Proof of Work #11

Feb 27, 2018

We’ve already outgrown our first home at Tinyletter, as we’ve exceeded their definition of tiny and have too many subscribers! The folks at Substack asked if we’d like to migrate over to their platform, and although they focus on paid newsletters, they didn’t mind when I told them that PoW will always be free, so here we are.

A lot of you have written in asking which projects are hiring, and unfortunately I don’t have time to respond to each person, so I’ve made a simple form you can fill out if you’d like to apply en-masse to one of the projects listed in Proof of Work—kind of a Blockchain Common App for most interesting blockchain projects out there. I’ll make the responses available to the project teams, and they’ll contact you if they think it’s a good fit. Note that besides engineers, everyone is also desperately looking for good marketers, designers, and community managers, so do apply if you are one of those.

At this point, there’s really no excuse for not just jumping in if you’re interested. Spend whatever spare time you have reading up on the aspects of the space that interest you, make an exchange account and get some skin in the game, and then go ahead and apply to the Common App or directly to projects that interest you. Jay Graber of Zcash put it best in her very worth-reading thread:

“For a developer, cryptocurrency projects are even more accessible than the rest of tech because most of the code is open source, but unlike most open source projects, if you just jump in and start doing things you'll also most likely find a way to be compensated.”

Will from 0x

The 0x team attended the ETHDenver hackathon last weekend. It was awesome. Amir gave a presentation "Building a trading bot on 0x protocol”, Fabio, Remco and Leo won a hackathon prize for building Profiler: a tool that measures line-by-line gas consumption for smart contracts by analyzing the blockchain trace, and we organized an incredibly productive working group on non-fungible tokens and bridging the gap between ERC721 and ERC821.
Amir and I spoke with Epicenter.
Jacob put together the 0x developer sandbox, which makes it super easy to get started building with our dev tools.

Larry and Ryan from Blockstack

Our $50,000 chat bounty ended this week and judging has started - the winning apps will be announced soon.
We started internal testing of subdomains, a new type of Blockstack name that allows multiple name operations to be processed in one transaction of the underlying blockchain. This improves scalability and makes it faster and cheaper for users to on-board to the ecosystem.
We're polishing off a move to client-side Blockstack transaction generation which will bring feature parity to Blockstack apps running on all of our desktop platforms.
Finally, we announced our high-level plans for Blockstack apps on mobile platforms

Bowen & Tian from Hydro/DDEX

We’re working hard on the DDEX API, which will be released with full documentation in 2 weeks!
Hydro protocol ledger support beta testing under way—you’ll soon be able to trade directly off of your ledger wallet!

JZ & Jake from Decred

Marco Peereboom, our New Systems Development Lead announced this week all the necessary primitives have been put in place for our privacy implementation, and integration has commenced. Activating Decred’s privacy features will require a stakeholder consensus vote which will need to meet the 75% threshold.
Developer Matheus Degiovani has released a proof of concept showing how ticket splitting can be achieved, thus lowering the barrier to entry for users wishing to participate in our governance system.
Dave Collins our Lead Developer merged some changes for managing the block index. They significantly enhance the performance of dcrd and reduce startup time. After migration the startup time for mainnet on an SSD goes form ~21 seconds to ~2.7 seconds. For testnet data on a 7200 RPM HDD the time goes from ~2 minutes 34 seconds to ~9 seconds.

Ryan from FOAM

FOAM is making progress on our integration with uPort and our teams are working closely together. Join the February uPort Community Call Tuesday, February 27th to learn more about FOAM as a featured partner and how digital identity and Proof of Location intersect.
We had over 600 users register for our Spatial Index beta, invitations will be sent out February 26th. We are excited to stress test our architecture.

Jimmy for Bitcoin

Andrew Poelstra on Bulletproofs as general zero-knowledge proofs [ed note: why do I love twitter so much? Because minutes after this was published, you can read an interesting back-and-forth about it from leading cryptographers in the field in realtime]
Hivemind is a general purpose prediction market on Bitcoin that utilizes drivechains, being developed by Paul Storcz
0.16.0 tagged, but not released yet [ed note: if you’re a programmer interested in getting into blockchain work or bitcoin development, Jimmy’s seminars are an excellent place to start]

Tom & Michael from Dfinity

DFINITY's white paper on the consensus system and threshold relay has been released in Chinese.

James from Vertcoin

AMD miner kernel reaching completion and in the testing and performance verification phase. The OpenCL version has been integrated into the bespoke host code, with the pure GCN3 ASM version soon to follow.
We moved our GitHub organization to a new URL in order to reflect changes in the team in the last year : https://github.com/vertcoin-project
We're still battling Apple to get the Vertwallet listed on the app store.
Dockerised insight-vtc now available: https://github.com/vertcoin-project/insight-vtc-docker

David from Sia

We’ve launched our Siafunds Tokenized Security Offering page, where info is available about a sale of 750 Siafund tokens to accredited investors.
‘Download overhaul’ has been completed and merged into the codebase. Initial reports indicate that Sia can now get a sustained download speed of over 500mb/s. With the Download overhaul being merged in, the core team also released Sia v1.3.2RC1. As usual, release candidates are still being tested and not intended for general use. If you would like to help test the RC please join the #contributors channel.
A new human-readable timestamp has been added to the siac wallet transactions command. You can now see a timestamp, in addition to the block height for each transaction in the wallet.
Sia version 1.3.2 is expected to be released for general availability next week.

