Proof of Work #20

May 08, 2018

Issue number 20! When I started this 140 days ago, it had the lame name “Token Update” and was just quick look at a few projects I liked. It’s evolved into a “weekly public standup meeting” for some of the best projects in crypto, and I will be bringing on a full-time team to make it even more useful for people trying to keep up with progress being made towards decentralized networks of value and info. No change to the model—it’ll still be free, ad-free, and non-commercial, but we’ll be building some tools to allow us to scale the number of projects that can be included without causing information overload for readers. Stay tuned!

James Prestwich is someone who’s work I’ve been following for quite a while, so when we had the opportunity to invest in his latest project, we jumped at it. Now he and his team at Summa are are releasing Riemann: a toolbox that allows you to build transactions from human-readable inputs, with support for 20+ blockchains, including BTC, ZEC, LTC, and VTC. Riemann abstracts away differences between chains, to allow people to focus on building interesting infrastructure. You can read more about it here and expect to hear more from Summa in the near future.

I’m also adding updates from Liquidity Network—they’re not one of our portfolio companies, but I like what they are building, and I’m apparently not the only one.

Arthur from Liquidity.Network

Liquidity.Network released an invite-only beta for the first bi-directional off-chain mobile wallet
Liquidity’s ERC20 Token competition is ongoing and will decide on the first ERC20 tokens to be transferrable over Liquidity
Liquidity is hiring a COO and business dev folks!

Larry & Ryan from Blockstack

Releases for blockstack.js + blockstack-core: This week, we released new versions of blockstack.js and blockstack-core. The new release of blockstack-core adds new features for sponsored names: instantaneous resolution of sponsored names and inclusion of sponsored names in search results. Muneeb was the sponsor of this work.
Proposals for Future Work: This week, I worked on a number of proposals for future work -- the investor wallet, gaia hub inboxes, and standard lookup locations for app public keys. Gaia hub inboxes will support bootstrapping of social network applications without mandatory network indexers.
Adding Signature Verification to blockstack.js: Started work on adding signing and verification support to putFile/getFile in blockstack.js. This removes trust in the gaia hub for integrity guarantees (the hub was already untrusted for confidentiality). This work will also allow third party verification of the signatures --- user's will be able to confirm that a given file was signed by the same address that owns a given Gaia hub.

JZ from Decred

Company Zero’s lead dev Dave Collins has released some code which significantly optimizes how Decred performs signature hash calculations. Improvements in both speed (306x faster) and memory allocation (91% reduction) for a transaction with many inputs.
We also made a minor Decrediton release this week (v1.2.1) which addresses issues with balance display that some users were experiencing.
Slack is back. We have put up a custom invite page (automated invites were previously disabled) which allows us to once again smoothly invite people to our community.
Our monthly snapshot of Decred's public dev activity for April across a few of our software repos on GitHub is ready. We had 152 active PRs, 125 commits, 21,656 additions, and 10,288 deletions in total spread across 2-7 devs per DCR repo. If you’re interested in working on Decred, join our #dev channel on Slack (see above) and introduce yourself.

Sam from OpenBazaar

A new release candidate is about to be published which includes the ability to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. A browse-only version of OpenBazaar through a web browser is nearly completed and will be released along with the next full release.

Jutta from Parity Technologies

Gav completed the first test of a governance-based dynamic runtime-upgrade on a local testnet.
At Edcon, Jutta presented on Parity’s commitment to Ethereum and a decentralised web. Transcript and slides.
At Edcon, Gav presented Parity Substate and presented and demoed Polkadot's governance and no-fork upgrade mechanism.
We're hiring! Check out our open positions or just send us a speculative application.

Robbie from Truebit

The Truebit team has moved to Berlin and officially moved into the Full Node coworking space.
We summarized our software and research progress in SF over the past few months here. Check out this new demo of the Truebit Client (CLI tool) -- @hdswick added a bit of funk to the design as a homage to the #artproject
Engineering is fully focused on getting Livepeer working in an altruistic manner (ie. without incentives) - this is the next major milestone. Added more scripts to ports, and managed to get livepeer task working properly on kovan

Demi from Zeppelin

Still focusing on improving dev experience and code quality for ZeppelinOS' upcoming release.
Working closely with external auditors to fix some security issues found by them.
Finishing up sample apps showcasing how to use ZeppelinOS, and the talk for ETHBuenosAires.

Doug from Livepeer

Livepeer’s alpha release is live on Ethereum’s mainnet!

James from Vertcoin

Vertcoin core wallet: Vertcoin keeps up to date with the latest Bitcoin core builds. Vertcoin core Wallet 0.13 has been pushed out of pre-release.
Electrum wallet Release 3.1.2
iOS wallet App: We have hit a wall with apple. The wallet has been rejected several times. If people really want an apple wallet they can use the Coinomi iOS app, or ultimately just buy an Android device
AMD miner: New lyra2 custom kernel utilizing LDS completed and validated.

Ari from Decentraland

Last week, our dApps team released version 0.5.0 of the Marketplace, adding a stats dashboard and updated formatting for each parcel's page view.
The dApps team is also making progress with the Estates feature, having released a new LAND smart contract supporting Estates on the Ropsten network.
Ari Meilich also hosted a meet-up and moderated a panel centered on NFTs at the WDAS conference alongside Wax, Etheremon, Trinity, DDEX, and Zeppelin.

