began with a 7% drop on Monday — followed by a colossal “rip-a-thon” from Tuesday through Sunday, which sent the entire market higher (+20%) week-over-week. Had you traded every day, you undoubtedly would have been caught up in the vortex. Had you picked entry points and exit points upfront, you probably had a pretty good week/month. Price chart of the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index — September 2018 Pent up positivity finally released thanks to Ripple (XRP) We mentioned in that almost ALL of the news two weeks ago was undeniable positive, and yet prices barely budged in crypto-land. Looking back however, all of the news was “non-security specific” — meaning, it was good for the overall crypto market but there was no one or two identifiable tokens for the market to latch on to and send higher. The tone was positive, but prices didn’t reflect the tone. last week’s Two Satoshis Last week that changed. Like a marathon runner coming out of the pack, Ripple (XRP) became the market darling following . Coupled with strength in more traditional markets, XRP was able to break the downward pricing spiral in crypto, setting the tone for a rally across the board not seen since June. one announcement after another Breaking down week 3, day-by-day, you can see how a positive macro backdrop coupled with XRP’s news translated this pent-up positivity into higher prices: — Asian, EM and US equities were all lower — as such, crypto prices shot down 7% in minutes while the VIX shot up +13%. Monday — Asian equities reversed course and shot up higher, and the crypto market ripped higher as well while the VIX fell -7%. Tuesday — All global markets traded higher except crypto in the morning … but following Crypto futures expiry and the XRP news (+25% itself), the whole market began its one-way march higher. Wednesday — US markets were higher but Asia markets were down (mixed) — but XRP gapped up another 20% higher and the whole market followed suit. Thursday — Asian equities ripped higher (+2–3%), XRP jumped almost 100% and anything not glued down in crypto land flew. XLM, ADA, LTC, NEO and many others saw 20–30% instant price gains on Friday and into the weekend. Friday It’s possible that crypto just needed a shot in the arm from Asian and EM equities, followed by Futures expiration that unwound in bullish fashion, to get the wheels in motion — but make no mistake about it, the rally was led by positive news. The TLRY nonsense; why regulation alone isn’t enough It’s been rumored that retail investors are now chasing cannabis stocks and forgetting about , given the 9-month old crypto bear market compared to relative strength in “pot stocks”. This “long cannabis/short BTC” strategy is hard to really quantify, but on Wednesday last week it was also hard to ignore. At 2:50 EST Wednesday, Tilray (TLRY) stock was halted after a run to $300 (+75 on the day), and the pop in BTC/USD happened right as TLRY reopened when the stock traded down $130 from the highs. This spurious, negative correlation strengthened the narrative, and can be seen in the charts. Bitcoin Let’s forget about the correlation for a second, and focus on something more important. With the volatility and violent whipsaws experienced in crypto prices, many argue that crypto can never truly earn respect as an asset class until regulators steps in to monitor these violent price moves. While we concur that regulation is necessary, the rationale is faulty. Regulation alone does not prevent market manipulation nor does it protect investors from their own misbehavior. Just ask any retail investor who sold TLRY stock near the lows or bought near the highs. The stock was halted 5 times in one day, but that didn’t help anyone. The Nasdaq is a regulated and respected Exchange in the US — but people are still people, and when they latch onto a stock that they think can make them rich overnight, bad things will happen. TRLY didn’t deserve a temporary $20 bn market cap any more than Tesla (TSLA) deserves its current $50 bn market cap. And a $20 bn market cap stock shouldn’t go up/down 50% in a day, but it did. Regulation is important, but it’s not the most critical component of market health. There will always be traders who make bad decisions. And there will always be bad actors looking to trade on technicals rather than fundamentals. That doesn’t mean an entire asset class is bunk. Peter Thiel is known as a very smart investor — his fund is the Thiel doesn’t trade it; he simply owns 76% of the shares. I don’t recall hearing anyone bashing him for having a stake in a volatile security. In fact, he’s applauded. It’s possible to have a long-term bullish view on an asset without being influenced by the market gyrations caused by others. Fundamental long-term holders of crypto should be offered the same respect without assuming that everyone is a day trader. largest holder of TLRY stock. For specific information about investing in the private Arca Funds, click here . Notable Movers and Shakers Just about every token and coin rose last week, with new leaders emerging each day from top alt-coins. While most remain a long-way away from their