A trusted, decentralized source of random numbers on Ethereum is what our team has been working towards. The Keep Random Beacon is the first component of the Keep privacy protocol we are launching to mainnet in 2019. We would like to elaborate on why it is essential to release this feature first.

Trusted randomness is the core foundation of decentralization. It removes the need for involvement of a centralized player, oracle or other external entity, allowing for mutual trust across an open network.

In our newest article, we put together the overview of randomness on public blockchains and the reasoning behind our focus on the Random Beacon.

We are looking forward to discussing it with you in our Slack!

https://blog.keep.network/why-is-trusted-randomness-so-important-c22de1c1c5ee

Happy Friday, folks!

Shiny new Keep Business Primer is here!

Following our recent visual brand refresh, we have also updated the looks and the content of our Business Primer.

https://keep.network/KeepBusinessPrimer.pdf

Share away !

Since the Keep Network was first announced, the project and its team have progressed, and so should its visual identity.

You may have noticed that Keep underwent a significant design update.
New elements and colors have been introduced, presenting a new look and feel for the project, creating a sturdy base for our ongoing and future work with different elements of our privacy protocol.

In this new article Keep’s Head of Design Michael Gluzman elaborates on thought process and details of this update. Enjoy and let us know in our Slack how you like the new look!

https://blog.keep.network/announcing-keeps-visual-refresh-bc9697b2bb11

Dive into our new blog post to explore Keep Random Beacon's mechanism, how dApps can benefit from it and why we’ve chosen to build the Keep Random Beacon on threshold relay technology.

https://blog.keep.network/whats-in-a-beacon-12c34b0bc078

We keep exploring a wide range of its use cases and possibilities - for Keep Network and beyond.

If you are an organization, project or a dApp developer interested in building with the Keep Random Beacon or the broader Keep Network, be sure to get in touch to discuss ways we could collaborate.

We are looking forward to hearing from you in our Slack!

Today, we present to you the interview with our Growth Lead, Laura Wallendal.

Laura is the person who drives the project in the right direction and skilfully wrangles many go-to-market things here at Keep.

Along with fun facts and Keep’s goals, she tells us an engaging story of her career path, the world of tech startups, and shares some sales success tips.

We hope you enjoy this read, and have a great weekend!

https://blog.keep.network/getting-to-know-the-keep-team-laura-e1ea71cc8742

Our April Roundup has arrived! Read on about:

- Our efforts on the gas cost improvements on Ethereum, aimed to help move the whole ecosystem forward by making core curve operations cheaper and unlocking new use cases

- Randomness for dApps

- An interview with Keep Network Growth Lead Laura Wallendal

- MIT Bitcoin Expo, where our very own co-founder Corbin Pon was invited for a chat around public blockchains

- Boston Blockchain Week, where Corbin was invited to expand on the importance of privacy.

Some of us will also be attending Blockchain Week NYC, let us know if you are around!

https://blog.keep.network/april-roundup-d613e80a7d3b

One of our goals at Keep is to contribute to cutting-edge technology adoption. We do this by providing privacy across public blockchains.

Given the caliber of this responsibility, security is of paramount importance to our project.

One of the most important security components of our protocol is homomorphic encryption - a way to compute over encrypted information without the need to decrypt it.

Today, we bring to your attention an article by Keep’s Tech Lead Piotr Dyraga on how we’ve implemented threshold-ECDSA with homomorphic encryption and sMPC to build decentralized, autonomous system components.


We hope you enjoy reading it, join our Slack to discuss it with Piotr and the rest of the team!

https://blog.keep.network/keeping-secrets-in-public-places-with-homomorphic-encryption-49995979acbc

Our Writer & Communication Strategist Olivia Lovenmark shares an op-ed on the vulnerabilities and trust we put into centralized financial institutions entitled.

She exposes the issues inherent in governance, decision-making and trust in both centralized and fully decentralized systems. Olivia also offers some potential solutions as we build towards a more decentralized future.

Please enjoy and we'd love to hear your thoughts on Slack!

https://blog.keep.network/the-failings-of-financial-centralization-62413b5d4625

Hello everyone, May Roundup is here!