Doug from Livepeer

Worked side by side with the Truebit team to lay the groundwork and begin developing the first PoC for trustless verification of video transcoding in Livepeer.
Built video encoding functionality that was compatible with running in Truebit’s on chain WASM interpreter to resolve disputes in work verification. It’s great to see these systems fitting together after a year+ of design and initial builds.

Diego & Riccardo from Monero

Ledger just made a big PR that really pushes forward hardware support closer to completion. Some of it is even more generic than Ledger, so it should potentially help other hardware wallets as well—basically it allows the secret keys to be on a device rather than a file. This is a big step for Ledger Hardware support, and after merging (which should hopefully happen very soon) there's just some testing of the code, and of the code with the hardware.

Robbie from Truebit

Released medium articles about Truebit's Token Economics and Roadmap and the DOGE-ETH #Artproject Community
Deep dive with the Livepeer team for two days at the Truebit Hacker House. Scoped out integration architecture for POC and got ffprobe to run on Truebit
Delivered a Carbon Voting platform at ETHDenver - Built both the smart contracts and client with test suite. Won the Aragon bounty for this submission.
Spoke at Stanford GSB around Community Management tactics and non-technical roles in crypto.

Simar from Stream

Stream was focused this past week on executing a "rebase" with its backers thus far in light of a new whitepaper and token distribution strategy.

Zooko and Paige from Zcash

We needed some extra time fixing up Overwinter related PRs—1.0.15 which implements Overwinter code and sets activation block height on testnet (currently planned for mid-March) is scheduled for the 26th, and if all testing goes well during this period then 1.1.0 sets the activation block height in mainnet (currently planned for June 25th 2018). The Overwinter activation date is the key date to remember which is why we’ve created an Overwinter information portal with a countdown to activation.
The new engineering hires have been diving into various onboarding tasks this week (including setting up an office in Denver) and starting to pick up some tasks like doing reproducible deterministic gitian builds of the client. We’ll announce everyone in a blog post and add them to our team page soon!
Most of the security audits we’ve contracted have started. We’ll elaborate on the companies and scope of each audit in an upcoming blog post.

Brendan and Nadav from Dharma

Work-trialed two two engineering candidates
Implemented fixes from the first round of contract audits and prepared contracts for redundant round of audits starting this week
Getting very close to releasing a working prototype of our MVP application -- thanks in advance to everyone who has volunteered to provide feedback

Antonio from dYdX

Implemented core features in the base short sell protocol to support a wider array of second layer applications
Sourcing smart contract security auditors
Interviewing engineering candidates for full-time roles in San Francisco

Evan on Ethereum

Notes from last Friday's core dev call
Beige paper: a rewrite of the yellow paper for readability
Two big funds announced: Ethereum Community Fund, $100m from Cosmos, OmiseGo, Golem, Maker, Global Brain, and Raiden to support ecosystem infrastructure. Also Maker/L4's Stable Fund to invest $45 million to support the Maker ecosystem

Ari from Decentraland

We made a new version of the SDK supporting Node.js server-side scenes and shared states, which is the first milestone to create interactive multiplayer scenes. Within the SDK, we’ve been working on VR and interaction optimizations and bug fixing. Also, been working on visual testing and increasing the compatibility with a-frame.
LAND Marketplace: we deployed a Marketplace contract on Testnet and are performing LAND publication tests. We are indexing the contract data to improve the UX speed dramatically on the next release, and we’ve also redesigned the UI
We setup an IPNS Gateway for use by the client team and apps, are exporting a blacklist in text format for third-party nodes to use, and have figured out a workaround for a limitation in IPFS for the expiration of IPNS links.

Joey from Augur

The front end team is working on building out the screens for reporting during dispute resolution and open reporting. They received some new mocks back from IDEO regarding the forking screens, and are beginning those shortly.
Additionally, we got the second round of audit results. I estimate there’ll be another 2 audit rounds until we get a clean pass

Peter from PROPS

Rize, which will be the first app to integrate PROPS, was released on iOS and Android
Implemented ERC865 transfers in the PROPS wallet app (alpha coming soon)

Demi from Open Zeppelin

OpenZeppelin v1.7.0 released, including 5 new crowdsale models:
Dozens of amazing new projects being built with OpenZeppelin at ETHDenver last week. Big shout out to ETHDenver Zeppelin prize winners: Decentpost, Espresso and securETH
We are hiring: software engineers, security researchers, and dev relations. Apply here!

Brian and Sam from OpenBazaar

OpenBazaar has merged several improvements to our escrow and moderation system over the past week, and after testing expect to publish a new release later this week.