all-time highs, there were encouraging signs especially amidst the top 50 tokens (as measured by market cap). Ripple (XRP) had a breakout performance, rising 105% week-over-week after news surfaced that Ripple is , and followed that up two days later with more positive news that another top 10 bank, PNC, is becoming . launching a new XRP-backed product later this year the latest to adopt Ripple’s xCurrent system Stellar-Lumens (XLM) was the beneficiary of two promising pieces of news over the weekend; first that Goldman-Sachs backed financial platform, Circle, has added XLM to its array of investable assets. And second, that world aid organization UNICEF has expanded its breadth of donatable currencies to include Stellar (XLM). XLM tokens jumped higher on the news, and finished the week +35%. EOS fell 12% on Monday after news surfaced that two of the most popular apps in the EOS ecosystem . While this was not a security issue at EOS, nor was it even really a hack (more like a very smart player taking advantage of the game), it nevertheless highlighted the vulnerability and immaturity of platforms like EOS. That said, EOS recovered fairly quickly during the alt-coin rally later in the week, and finished the week 10% higher. fell victim to a hack Cardano (ADA) managed to gain 30% week-over-week, making it the 4th best performer last week amongst large-cap tokens. The rally followed a recommendation and analysis by Weiss Ratings saying that Cardano is a ‘steal’ at this price. XRP, XLM, EOS, Basic Attention Coin (BAT +8.0%), NEO (+8.0%), and MIOTA (+6.5%) were also mentioned positively by Weiss Ratings. Cryptocurrency Tezos (XTZ) cooled off a bit, only rising 3% week-over-week after gains of 30% the week before as anticipation grows surrounding its mainnet launch. What We’re Reading this Week The fall of PayPal? How crypto can disrupt the payment giant We don’t necessarily agree with the PayPal short thesis, but this is a well balanced view on the rise and fall of single purpose fee-based technologies like Paypal that will be disrupted by cheaper, peer-to-peer blockchain protocols. Interactive Brokers to Become First Company to List its Stock on IEX While this is “non-Blockchain” news, it shows a willingness of large corporations and specifically financial organizations to buck the trend a bit. IEX is shaking up the trading game, and one of the pioneers of electronic trading (Interactive Brokers) is the first to leave Nasdaq because of it. Note the heavy parallels to what we’re seeing with crypto adoption. SEC Warning about Enterprise Bitcoin adoption Bitcoin core developer Bryan Bishop, former Morgan Stanley MD Caitlin Long, and other prominent blockchain figures sent a letter to warn the SEC that enterprise adoption could actually corrupt some of bitcoin’s inherent benefits if not properly overseen. NY Attorney General sends questionnaire to Exchanges The NYAG report not only released this important report on Crypto Exchanges, but kudos to them for also As part of the “Virtual Markets Integrity Initiative”, the NYAG office sent questionnaires to 13 crypto exchange platforms back in April, basically asking the target exchanges to provide details on how they deal with: releasing a summary on Twitter. — Ownership & control  — Basic operation and fees — Trading policies and procedures — Outages and other suspensions of trading — Internal controls  — Money laundering surveillance  — Protection against customer fraud Caspian secures $16mm in equity financing for Crypto Trading & Portfolio tool Along with Caspian’s $16mm raise, raise recently… indicating that “Picks and shovel” investments in the crypto space are still going strong even as . OmniEx also announced a $10mm ICO funding for development projects cools off Arca in the Press & on the Streets Arca’s CIO Steven McClurg and Head of Research Katie Talati gave via Crowdfund Insider. In the article, Talati argues that EOS may surpass Ethereum as the go-to “app store” for blockchain developers. a detailed analysis of smart-contract Platform EOS McClurg was also quoted in this article from discussing the upcoming Bitcoin ETF proposal decisions. While the article takes a bullish stance on the inevitable approval (eventually), McClurg offered his rationale for why this process will continue to take time: 51percent Crypto Research We caught up with Chief Investment Officer of Arca Funds, on his thoughts on a potential approval. Steven McClurg “The biggest issue the SEC has with a Bitcoin ETF is the low volume and lack of transparency around trading, which opens it up to market manipulation. We have seen manipulation occur not just in Bitcoin, but other cryptocurrencies. This is not a special case, as there is a precedent of the SEC limiting certain OTC-traded and micro-cap equities from inclusion in ETFs. It is unlikely that the SEC will approve an exchange-listed product such as an ETF to hold crypto currencies until the issue with market manipulation is solved.” And That’s Our Two Satoshis! Thanks for reading everyone! Questions or comments, just let us know. - The Arca Portfolio Management Team Steven McClurg — Chief Investment OfficerJeff Dorman — Portfolio Manager / Head TraderKatie Talati — Head of Research Disclaimer: This commentary is provided as general information only and is in no way intended as investment advice, investment research, a research report or a recommendation. Any decision to invest or take any other action with respect to the securities discussed in this commentary may involve risks not discussed herein and such decisions should not be based solely on the information contained in this document. Statements in this communication may include forward-looking information and/or may be based on various assumptions. The forward-looking statements and other views or opinions expressed herein are made as of the date of this publication. Actual future results or occurrences may differ significantly from those anticipated and there is no guarantee that any particular outcome will come to pass. The statements made herein are subject to change at any time. Arca Funds disclaims any obligation to update or revise any statements or views expressed herein. In considering any performance information included in this commentary, it should be noted that past performance is not a guarantee of future results and there can be no assurance that future results will be realized. Some or all of the information provided herein may be or be based on statements of opinion. In addition, certain information provided herein may be based on third-party sources, which information, although believed to be accurate, has not been independently verified. Arca Funds and/or certain of its affiliates and/or clients hold and may, in the future, hold a financial interest in securities that are the same as or substantially similar to the securities discussed in this commentary. No claims are made as to the profitability of such financial interests, now, in the past or in the future and Arca Funds and/or its clients may sell such financial interests at any time. The information provided herein is not intended to be, nor should it be construed as an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy any securities. This commentary has not been reviewed or approved by any regulatory authority and has been prepared without regard to the individual financial circumstances or objectives of persons who may receive it. The appropriateness of a particular investment or strategy will depend on an investor’s individual circumstances and objectives.

“That’s Our Two Satoshis” — Crypto Market Recap (XRP, XLM & TLRY)

A data-driven review of Tether’s transactions, “users,” and relationships Update: We have published a new review comparing Tether to other stablecoins . Update 2: We have released a stablecoin page for comparing the supplies & prices of different USD stablecoins. Much has been written by on Tether, the supposed 1–1 USD-backed token issued by Tether Limited. Some see it as today’s version of , the Mt Gox trading bot that Bitcoin’s price in 2013/14. Most of the analysis has focused on off-chain dynamics: Tether’s , , the ownership relationship vis-a-vis Bitfinex, etc. passionate critics Willy manipulated lack of a banking partner its split from its auditor Because Tether is a blockchain token, signals can be derived from the on-chain data as well. My partner and I have been collecting and analyzing data on different blockchains (including ) for some time, and we recently took a closer look at Tether. Edwin Ong Ethereum usage **Tether Blockchain Background**First, a primer on how Tether’s blockchain works: Tether is a token issued on the Omni Layer (“Mastercoin” to old-school blockchain enthusiasts), a platform that enables the creation of new assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. Every Omni transaction (and thus Tether transaction) is recorded in a Bitcoin transaction sharing the same transaction hash. For example, this BTC is actually the sending of 50,000 USDT . transaction To date, Tether has on the Omni network. (Separately, Tether has also “authorized” 60M USDT on the Ethereum network.) “issued” 2.22 billion USDT tokens ERC20 tokens The hockey stick graph of over time Tether’s token supply While other coins do run on Omni, Tether is the largest tenant by far, with over and in January. At this point, Omni is effectively a Tether blockchain. 75% of Omni’s transactions ever over 95% of its transactions Tether accounts for the vast majority of Omni’s transactions Despite its age, the Omni ecosystem is relatively sparse. Many of the repos on are very much a work in progress. The primary user-facing tool is , a block explorer that is today mostly used to track USDT movement, especially by users from Binance and Remitano (a Vietnamese exchange that is now a in that country). Omni team’s Github https://omniexplorer.info top website OmniExplorer referral traffic. (via SimilarWeb) Prior to splitting with Tether, the auditor Friedman LLP that it wrote “utilized the Omniexplorer.info website to trace that the balance per the Omniexplorer.info website matches the information provided by the Client.” Even the carefully thought out relied on collections of “500 sequential transactions pulled from OmniExplorer.” TetherReport **Our