Week #18
JZ from Decred
Politeia, our blockchain anchored proposal system went live on testnet this week. We’re ironing bugs out and getting it integrated into the Decrediton GUI wallet.
If you’re attending MIT’s Business of Blockchain event on Monday April 23rd be sure to check out the presentation by Decred’s project lead Jake Yocom-Piatt entitled "Blockchain Sovereignty and Blockchain Integration for Businesses".
Larry & Ryan from Blockstack
Android SDK - a preview release for developers with a getting started guide, api documentation and an example app shipped.
Mobile signup redesign: We have a working UI. Larry and Ken have started work on integrating into their mobile SDKs and our production systems.
We launched the Blockstack Community Rewards Program where you can earn Stacks Tokens for completing different tasks or suggesting new ones.
Great week for hiring some awesome people to increase our engineering and overall capacity, you'll see them out and about in the community soon.
Michael & Tom from Dfinity
Worked on C/C++ libraries and compiler tools for wasm
Set up automated integration tests for the network.
Opened a telegram support channel for Arabic speakers and a developer focused community group
Robbie from Truebit
Spoke about Truebit and the WASM VM to the Blockchain Group at Facebook
Truebit Code: Began prototype for truebit-os, with working shell. New error handling is working, also added option to run tasks with JIT. Worked on interfaces of the contracts in the WASM/Solidity Repo
We are celebrating our last few months in San Francisco with a skydiving day Thursday April 26th -- reach out to Robbie if you want to join. Truebit will be moving to Berlin on May 1st for the summer to take advantage of the full node
Zac from Stellar
Stellar is hosting a meetup in Dubai called "An Evening of Blockchain and Fintech" on May 1st
The winners of the 6th Stellar Build Challenge were announced
Doug from Livepeer
Release node version 0.1.17 to focus on the creation of a "Small World Network" for more reliable video broadcasting.
Wrote a comprehensive overview of what it means to stake and delegate in Livepeer's delegated stake based protocol. A good overview for anyone who's looking to participate in any of the staking protocols that will be coming live in short order.
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
No updates.
Zaki from Cosmos
Quiet week on the whole for the Cosmos team as we ramp up to push hard on testnet releases in the coming weeks.
Tuesday 4pm GMT will be another testnet launch.
Look for long term stability and eventual GUI integration.
James from Vertcoin
New open-source website launched
James talks about Lightning at SF Bitcoin devs meetup:
VertcoinTalk, a podcast with Vertcoin developers and marketing team members released its third episode
Ari from Decentraland
Releasing the alpha version of our SDK: developers.decentraland.org - tools and documentation to help developers start developing games and experiences on their LAND. Visit blog for the full announcement.
Released v.0.4.0 of the LAND Marketplace, adding Parcel Context (proximity to plazas, roads, and districts). Also, a Bancor widget now allows users to purchase MANA directly from the Marketplace.
The dApps team has been working on an implementation of "Estates" — a method of grouping parcels together to make it easier to develop and transfer, sell, or buy groups of parcels.
Our Product team is making progress with our Etheremon implementation for Decentraland! They're exploring other crypto-based games to include in our launch of the platform.
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Just after last week’s update, we finished the process for releasing the first Overwinter compatible Zcash version, 1.1.0. We urge users to upgrade their Zcash clients 12 in anticipation for the Overwinter activation on June 25th.
We’re interviewing a handful of brand and design agencies to help us in a revamp of the website, visual assets and generally align our brand.
As the team grows, we’re formalizing development processes by creating sub teams and 2-week sprint cycles (3 per release).
This week, on the est coast of the US, we participated in the Blockchain Career Fair 2 and next week will be at SHE256, both hosted at UC Berkeley.
Ryan from FOAM
Began a new phase of our hardware track and are now stress testing LoRa radio's for the final specifications of the Proof of Location test net.
The Spatial Index Visualizer beta was made public and can be accessed here. Requires Metamask on Rinkeby, supports uPort.
Sam from OpenBazaar
The OpenBazaar developers published their 2018 roadmap, and are holding a live session April 26th to hear feedback from the community on their plan. You can sign up for the session here.
