Proof of Work #16
Hi from Beijing! As usual I underestimated the havoc that the time difference would wreak on my ability to function and so this is going out late. We’ve added Katherine, from Messari, an interesting new project working on a way for blockchain projects to self-regulate and provide appropriate disclosure. Katherine will also be commenting on the general regulatory environment for blockchain projects, and I'm really excited to have her onboard!
For a while I’ve struggled to get people in the US to understand that the Chinese establishment’s position on cryptocurrency is complicated and far from purely negative. While they are very negative on stuff like public ICOs, the potential of the tech for everything from supply chain logistics to international settlement has obvious appeal, and China is absolutely unwilling to miss out on the massive growth entailed in this new wave of tech (AI, space, biotech, blockchain etc). When I told friends that our fund INBlockchain just announced a new fund in partnership with the Hangzhou city government that will provide 1.6 billion dollars of funding for blockchain tech projects, they’ve finally started believing me that blockchain in China absolutely has a future.
I haven’t had as much time to read recently as I would like, but I really enjoyed these two different pieces from Derek Hsue, the former of which is one of the best examples of Betteridges Law of Headlines that I’ve seen in a while 🙃
Apologies for the late delivery this week, more next week! We’ve done some internal reworking to make it much easier to get all the updates in one place and put together ontime, so expect a smoother and more reliable Proof of Work going forward!
Zaki from Cosmos
Great blog posts on the cosmos system design
Awa on the need for central liquidity rail between sidechains
BigchainDB goes BFT with Tendermint
Cosmos participates in the crypto for your throughts hackathon
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
This week we made the go decision for moving forward with the Overwinter release without inserting a buffer release.
This week we packaged up and tested the parameters generated from phase 1 of the MPC (aka Powers of Tau) and will be announcing them along with a coordinator report in the coming days.
Doug from Livepeer
Published updates to LivepeerJS enabling web developers to embed streaming video from the network into their web apps and to interact with the protocol directly on chain from their web browser.
We welcomed Philipp Angele to the team as Livepeer's Director of Product. Philipp brings 13 years of deep video experience as the founder of Camfoo and product lead at Wowza Streaming Cloud.
James from Vertcoin
Vertcoin Core 0.13.0-RC1 (rebased from Bitcoin Core 0.16) released
March Vertcoin developer update
Larry & Ryan from Blockstack
ed note: Blockstack is switching around who will be doing PoW updates so they missed this week, but they have a lot of awesome stuff to report next week!
Will from 0x
Published the 0x Relayer Registry, a formatted list of relayers, making it easier to aggregate 0x's networked liquidity
Published March Dev Update
Zack Skelly joined us to run recruiting and Blake Henderson joined our Ops team!
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
We’ve hard forked. The Monero hashrate dropped like 75 percent, which means that the ASICs are no longer mining on the Monero network. [ed note: this is the second time we’ve seen a big hard fork away from ASICs, Vertcoin being the first. Will be an interesting trend to watch.]
David from Sia
1 Nebulous repo was updated this week. 3 issues were created, 4 were closed. 8 PRs were merged.
A rollback feature was added to the wallet; in the event of an internal error in the wallet it will roll back to its previous state. This is not user accessible but should provide a more robust Sia wallet.
Additional logging has been added to a few of the Sia packages to help track down bugs and offer greater visibility to the users.
From the community: The official @SiabotTechHQ Twitter passed 100k followers!
Community site SiaSetup.info added another consensus download point, with instructions on bootstrapping a downloaded consensus. This helps users with traditional hard drives synchronize Sia faster, though there are always risks to downloading the consensus instead of building it yourself.
Helena & Jutta from Polkadot
As part of our roadmap to releasing a stable Light Client, we've been able to make a lot of progress on implementing LibP2P in Parity Ethereum. We're hoping to have this available in a beta within the next few weeks, so stay tuned! To start testing out the current version of the Light Client, simply run Parity Ethereum with this flag.
Are you interested in consortium blockchains? The Energy Web Foundation has theirTobalaba test network now on Etherscan. This proof-of-authority network was setup by Parity usingParity Ethereum, and is an example of how businesses can work together within an industry. Some of the authories include Shell, SP Group, and Statoil.
We are hiring in Berlin! Check out our open positions here.
Robbie from Truebit
WASM Deep Dive: Interviews with Dfinity, eWASM Team, Parity and Truebit developers to prepare a presentation for the WebAssembly annual CG meeting this week. Truebit will be presenting to the WASM community of behalf of Blockchain technology.