Diego and Riccardo for Monero

Monero Research Lab has made progress on refund transactions, which would enable things like Lightning Network. As well, on a practical level, there's a lot of work to speed up wallet refreshes and scanning the blockchain.

Zaki from Cosmos

Much of the team spent the week traveling to Toronto and attending EdCon.
Jae and Ethan presented at EdCon. We filmed interviews with many attendees.
The first testnet with delegation, staking and inflation implemented is >65,000 blocks and still going strong.
We have ~11 active validators on this network.

Zac from Stellar

Bifrost V2 with time-locked accounts, better account management and bug fixes has been released.
Check out our job listings. We're hiring!

Evan on Ethereum

Next cohort of Ethereum Foundation grants
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance releases architecture stack
Sharding. Vitalik published shard fork choice POC, “a fork choice rule-based mechanism for how sharding can be bolted on top of the current ethereum main chain, with a specialized random beacon and shard block times of <10 seconds (source with lots more). Also sharding update from Prysmatic Labs
Swarm POC3 released ahead of their summit in Ljubljana next week

Tom from 0x

Published 18 Ideas for 0x Relayers in 2018
Instex and Bamboo Relay launched on mainnet
Published deployer, a better way to compile and deploy Ethereum smart contracts

Jimmy on Bitcoin

eltoo (get it, L2?) : A Simple Layer2 Protocol for Bitcoin
sighash_noinput proposal
Hard forks of Bitcoin are altcoins

Ryan from FOAM

We have released and are excited to share our Product Whitepaper on the Elements of FOAM, Token Curated Registries for Mapping and Proof of Location. Additionally, we released our draft technical whitepaper. We are looking forward to the community feedback.
Released Cliquebait, a fun and easy-to-use Docker image designed to make testing your blockchain code as simple as possible while maintaining feature parity with existing Ethereum clients.

Antonio from dYdX

Increasing test coverage on our protocol smart contracts. Working with security auditors to uncover and fix issues
Designing user facing applications
Working with lenders and market makers to help build early liquidity on dYdX Short & Leveraged Long Tokens

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

Note that each release cycle contains 3 sprints and that we are still in heavy dev mode for both implementing Sapling consensus code for the next release so we can activate it on test net in the following weeks and also external preparations for Overwinter activation at block height 347500
This Sunday, we’re speaking at the Colorado Springs Blockchain & Crypto entrepreneurs meetup 1 and next week will be attending the Blockchain Summit Latam 2 so come say hello if you’ll be at either of those! Next week we’re also giving a remote presentation to the Blockchain Online Forum hosted by the Seoul Crypto Club.
Zcon0 & the Foundation： We’re starting to send out letters to applicants of Zcon0. If you haven’t fill out the form yet and are interested in joining us in Montreal this Summer, definitely consider applying to attend 2. Check out the governance proposal for the Zcash Foundation 7 including their plan for a community governance panel which will vote on issues like board elections and ballot measures.

David from Sia

1 Nebulous repo was updated this week. 4 issues were created, 6 were closed. 11 PRs were merged.
GitHub users ChrisSchinnerl, lukechampine, and MSevey had code contributions into Sia this week.
Sia version 1.3.3 RC1 was released this week, this release candidate includes tons of new features such as “Video streaming in the api, faster contract formation, improved host selection, lower contract churn, and additions to the siac renter command that fully detail how your allowance has been spent.”
This week also saw minor tweaks in the host scoring algorithm, Sia developer Chris had this to say about the tweak “instead of getting a 2x collateral bonus when you double your collateral you only get a ~1.68x bonus. A host that previously put up 10x the collateral of another host would now have to put up ~22x the collateral to get the same advantage as before.” Read more here
Additional fields such as BlockHeight, and BlockID were added to the new /consensus/blocks endpoint which was introduced in February. Among other things this will eventually be used to calculate host uptime instead of the current timestamp based methods. More info here

Katherine from Messari

We now have 80 volunteer analysts, who have collectively helped us published 20 cryptoasset project profiles. Full library
Check out a sneak peek of our Agora database, where all Messari research will ultimately live
We added two more engineering job openings! In addition to front-end, full-stack, and infrastructure devs, we're looking for a lead smart contract developer and blockchain data engineer
We will be speaking at Fluidity, Ethereal, and Consensus, and attending several other events during NYC blockchain week. Find us and say hello!
On the regulatory front, the SEC and CFTC are sitting down today (Monday) to talk about Ethereum and the crowd sale. No word on when they will communicate a decision.

Brendan and Nadav from Dharma

Dharma Plex is live on mainnet in closed beta. For access email brendan-at-dharma-dot-io
Created the Dharma Protocol Contract Registry that houses all Dharma Protocol contracts
Made several UX improvements to Plex and began refactoring Plex data and redux layer
Began overhauling documentation for both the Dharma smart contract system and `dharma.js`

Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io

Hydro listed on Huobi
DDEX native mobile app on SuperDemo Edcon Toronto—more in-depth look at this and other DDEX news in our weekly update
Hydro team will be in NYC for blockchain week
Hydro API SDK is on github. The API SDK will be able to connect all future decentralized exchange liquidity pools.

Michael & Tom from Dfinity

No update