Approach**While OmniExplorer is useful, there is no substitute for primary data when it comes to blockchain analysis. To collect Omni data, we ran full nodes of and synced them to our data toolchain. Omnicore **Transaction Trends**We first looked at Tether’s transaction trends. Unsurprisingly, the big picture is what you might expect: both the number of transactions and the aggregate value of transactions have skyrocketed in recent months. The nearly doubled each of the past 3 months. aggregate value of Tether transactions To put the transaction data in perspective, we looked at Tether from the framed by : MV=PQ lens Chris Burniske Average daily supply in 2017 =    273,374,613 (M)Total 2017 transaction value = 14,963,834,982 (PQ)V = PQ / M = 14,963,834,982 / 273,374,613 = 54.73 Tether’s velocity of 54.7 is about higher than that of the money supply. (Of course, speculation is typically not included in money circulation calculation.) Regardless, users sure love moving Tethers! So, who are they? 10 times M1 To answer the user questions, we mapped out different distributions of Tether usage by addresses, and created lists of the and the Tether senders. Tether Users most frequent biggest Tether’s biggest s[p]enders The #1 most frequent user, with its iconic address , is the exchange Poloniex, sending over 2B USDT (nearly Tether’s entire supply!) over 111K transactions, averaging nearly 19K USDT per transaction. Clearly, with their high number of transactions, it’s obvious that the busiest addresses are exchange wallets. 1 WkD2LmodfkBYiAktwh76vkF93LKnh Po1o Tether’s busiest senders The biggest senders list looks a little different. The #1 sender is , Bitfinex’s account (per Tether), sending nearly 5B USDT over 38K transactions, averaging nearly ~130K USDT per transaction, a lot higher than Poloniex’s 19K per transaction. 1KYiKJEfdJtap9QX2v9BXJMpz2SfU4pgZw Some of these other big senders are not as busy. is Tether’s new “treasury account” after the , distributing 1.7B of newly printed USDT in 31 transactions, mostly to (Bitfinex). (the Chinese platform Huobi) averages 12.6M USDT per transaction over 62 sends! 1NTMakcgVwQpMdGxRQnFKyb3G1FAJysSfz November hack 1KYiKJEfdJtap9QX2v9BXJMpz2SfU4pgZw 1HckjUpRGcrrRAtFaaCAUaGjsPx9oYmLaZ Recycle 12.6M is a lot of Tethers per transaction. It turns out that in Huobi’s case, the transactions are all to the same recipient. Those are some big numbers per transaction! Our tool lets us easily track the interactions between any 2 addresses, so we can see that Huobi’s address has been sending those tens of millions everyday to , another Huobi address. 1LAnF8h3qMGx3TSwNUHVneBZUEpwE4gu3D This other Huobi address maintains a nearly 50/50 split in terms of aggregate amount sent and received. This Huobi address maintains an almost 50/50 sent/received ratio This 50/50 split is hardly atypical for Tether addresses. There are many more who maintain this ratio, whether they transact frequently (like ) or not (like ). 16bUGjvunVp7LqygLHrTvHyvbvfeuRCWAh 1MMZ5QNzARpn7kvf2aj4UzViALP9j84Ufi What this suggests is that many Tether addresses are simply being used to cycle funds from entities to entities. Thus, the high token velocity should be discounted for such use cases. Address Relationships We also mapped out relationships between distinct addresses, focusing on relationships between and . addresses that transact together often addresses that transact large numbers of USDT together Some of these addresses love sending Tethers to their favorite receivers many many times Bitfinex’s dominance in Tether is absolutely clear from examining these interactions. alone is involved in 22 of the top 50 highest-valued “relationships.” 1KYiKJEfdJtap9QX2v9BXJMpz2SfU4pgZw One of Bitfinex’s addresses dominates the “Highest Valued Relationships” chart By mapping out these relationships on Tether’s blockchain and following a few degrees of separation, we have been able to track and in some cases correlate capital flow, especially in combination with other blockchain and market data. **Balance Distribution**Another area we examined was the distribution of USDT holdings amongst addresses. Tether.to’s is a popular page, and we are adding a to the mix. While blockchain address distribution can hardly be conclusive given the ease of new address generation, the data can still be informative. top 20 addresses top 100 list In Tether’s case, the top 200 addresses out of Tether’s nearly 100K active addresses hold over 2B USDT. Yes, . This is more than double BTC’s wealth concentration. the top 0.2% owns over 90% of the token’s total supply **Data Download**We believe that on-chain data, in combination with network metrics, ultimately provides the best understanding of the vibrancy and health of any blockchain. They will matter as much tomorrow as DAUs and ARPUs do today. Given the dearth of easily downloadable on-chain data for Tether, we are publicly releasing the entirety of . Tether’s transaction data up to block 507015 This dataset is a little bigger than what Google Sheets or Excel can easily handle, so storing the data in a database or data warehouse might make analysis more pleasant. A can be useful if you want to follow the “social graph” of the addresses. If you are just interested in high-level trends, you can also browse the data we have published on . graph database Blockspur Tether’s blockchain data has answered a few of our questions and raised some new ones, and we are excited to hear if they can provide new insights for you. If you have specific questions about using the data or about this post in general, please contact us and we’d be happy to share our perspectives. Thanks to Brian Schroeder , Gordon Wilson , and Remy Hathaway for feedback. For additional data-driven blockchain posts, please see our work on Ethereum usage and Zcash .