Worked on webasm-solidity tests and added simple deposits to the test node
Added Metering capabilities
JZ from Decred
March was a busy month. We had 190 active PRs, 176 commits, 23,165 additions, and 12,010 deletions spread across 3-7 devs per DCR repo. As always we’re on the hunt for developers so interested parties should take a peek at our GitHub and reach out.
Saleem Rashid’s code adding Decred support to the Trezor hardware wallet was merged. We’re looking forward to seeing it in the upcoming v1.7.0 firmware update.
We recently announced our partnership with YBF Ventures, Our goal is to expand our Australia/APAC contractor network and help to build the core infrastructure and protocols for the future of fintech and governance.
Ari from Decentraland
We're setting the groundwork for our Content Partner Program, which will assist development teams to build some of the very first content for Decentraland! We want to make sure we produce high-quality, engaging experiences — stay tuned for more info on this initiative in the coming weeks. As part of this initiative, we have begun building Interactive Experience Starter Kits, which will help new developers bootstrap their parcels.
Marketplace updates: adding a new transaction history log for each individual parcel, we're enabling users to transfer MANA (not just LAND) to other accounts from wallets on the Marketplace, we are creating an integration with Bancor allowing you to purchase MANA right from the Marketplace, and finally, we'll be applying some fresh UI designs.
We co-hosted a screening of Ready Player One with the Digital Currency Group in NYC.
Kieran Farr from our team will be presenting a demo of our upcoming SDK at the Augmented Reality San Francisco Bay Area Meetup on Monday, April 23rd. There's still room left! Check it out here.
Ryan from FOAM
Continued to build and test our functional Truffle alternative Chanterelle, opened our Spatial Index Beta to the public and released a framework for Token Curated Registries for Geographic Points of Interest as well as a Map of user defined Zones where they will be running FOAM nodes.
Antonio from dYdX
Writing extensive tests for protocol smart contracts
Security audits start April 16th. Expected to last about 2 months
Interviewing multiple candidates for our software engineering roles
Michael & Tom from Dfinity
The DFINITY team announced a community airdrop in conjunction with a private presale. Eligibility, token metrics and the future of token distribution are discussed on Medium.
On Thursday, April 12, Dominic Williams will be presenting on WASM in DFINITY at the San Francisco Ethereum Developers meetup.
Hsin-Ju & Jed from Stellar
Our monthly newsletter is now live.
You can catch up on all of the March news from Stellar here
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Formalized Mainnet deployment procedures for the Dharma smart contracts
Merged the `Collateralizer` contract and associated `dharma.js` tooling -- Collateralized loans will be available soon on Dharma Plex and `dharma.js`
Made important updates to `dharma.js` libraries -- added clearer order generation API endpoints and functions for returning and seizing collateral
Demi from Zeppelin
A lot of work put into the initial version of the ZeppelinOS kernel and polishing smart contract upgradeability mechanisms.
Upcoming posts explaining core ideas behind ZeppelinOS
Exploring new possible ERC implementations to be included in OpenZeppelin
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
DDEX V2 API updates. Add sequence field to response.If developers want to participate in Closed Beta API, send a note to bowen@ddex.io.
DDEX is live on Cipher, Trust, Toshi!
DDEX mobile will be presented at EDCON Toronto , World Digital Asset Summit Singapore, Google Seattle Campus in May
Hydro API sample, and SDK will opensourc on github by the end of Q2.
Evan on Ethereum
Casper FFG spec and implementation guide - block reward reduced to .6 ETH for miners in hybrid PoW/PoS. Checkpoints every 50 blocks
EIP960: cap Ether supply at ~120m, 2x what was sold in summer 2014.
Trail of Bits suite of 8 Ethereum security tools
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Sztorc on sidechains.
Feerate distribution through time.
wif for segwit.
Katherine from Messari
Messari’s mission is to promote transparency and smarter decision-making in the crypto-asset community. We are building an open-source data library to encourage a disclosures-driven approach to self-regulation. To date, we have produced around twenty crypto-asset profiles and will be hitting a pace of one per day in the coming week(s). On our product side, we have built our first prototype.
Regulatory issues of the week: Big moves from the SEC this week. Both the SEC and the DOJ (meaning criminal charges) just filed complaints against the issuers of the ICO tokens that DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather famously endorsed, charging the issuers with fraud. SEC chairman Clayton makes positive remarks about tokens at a crypto event at Princeton University, acknowledging that not all ICOs are fraudulent and that tokens may or may not be a security. Seems like the SEC is also quietly re-considering the approval of bitcoin ETF proposals. The implications of that would be massive for large financial institutions-- banks in particular.
We’re hiring! Keep up to date with any job postings here. Interested in participating in our exclusive research group and slack channels? Apply to Eric Turner .