Proof of Work #21
I apologize for the late update—Blockchain Week in New York was a flurry of meetings, and I did not get to sleep before 3am a single night this past week. Putting faces to internet handles was really fun, and on a walk from midtown to the park I had not one but two people DM me on Twitter and say “hey, did you just walk by in a “Long Bitcoin, Short the World” shirt?”
This week in NYC I stayed far away from the event itself and the scammy ICO booths, and free-rode on the confluence of the worlds cryptocurrency communities coming together. One big impression that I got is that that the wave of large-scale institutional money to crypto might be arriving sooner than expected, with the announcement of things like Coinbase’s new suite of institutional products. I had the pleasure of hanging out with Zooko from Zcash in meatspace for the first time in a while, and remain really impressed with the Zcash team’s progress.
A couple of interesting developments: friend of the podcast David Vorick published a fascinating overview of the state of cryptocurrency mining, in which he discusses the economics around ASICs and “asic resistant” currencies, and the Interchange team released a proposed standard for exchange data exports, something which anyone who has tried to use exchange transaction data knows is sorely needed.
The next PoW issue should be accompanied by a new website that will allow us to feature many more projects without running into the issue of making this newsletter too long to easily absorb. Excited to share that with everyone, please stay tuned!
JZ from Decred
Decred Proof-of-Stake ticket splitting has hit mainnet. Developer Matheus Degiovani has created a transaction with a twelve way split ticket. This work will massively lower the barrier to entry for stakeholder participation.
Little preview of Politeia, Decred’s git based, blockchain anchored proposal system, and what the audit trail looks like on the backend.
It’s not the sexiest news, but Decred’s DNS seeder (dcrseeder) has been revamped to make it easier to maintain. The new code also results in quicker node discovery for users and adds service bit filtering, enabling SPV nodes to find full nodes that support Compact Filters.
Decred will be rocking Consensus 2018 in New York City this week! If you're attending, come see us at booth 230. We've got tons of Decred swag for attendees who stop by.
Jutta from Parity Technologies
We released an announcement on our new smart contract development processes.We welcome questions, feedback, and contribution on our security processes.
We're hiring. Check out our open positions or just send us a speculative application.
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Dandelion - Privacy Preserving way to propagate transactions
Bitcoin Acks - A way to more easily keep track of which issues need review and testing
Zac from Stellar
Set Up an Exchange Guide – This new guide will walk you through the integration steps to add Stellar to your exchange. Recently, a new section has been added that describes the process of adding non-native assets.
SEP-0007: URI Scheme for Delegated Signing – This Stellar Ecosystem Proposal (SEP) introduces a URI Scheme to generate a URI that will serve as a request to sign a transaction. The request represented by the URI will be signed by the user’s trusted wallet where she stores her secret key(s) so users do not have to copy/paste their secret keys into websites and applications.
Jed will be speaking at a panel during Consensus on May 14th.
Lisa will be at Money2020 Europe on June 4th.
The Stellar Monthly Roundup has been published
Doug from Livepeer
The Livepeer Alpha achieved a full active transcoder set in the first week of running live on Ethereum's mainnet.
LivepeerJS and go-livepeer received contributions from 4 community committers, as we also started to experiment with Gitcoin bounties.
Collaborated with the web3 infrastructure community at the amazing Swarm Summit in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and spoke about competitive markets for resource allocation protocols like bandwidth, compute, and storage.
This week Livepeer will hopefully have content streaming from Ethereal, Eth's core dev call, and PoW's own Eric Meltzer :)
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Zcashd Team: This sprint saw 13 new pull requests merged into zcashd master (see “Released column” 2).
Consensus Protocol Team: As with the previous sprint, the consensus protocol team is heavily focused on consensus implementations necessary to get Sapling ready for the upcoming 1.1.1 release
Development Infrastructure team: In this sprint, we finished and deployed the Sapling MPC application, updated the Gitian github with new documentation describing per platform setup, did some preliminary investigation into CI System in which a refactor is underway.
Ecosystem team: We worked on upgrading the insight explorer for testnet run by Zcash Co to reflect the changes introduced by Overwinter and returning this link to service.
Documentation team: The last sprint reworked the user guide, Debian package install and troubleshooting FAQ.
Evan on Ethereum
Plasma Cash design continues to improve. Kelvin Fichter: Plasma XT. Plasma Cash but much less per-user data checking and Xuanji Li: Plasma Cash with smaller exit procedure
Sūrya. Gonçalo Sá’s extension of soli for exploring Solidity code
Flippening: Ethereum’s fee market is now larger than Bitcoin’s
Casper FFG getting closer: Casper FFG v0.1 release
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Opened Dharma Plex Mainnet Closed Beta to a wider audience. For access details, email brendan-at-dharma-dot-io
Created frontend react app for Dharma Protocol developer documentation
Assessed 2 successful bug bounty submissions of "note severity" and paid out pertinent rewards (submissions will be published at the conclusion of the public bug bounty)
Antonio from dYdX
Finishing our first security audit with Cryptofin this week. Starting a second with ZK Labs soon.
Got to 100% test coverage on our protocol smart contracts
Interviewing and work trailing several engineering candidates. We’re hiring world class engineers full-time in San Francisco!
Robbie from Truebit
Worked on compiling rust to WASM architecture (needed support for asm.js backend)
Managed to compile gas metering from parity into WASM that works in our system!
Included test coverage for webasm-solidity
Demi from Zeppelin
OpenZeppelin crossed the 100,000 total downloads this week! Thank you to our amazing community of developers.
Lots of work in improving the development experience for ZeppelinOS's Kernel and CLI, and finishing up sample apps showcasing how to use them. We’ll be presenting all this to the 150+ developers hacking at ETHBuenosAires
Arthur from Liquidity.Network
Significant extension of our Whitepaper, adding 7 team members
Simplified KYC procedure approved by the Swiss Finance Regulators (FINMA)
EDCON presentation online
Tom from 0x
No update.
Zaki from Cosmos
Cosmos did a Reddit AMA this week
We published a deep dive into Tendermint Consensus
Gaia-5000 testnet going strong.
Ari from Decentraland
Last week, our dApps team released version 0.6.0 of the Marketplace, including a few minor fixes in addition to adding support for new mobile gestures and making the detailed parcel view map navigable.
Our Experience Architect, Chris Chapman, is creating some new educational material for our SDK in the form of "game kits". These will cover common game development patterns and helpers like state machines, signaling, collaborative scripting, and more.
Finally, our world team is in the process of implementing the babylon.js framework to provide faster rendering and better developer tools for the Decentraland client and SDK. This move away from three.js has seen great improvement in our performance benchmarks.
James from Vertcoin
Vertcoin Core 0.13.1 released
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
The Kastelo hardware wallet project had completed its first round of goals, and has opened a second FFS proposal to complete the work and release the spec. The whole community is impressed with their work and dedication. Their proposal can be found here.
Michael & Tom from Dfinity
Quality review for translations of Consensus white paper into Japanese, Korean, and German languages.
Preparation for Blockchain Week NYC meetup, where Norton Wang will be giving a presentation on DFINITY's programming models.
Continued work on DFINITY's SDK.
Ryan from FOAM
We continued to refine and test the main net candidate of our Token Curated Registry for Geographic Points of Interest
FOAM sponsored and presented at the Smart Cities NYC conference, demo'ed the Spatial Index at the Ethereal Summit and hosted over 200 attendees at the NYC Token Curation Markets Meetup
Sam from OpenBazaar
No update this time, as we were pushing hard to get this cryptocurrency release out. More next week!
David from Sia
No update