A Closer Look At Tether’s Blockchain

The web disseminates ideas globally, instantly at zero cost. Because JS executes on the Web it has an unfair advantage over every other language. the feedback loop for collaboration is very tight. We can see code executing without compiling or building. Great minds rapidly gather around promising ideas and help mold them. As the tools for collaboration get better and the size of the community grows the loop tightens. A student remarked to Pixar’s Ed Catmull he must be surrounded by geniuses because his team had so many algorithms named after them. His reply was that at the time nothing existed to do the things they wanted, so to do anything they had to invent it. Innovation is easy on the cutting edge. It is no more difficult than creatively hacking legacy software to keep up with the status quo, but much more rewarding. The further back you are from the frontier the harder it is to come up with anything new. Reason In the past I’d say things like I don’t miss types in JS. I’d seen many developers move from Java to JS. They found the instant feedback made them more productive than having rigorous static analysis with slow builds. One thing that began to change my mind was seeing Jonas Gebhardt talk: . Evolving Visual Programming with React In it he showed that by mining Flowtypes from props he was able to visually wire up components to APIs and other components. Every time he pulled an edge out from a node everything would be grayed out except the props of nodes that could handle that type. In this way applications could be visually snapped together out of components and APIs. I saw that types are really like the modular connectors that you have with the pipework under your sink. They tell you exactly what can connect to what without getting leaks. And it turns out that types and fast feedback are not mutually exclusive. The three pillars of functional programming are first class functions, immutable data and static types. The last two are not native to JS but can be bolted on through immutable.js and Flow annotations. If we’re going to transpile JS anyway why not transpile from a language that has first class types and immutability? Enter . Reason is a transformed view of OCaml that makes it look a bit like ES2016 without JavaScript’s bad parts. OCaml can be transpiled to readable JavaScript via . Reason BuckleScript Selling points: First class functions, immutable data and types Run the same code on client and server but compile to native on the server Native code can run in parallel e.g. good for VR (use WebGL on the web and OpenGL in native apps) Learn once target anything web, ARM, x86, Mac, PC, Raspberry PI etc Strong types make security easier to verify Deploy with a MirageOS unikernal for security and small size MirageOS is like Docker but without Linux. It creates unikernals (app and OS fused together) you only include the parts of the OS you need. For many web applications that is just enough OS to run an HTTP server. A unikernal might be just 5MB whereas a Docker container is more likely 50–100MB. Mirage instances can be spun up and torn down so quickly one could be started up for every request (like Amazon’s Lambda but much faster to start and lighter weight). Or you could have thousands running on a single machine. Because there is less OS code and what there is is strongly typed there is a smaller attack surface area. Reason was created by the creator of React. from the React core team has created bindings to JavaScript React. I believe a native Reason version of React is also being written React on Reason (RoR). We may see some fusion between the Oculus and React ecosystems. Community: Jordan Walke Cheng Lou Rust This language was commissioned by JavaScript’s creator while he was CTO of Mozilla to solve memory leaks in Firefox. The rendering engine is written in and parts will be merged into Firefox in 2017. Rust makes it safer to write code that can be run in parallel. So compositing render layers will now be able to make use of multiple processors. Hopefully this will provoke the next round of browser performance wars focused on rendering and layout. It may also make it worthwhile including more cores in desktop and mobile CPUs (this is perhaps why Samsung helped sponsor the project). Brendan Eich Servo Rust Rust has many of the features of functional languages lambdas, data is immutable by default and strong types. Yet it has the raw performance of a systems language like C. It is not