Short summary:

- We have attended and spoke at conferences in Boston and New York, meeting great minds and working on new partnerships.

- We are also presenting at CogX in London next week at Web 3.0 & Decentralised Future Stage.

(Get in touch with us on Slack if you are around - we have some free tickets to share with friends and community members!) 🎉

- Our developers held a presentation at the IPFS call on one of the important components of Keep - libp2p.

- We have welcomed two great team members for the roles of Writer & Communication Strategist and Ecosystem Growth & Innovation Lead.

- We have published the new article expanding on how Keep computes over encrypted information without the need to decrypt it using the homomorphic encryption.


To see the full summary of May happenings, click on the blog post link!

https://blog.keep.network/may-roundup-6083cddbe7a7

Good day everyone! ☀️

In our newest blog post, Olivia Lovenmark analyses parallels between the early days of computing and the adoption of blockchain. She posits how interoperability will spark mass adoption, much like email did for the internet.

At Keep, we believe a world of connected blockchains will power the next leap for this industry and are powering the technology behind this movement.🚀

Enjoy the read and join our Slack or Twitter to discuss this with Olivia and the rest of the Keep team!


https://blog.keep.network/cross-chain-bridges-are-the-email-of-blockchains-76f13ea9cbb7

This weekend, on June 23rd, Keep founder, Matt Luongo and summa.one founder James Prestwich will give a workshop on "Toward Cross-Chain Interoperability with Zcash” at the Zcon1, annual privacy conference 🚀

Zcon1 is a three-day conference for people who are working on building the privacy infrastructure for the public good.

The event will be livestreamed on the Zcash Foundation’s YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi01v05DNTUEC_eB0c9rpgQ

Zcon website: https://www.zfnd.org/zcon/
Zcon speaker agenda:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hcsi2Bd0CNuUuPiCKMavHOByFMnTsKkM6_Rw165_oe8/edit

Our technical updates are now being posted in the Proof Of Work weekly newsletter, look out for those in your inbox, or subscribe!
https://proofofwork.news/p/proof-of-work-72

June was a phenomenal month for the Keep project. Here's a short recap for you:


- Keep Project Lead, Matt Luongo and James Prestwich of Summa held a workshop at the annual Zcon1 entitled “Toward Cross-Chain Interoperability with Zcash”. The event was a success and Zooko mentioned that it's one of his favorite things in the works for Zcash.🦓

- The EIP-152, which the Keep team championed, has been accepted into next Ethereum hard fork. EIP-152 helps move cross-chain interoperability forward and we are excited to contribute to the ecosystem.

- Out team has welcomed a fantastic engineer, Liam Zebedee, follow him on Twitter https://twitter.com/liamzebedee

- Our Ecosystem Growth & Innovation Lead Jarrell James spoke at the privacy panel of CogX with other experts — Tom Pocock from AZTEC team and Arjun Hassard from NuCypher. Here is the video for you. https://bit.ly/2XBH80N

- Matt Luongo appeared on the Baselayer podcast and talked about Keep, privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, and the upcoming mainnet launch. https://apple.co/2JxhgJV


Follow this link for more details of June happenings as well as the technical updates!

👉https://blog.keep.network/keep-network-june-roundup-db063f305ad9

Don't forget to subscribe to our mailing list 💌

Great news - the Keep private testnet has its first outside node! Wohooo! 🚀

We are pleased to announce that Keep has partnered with Summa to establish a blockchain interoperability working group, called Cross-Chain Group.

Cross-Chain Group is an industry resource for technologies, projects, and efforts at the forefront of blockchain interoperability. The group is dedicated to furthering cross-chain research, design, and implementation through collaboration, development, and educational events.

Working together as a community, we aim to support a more robust and user-friendly ecosystem.

We're excited to learn about new projects that are working on interoperability solutions. If you or a team you know should be included, we'd love to hear from you.

Read the article for more details.

https://blog.keep.network/blockchain-interoperability-working-group-keep-summa-30eb8071f865

July was rich in happenings for the Keep team! Here's a short recap for you:


- Staking providers are now successfully up and running on our private testnet! Stay tuned for more announcements as we progress.