Jimmy on Bitcoin
My review
Tx Fee Visualization
Katherine from Messari
Coming off our first full week of new asset profiles, our community contributors are in high gear. We are integrating the feedback we have received and releasing new features soon!
We are building out our engineering team and looking for front end, back end, full stack, and blockchain engineers.
Regulatory issues of the week: This was a busy week in the U.S. for the crypto regulation/ policy world. Earlier this week, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to 13 virtual currency exchanges requesting disclosure of key information about their operations. The exchanges include Coinbase, Gemini, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Bittrex, Circle, Binance, Huobi, Kraken, and a few others. Most exchanges welcomed the opportunity to provide transparency, but Kraken has come out very strongly against the inquiry.
News broke out that some prominent VCs and law firms went down to DC last month for a private meeting with the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance. Among other things, the group proposed a safe harbor provision for tokens and a reconsideration of tokens under the definitions provided by U.S. federal securities laws. Ryan and I wrote a longer post on what the implications of this meeting could be in our newsletter this week here
David from Sia
2 Nebulous repo was updated this week. 3 issues were created, 3 were closed. 5 PRs were merged.
GitHub users ChrisSchinnerl, lukechampine, and nielscastien had code contributions into Sia this week.
Contract fees are now expressly shown in the /renter API endpoint and siac renter commands. Users can now see how how their spent allowance breaks down with amount spent on storage, upload, download, and fees. Check out the changes here.
GitHub user nielscastien spent a lot of time adding a new API endpoint to view host contract information. The new /host/contracts endpoint displays every contract a host has and various fields about the contract such as its riskedcollateral, expirationheight, obligationstatus, potentialstoragerevenue, and many more fields. To see all the fields available check out the PR here and follow it’s progress as the new API endpoint gets added to siac here.
From the community:Community member mtlynch released an updated Sia docker image. Read his post and download the image here.
Antonio from dYdX
Started security audits on protocol smart contracts
Started working with a senior designer, Chris
Interviewed multiple engineering candidates. Have a few work trials coming up
Stay tuned for some news this week about our protocol launch!
Tom from 0x
Tokenlon, part of imToken, launched with 0x-powered trading
New blog post on tokenized securities and compliant trading
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
Hydro API opensource on Github 4/27/2018
Hydro Node Program initazted, Hydro is a network layer protocol for high performance decentralized exchanges and marketplaces with built-in incentives for coordination, A node will be rewarded in HOT token. If you are interested, plese send us a note at bowen@ddex.io
Hydro Protocol Token will be listed on HADAX.
Evan on Ethereum
Vitalik: A general theory of quadratically sharded validation
Solidity v0.4.22: dynamic returns, error messages for revert and require, safer constructors, ABI encoding utils, etc
Flint: a new statically-typed language aimed at code security. Under development.
Even Ethereum’s competitors in the enterprise space are starting to realize that public chains are inevitable
Jutta from Parity Technologies
Gavin Wood introduced Parity Substrate at Event Horizon. Substrate is the blockchain building technology stackthat makes it easier to experiment with ideas for governance, sharding, encryption, etc. Polkadot will be built with Substrate. Gavin's Parity Substrate presentation slides are here.
MyCrypto Beta now includes offline signing through Parity Signer.
We released Parity 1.10.1 Beta is released with improved warp sync, so that you can specify a minimum block number to warp to.
Jack Fransham and Pierre Krieger presented their latest work on Libp2p at the Zero Knowledge Summit. The recording of that presentation is out here.
We're hiring in Berlin! Check out our open positions or just send us a speculative application.
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Made several important improvements to Dharma Plex - collateral seizing and returning; explanations and UI improvements
Added test suites to Dharma Protocol for deploying terms contracts, authorizing contract interactions, and transferring ownership to multisig
Fixed a bug around incorrect scaling of interest rates
Demi from Zeppelin
Development team went on a coding retreat to work on the ZeppelinOS Kernel without email and chat distractions
Published the first early release of zos-cli (a command line interface to ZeppelinOS) and zos-kernel (the ZeppelinOS Kernel module)
External audit of current versions of zos-lib, zos-kernel and zos-cli start this week.