garbage collected and this turns out to be important because does not have a garbage collector. Go, Haskell, OCaml and Reason cannot be compiled to Web Assembly because they need a garbage collector. So Rust is probably the nicest language to write new performance critical code to compile to Web Assembly. The ability to will put pressure on spec writers to add support for concurrency to Web Assembly. Web Assembly compile Rust to Web Assembly Some really interesting code is being written in Rust such as the XI editor this uses CRDT (Google Docs style syncing) to allow text editing reflows to use multiple processors. Having CRDT at the foundation may make it easier to add multi user concurrent editing in the future. If compiled to Web Assembly this might present opportunities for applications like Atom to enable remote pairing (which was the original intent of the Atom editor). XI’s reflow code is already being used in Servo’s textareas. One take home is that multi user and multiprocessor problems may have similar solutions. As more people write safe multiprocessor code it may cross pollinate the web ecosystem. Web Assembly The web now supports Canvas, SVG, Web Audio, Video & WebGL. The browser has done loads of heavy lifting when it comes to creating multimedia applications we just need to add UI. for example splits songs into their component tracks allowing you to mute individual tracks. multitracks.com Live bands can then use instrumental tracks for instruments they lack or use individual tracks for practice (some songs have 21 tracks). It is an awesome application but surprisingly easy to write. You just need a component that turns an audio sample into a bitmap and to repeat it a few times on the page. The hard part playing back multitrack audio cross platform is done by the browser. But there are few great creative tools on the web for working with bitmaps, vector graphics, audio, video and 3D graphics. However there are some pretty decent open source desktop apps: , , and . Gimp Inkscape Audacity Blender Most of these hark back to the Sourceforge era and other than Blender their development pace has slowed. Their codebases do have working C++ and C code for image, 3D graphics, sound and vector manipulation. As well as support for plugins like VST for sound. It would be great to see processing code extracted from these projects and compiled to Web Assembly. UI code could then iterated on quickly in the form of React components. Applications could then be quickly created by snapping editors together. It would be great to see some of the contributors to these projects welcomed into the JS / Web Assembly community. Split Pane UI My open source break came through creating SubDivide a Redux implementation of Blenders subdivision UI. Similar UI can be seen in Atom and the Zeit’s hyper application. The cool thing about this style of UI is that it allows a user to have one responsive component per pain and then snap together an application according to a their needs. Individual panes can be used fullscreen on mobile but a desktop with three screens can use all available space. You could mix and match editors and sequencers for audio, text, code, video, timeline, SVG, bitmaps and 3D models. This allows the same set of components to be recomposed for 3D rendering, a Digital Audio Workstation, stop motion animation sequencer, a video editor or a web page editor. Blender uses this style of UI. Though it takes a bit of getting use to, bringing these tools to the web would bring down the level of expertise needed to hack the UI. But the real payoff of moving these apps to web would be if it allowed multiple users to collaborate on the same project. Blender attempted to do this with the verse project a few years ago. Data In 2016 the popularity of Redux exploded and GraphQL gained traction. Redux taught us to value immutable data and also to value data history not just its current value. GraphQL and Relay gave us the ability to fetch the minimal data needed for a component without needing a custom Rest endpoint. However there are trade offs in GraphQL’s design because it needs to work with any conceivable backend. If we were more opinionated and data was strongly typed on the front and backend we could have guarantees that would allow subscriptions, mutations and shouldComponentUpdate to be handled seamlessly. OM.next has been able to achieve some of these things in ClosureScript. I hope we see some of these ideas bear fruit JS. Scale with Docker, Now.sh & GitHub Pages For many creative applications like video editing and 3D rendering you will still want to do heavy processing work on the backend. For 3D rendering you may want to rent 1000's cores for a few seconds and have each render a frame of your animation and this can be done for similar price to renting 8 cores for a few hours. Scaling servers previously required expert knowledge but hopefully in 2017 we will see lots of repos coming not just with dev servers but scalable backends that can be deployed with a single command. Services like Now.sh take a lot of the pain out of writing and deploying scalable Node, Docker and static file servers. In 