Proof of Work #15

Apr 03, 2018

Good evening from the first PoW to be sent from the middle of a bear market. Everyone that talked a big game about not caring about prices is getting a nice chance to walk that talk! I’m very stoked to report that by and large everyone who is building truly seems unphased by the price movements. Some projects who are in the middle of their raises are feeling a bit of a crunch as crypto-funds suddenly have less to invest, but by and large the enthusiasm for quality projects seems unabated. I hesitate to think of this as a real indicator, but I have noticed a huge uptick in the number of people asking me to help place enormous OTC buys—I’m not in the OTC business but have passed along some ten thousand to ninety-thousand BTC orders to a friend who is, and he reported that they are serious buyers who completed the transactions.

Our friends at DDEX said that after they mentioned opening up their API, they got an overwhelming number of key requests, including from developers in India, students from UChicago, and traders from the valley—the global reach of this thing is really wonderful to me and I love hearing these stories.

As always, if you have an interesting project you’d like featured in Proof of Work, please get in touch!

Zaki from Cosmos

The team is hard at work on launching the gaia-3 testnet based on the new cosmos SDK on April 3rd. The key milestones for this testnet is staking and IBC features are now full integrated with the cosmos sdk.
We will also be demoing IBC transfers between two testnet chains at the Crypto For Your Thoughts hackathon on April 6th.
Finally OmiseGo announced in factual April 1st post their intention to spoon the OmiseGo token distribution into Cosmos via their Tendermint based Honte DEX. Spooned tokens will be the native staking token of this DEX zone.

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

New release schedule page makes it easier to stay on top of the big picture of Zcash releases!
The Powers of Tau portion of the Sapling parameter generation was concluded and we’re moving onto the second stage of the ceremony. Next week we plan to release the coordinator report of Powers of Tau, the generated public parameters that will be used in the second phase, the PoT verification utility and the Sapling MPC code
Zcash did some big security audits this year and they can be read about in much more depth here
Don’t forget to register for the first Zcash developer’s conference Zcon0! Scholarships are available for students who can’t otherwise make it.

Doug from Livepeer

Public bug bounty on Livepeer Smart Contracts is now open.
Published a getting started guide for those looking to run transcoding nodes on the network at launch.

James from Vertcoin

AMD miner (Nextminer): Lyra2 custom assembly kernel functional and valid. Performance testing entire Lyra2rev2 algorithm, solving performance issues that arise, either at the macro level with more custom assembly kernels, or with micro level optimizations
New website: User feedback, issues and pull requests on Github have been incorporated into the new design. See it here and give feedback/contribute here
Bitcoin Core 0.16 and Electrum 3 upstream re-bases coming later this week

Larry & Ryan from Blockstack

Built an MVP of an app using our upcoming Android SDK
Released videos from the Blockstack Berlin event
User-tested a new on-boarding flow for mobile users which makes it super easy for app developers to on-board new users to their apps.
Welcomed two new team members, Ariella and Jesse who will be working on communications and operations.

Tom from 0x

Published sneak peek at 0x Trade Widget
Published overview of how governance works for 0x:

Diego and Riccardo for Monero

Binaries for new Monero code released for the CLI tools
New Monero GUI will probably be released tomorrow, please alert readers to be on the lookout and update ASAP.
Hard fork will occur on approximately April 6th

David from Sia

2 Nebulous repos were updated this week. 3 issues were created, 11 were closed. 6 PRs were merged.
The Sia team has been working on offline transaction signing. This feature request has been around a while and should enable offline and watch only wallets. You can follow the Issue here.
Peer-to-peer IP discovery was also merged in. Most users won’t notice a functional difference in Sia, but this was the last centralized dependency Sia used. With this pull request merged Sia is not relying on ANY external services for any of its functionality. [ed note: that’s really cool and notably not true of many other supposedly decentralized systems]
Special thanks to GitHub users mharkus and mikkeljuhl who have worked hard to lint all the Sia Go packages. This was tracked in this issue and resulted in 14 pull requests being merged in over the last 3 months.
Sia v1.3.2 has been deployed and is operating well for most users. Be sure to update if you haven’t already!