- We are pleased to announce that Keep has partnered with Summa to establish a blockchain interoperability working group, called Cross-Chain Group.

- Keep is contributing to the ecosystem and is supporting Zcash interoperability together with Electric Coin Co, Ethereum Foundation and Iqlusion.

- Great to see that the EIP-1108, initially put together by our team, was accepted into Istanbul, which means significantly reduced gas costs.

- Keep is headed to the Berlin Blockchain Week, where on Monday, 19th August, together with Fabric Ventures, we are organizing the Interoperability Summit.

- This month Keep team is also sending out some swag for those community members who won contests and have been awesome in so many ways!


To see the detailed summary of July happenings, as well as the Tech Updates section, click here

👉https://blog.keep.network/july-roundup-1a1d71e22575

Exciting news!

Today, Keep has joined the Messari Disclosures Registry

By joining the Registry projects commit to bringing a higher level of transparency to the cryptoasset space through ongoing disclosures. There are now more than 50 projects adhering to the same values and standards.

"The effort is intended to be a collective action to push standards of basic disclosures that should be expected of projects with numerous global stakeholders. We want to allow for honest projects to have a platform to differentiate themselves and build trust with their communities and anyone looking to better understand their project.”

Read more here:

https://www.coindesk.com/messari-disclosures-registry-tops-50-cryptocurrencies-with-10-new-additions?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=coindesk&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Organic%20

https://messari.io/article/announcement-messari-adds-11-new-disclosures-registry-participants-surpassing-50-members

Hey folks, the new blog post is out!

In it, our Tech Lead Piotr Dyraga talks about how Keep is closing the interoperability gap between public blockchains with a critical component of our protocol: t-ECDSA keeps.

This post is for technical and non-technical audiences to learn more about how we’re building and using the Keep Network.

Enjoy!

https://blog.keep.network/building-bridges-between-blockchains-with-t-ecdsa-keeps-e58d6debb8fd

Meet tBTC, a decentralized, redeemable, BTC-backed ERC-20 token that gives Bitcoin users access to financial services on other chains.

"In this Wyre podcast, Matt Luongo and James Prestwich explain the technical and economic guarantees of tBTC and offer a high-level overview of the system’s functionality, including how tBTC is minted and redeemed.

They go on to cover how tBTC signing groups are selected and how the system ensures they are behaving honestly, discussing how the network handles aborts versus fraud and its backup auction mechanism for sourcing liquidity when slashing conditions happen. They also explain their decision to launch with an authority-based price feed mechanism and later transition to a federation-based one. Listen in for insight around what the success of tBTC might mean for Ethereum and learn how Cross-Chain Group is working to further interoperability via collaboration and development in the crypto space."

Enjoy this great discussion, and come ask us questions in Slack! https://bit.ly/2FMkV6T

https://wyre-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-47-announcing-tbtc-with-james-prestwich-and-matt-luongo-of-cross-chain-group

In this new blog post, Matt Luongo announces tBTC and expands on what does it mean for Keep.

tBTC is a trust-minimized bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum, which will be the first major DApp launched on the Keep Network.

We love your feedback, comments in the post are highly appreciated!

https://blog.keep.network/bridging-bitcoin-and-ethereum-b2f9923630a7

Great news - EIP-152 and EIP-1108, both of which the Keep team has been working on, were now accepted into Istanbul, the next Ethereum hard fork!

In this blog post our Engineering Lead Antonio expands on the benefits of those for the ecosystem.

"One of the most prohibitive aspects with respect to privacy on Ethereum is the high cost of certain encryption operations, and both EIPs took direct aim at reducing this cost. With these changes, Ethereum will unlock new possibilities around random beacons, private token transfers, private computations, and cross-chain interoperability with Zcash, the foremost privacy-protecting digital currency."

Give it a read and let us know what you think!

https://blog.keep.network/privacy-and-scaling-focused-eips-accepted-for-ethereum-istanbul-hard-fork-1a75fe0c4e4a