2016 GitHub added the ability to treat a docs folder as a static site. Though this is a very tiny change it makes it trivial to include examples or an entire running application in the GitHub docs. This should tighten the loop when it comes to popularising new components as you will be able to try them in playgrounds in the docs. Houdini Sadly when it comes to writing applications the web still lacks some pretty basic features like fine control of layout and decent font metrics. Measuring the size of DOM elements creates reflows and there is no ability to add responsive breakpoints based on the size of a parent rather than the size of of the window. Enter Houdini I guess it is so called because it allows us to breakout of the current box model. Houdini allows developers to take fine control of rendering in a performant way. Decentralized Web WebRTC has been included in Firefox and Chrome for several years now. It first caught my attention after writing Fireflies a multiplayer web game. Players made an average of 4 key presses a second. I wanted games to have 10 players and each data frame (generated by a key press) was roughly 64 bytes (because a header is needed for each frame). The engine used a reducer on each client to create the game state from key presses (it was kind of like Redux with time travel back in 2012). So the bandwidth required for each game each second was: 64 x 4 x 10 x 10 = 25KB/Sec/Game That quickly adds up: 1GB every 40sec and 1TB every 11 hours and that is just for one game. If the game became remotely popular I would lose lots of money. For this reason I never launched it. WebRTC however would allow me to scale to millions games without paying anything for bandwidth (all I need now is some time to make the switch). Data Channel is in Firefox and Chrome, Edge still sees it a low priority and Safari still needs to implement WebRTC (but it is at least underway). However because there are now 2 billion Chrome users there is vast potential audience for great WebRTC applications. Privacy The success of SnapChat shows there is hunger to keep data private. With governments, Google and Facebook wanting to index every word we type peer to peer provides a great way to keep data private. IndexDB can be used to persist distributed databases and content in the browser. So it is possible to create in browser applications like Facebook and Twitter where only your friends hold your data. WebRTC can also run on the server so if you wish to make sure data is always available you may want to seed it from a server running on a RaspberryPI. But with 5G we can expect most users to have always on IoT devices. Service Worker enables applications to be cached in the browser and run offline. So one could imagine a Service Worker based browser app shell that connects you to a peer to peer version of the Web. Applications are served from a remote peer’s IndexDB and rehydrated by injecting script tags and content. Mozilla is also experimenting with a spec that allows web apps to serve content to other devices on the local network. Flyweb Audio Video WebRTC is the route by which the latest open audio and video codecs will gain traction. Opus is now available in Chrome, Firefox and Edge. It boasts better performance than AAC, Vorbis and MP3 specially at low bitrates. a new video codec backed by Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Amazon and Netflix will be released in early 2017. It should join the Opus audio codec as the standard for WebRTC video. AV1 Currency Decentralized currencies should start to affect the web in 2017. There is currently too much friction on the web if you want to sell content. There is high unit cost for credit card transactions. They require entering personal information which is time consuming and raises concerns over privacy. While Bitcoin offers a distributed ledger offers a decentralized turing complete way of scripting contracts. It could allow you to automate financial transactions. Transactions would have less friction because they have negligible unit cost and do not need to reveal the purchasers identity. This means you could sell articles, blog posts or videos without needing to sell subscriptions or needing advertising. Ethereum At the beginning of the article I spoke about a site that decomposes music into tracks for individual instruments. However each of these tracks also represents an individual musician. If these musicians allowed their tracks to be remixed they could potentially receive micropayments each time the resulting tracks are streamed. So while many are lamenting the accounting and admin jobs that will be lost through automation there creative jobs that can be gained. Automating accounting lowers the bar for everyone who wants to start their own business. You no longer need songwriting and accounting, games programming and accounting or flower arranging and accounting. You just need a core skill. Conclusion So for me the most exciting challenges in 2017 are making collaborative creative software more widely accessible and making creative work more financially rewarding.

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