Helena & Philip from Parity

On Wednesday, the Kovan testnet hard forked, allowing us to deploy the first WebAssembly-based smart contract live on the network. We said "Hello, World!" in a smart contract written in Rust, and we're looking forward to the new contracts, languages, and developers Wasm can bring to the community.
We've been hard at work on Parity Bridge, which is already being tested as a way to mitigate scaling issues for Dapps, and it's a big part of Polkadot. Max gave a workshop at the Zero Knowledge Summit in Berlin, and the video is now online!
We are hiring in Berlin! Check out our open positions here.

Robbie from Truebit

Spent considerable time cleaning the repo for open source contributors. Check out our new developer resources and a live stream of our first "Open Sourcerer's Jam"
Merged Proof of Concept Dispute Resolution Layer
Worked on WASM instrumentation: instrumenting bottom level of critical path, storing local variables, eliminating globals, sample implementation of generating proofs for a step
First steps towards a WIP PoC verification system for the Livepeer protocol using Truebit
Released an awesome content piece explaining Truebit in 10 minutes

JZ from Decred

One of our corporate contractors has made significant progress towards a mobile wallet which will make use of our soon to be released secure SPV functionality. As always, we’re looking for developers to contribute, so anyone interested in hacking and earning DCR should reach out.
Marco has been teasing us about Politeia (Decred’s blockchain tethered proposal system), and it appears to be almost be ready for testnet.
Developer Matheus Degiovani published an in depth piece outlining “Challenges of Decred Ticket Splitting”. It’s quite insightful and comes on the heels of him releasing an alpha version of a ticket splitting matcher service on Decred’s testnet.

Ari from Decentraland

We launched the mobile version of our marketplace, in partnership with Cipher, Toshi, and Trust wallets.
We integrated first-person physics in the client.
Bugfixing the API for next week’s release.

Ryan from FOAM

FOAM launched our Spatial Index Developer Portal! With access to our API, tutorials and sample applications.
Have begun testing our Chanterelle a functional alternative to Truffle as a type-safe Ethereum contract management tool
Built a graph-ql interface for large and specific blockchain smart contract quiuires based off of the newly released Facebook Haskell library, Haxl.
We released a video explaining the Elements of FOAM.

Antonio from dYdX

Scheduled protocol security audits with CryptoFin and ZK Labs. Audits start April 16th
Finalizing smart contract code by the end of this week
Hiring full time software engineers in San Francisco. Check out https://angel.co/dydx/jobs if you're interested!

Sam from OpenBazaar

Continuing work on the cryptocurrency listing type, and also adding in opt-in stats gathering to better improve our knowledge of how people use the software.
2018 Roadmap will be published this week!

Zac from Stellar

The most prominent things on Stellar's network has been the two network tests done. We don't have much internal news for the past week since the lightning report, but are excited to report the Heir.io Network Test and the Kin Network Test
Stellar StackExchange is now in Public Beta

Brendan and Nadav from Dharma

Released alpha version of Dharma Plex on the Kovan testnet. Feedback very welcome (feedback form here)
Modified Collateralizer contract to rely on composition pattern instead of multiple inheritance
Worked on updating debt token contracts to match finalized ERC721 interface

Demi from Zeppelin

Final implementation of the ERC721 Non-fungible Token Standard in the new OpenZeppelin release. Thank you to the OpenZeppelin community members and projects that helped set this standard implementation.
We now have 10 contributors in ZeppelinOS Labs, a space for the community to interact and exchange ideas on research and development initiatives:
We're calling all hackers to come buidl with us on May 25 at ETH Buenos Aires, the third event in the @ETHGlobal series & first event in Latin America

Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io

DDEX API Beta Release has received an overwhelming number of applications. We will release public API doc in early April.
DDEX Wapp Version beta Testing on Ropsten testnet. Launch on Mainnet soon. Will be supported by Trust, Cipher, Toshi Wallets!
Hydro Canal Project initiative started, which aims to unite various liquidity sources into one pool. More on this soon.