Proof of Work #22
Hi folks! Nice to be back after a week’s break for Blockchain Week.
We’re in the middle of a really interesting time in the space right now, because a lot of projects that have been making big promises are approaching their main-net launch dates, and people are starting to demand real progress from all the massive raises that occurred last year. What’s cool is that despite the non-deliverers getting a lot of attention, there are many projects that are actually shipping! Dharma knocked out their main-net launch, ZeppelinOS launched at ETHBA, and many of the other projects listed in Proof of Work are making big progress week on week.
2018 is going to be the year that many projects prove themselves able to ship a useful product, or not, and how that affects the ability of future projects to raise will be really interesting. At the moment I’m cautiously optimistic. I think the best metric for whether a bubble exists isn’t the market cap total, but rather the difference in capitalization between excellent projects shipping weekly (like those featured here) and stuff like Tron. The more (and faster) these valuations diverge, the happier I’ll be.
For the few of you that actually enjoy my rambling before the real meat of the PoW updates, you can listen to an extremely long version of this in the form of a podcast I recently did with Clay Collins of Nomics here. Additionally, I found the Daglab’s team’s summary of what a DAG actually is and isn’t to be extremely interesting and worth a read. Finally, we have a big announcement coming up next week about funding a new initiative to increase the security of every large public chain, so stay tuned!
Jutta from Parity Technologies
Parity 1.11 Beta is out — create encrypted contracts and transactions on-chain and warp-sync to specific blocks.
Rob Habermeier presented on Substrate, the foundation for blockchain innovators. Full recording here.
Jutta Steiner joined a Blockchain Workshop at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy to discuss the technological and regulatory challenges the blockchain industry is facing.
Jutta Steiner spoke at Consensus on the importance of carefully thinking about the choices we make as we build a new web.
We're hiring! Check out our open positions or just send us a speculative application.
Sam from OpenBazaar
OpenBazaar released the 2.2.0 version which includes the ability to buy and sell cryptocurrencies on the platform privately and with no fees. It also includes opt-in stats reporting to help the developers better understand users' needs. The development team is now gathering feedback on how best to improve on the cryptotrading feature, and is also focused on building the new OpenBazaar web client.
Zaki from Cosmos
The launch of the Cosmos Hub is imminent. Much of the Cosmos engineering team is gathering Berkeley, California to land the final features and release the genesis block and initial hub software.
We have a tracking issue for launch.
Our bug bounty program opened.
We also finalized the launch economic incentives.
Began work on the InterChain Token Spec. The goal is to have Dapp Chains in Cosmos support a uniform api to ease the integration burden for service providers like wallets and portfolio managers to interact with user assets on many chains.
The Gaia-5001 testnet is winding down. It's been a particularly exciting one. Tendermint improvements reduced the Disk I/O usage by 95%. With 36 validators, we've been holding 3 second blocktimes. The first time in the wild a validator double signed a block and while this tripped some bugs in the byzantine fault detection code, it also proved that this slashing functionality works. The root cause was an active active back up configuration causing validator nodes to come online on the same time under the same key. If you are running a validator on a network with slashing, have human in the loop backups.
Please join us for the Gaia-6000 testnet on May 29th especially if you are planning on running a validator at launch.
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Completed the Sapling consensus rules implementation for activation on testnet
Wrapping up on 1.1.1 release tasks which is due out next Tuesday May 29th
Progressing on CI builders to support zcashd on Windows, MacOS, CentOS7+. Ubuntu
And more please click here.
Tom from 0x
Published Introducing 0x V2
Forwarding Contract interface overview
Published Relayer Report #2
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Doug from Livepeer
Released Livepeer Node 0.2.3, which provides much greater transcoder and broadcaster stability, and better Ethereum gas optimizations.
Streamed the Ethereum Core Developers Meeting #38 through the Livepeer Network, along with events and interviews from ETH Buenos Aires, Berlin Video Tech, Truebit, and the Private-Key.
Released updates to the Livepeer Protocol Explorer, featuring transcoder performance history to help users delegate their LPT more effectively.
Published "What's Next For Livepeer" along with open research grant opportunities.
Antonio from dYdX
Released a new post on Margin Tokens
Hired a Software Engineer, Phillip Goldberg, who we met through the Proof of Work Common App. Welcome Phillip!
Stay tuned for our testnet launch later this week!
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
Fluffypony has launched a startup that is planning to develop a sidechain for Monero. It's called Tari, and it will be handling proof of ownership in the digital world. Read more here.
Zac from Stellar
Details of the 7th Stellar Build Challenge have been announced:
We’re hiring!
JZ from Decred
Big thanks to everyone who dropped by our booth at Consensus. We had a wonderful time in New York meeting some of our stakeholders and informing new people about what we’re building. If you missed out on the fun you can live vicariously through Twitter by searching for #DecredJacket.
Developer Dave Collins published an analysis of Decred’s first consensus vote and lays out the case that Proof-of-Work miners were incentivized to resist the changes in question, however Decred’s system worked as intended as stakeholders (PoS) were able to control the outcome without issue.
Some exciting news on the exchange front this week as Decred received a new fiat listing in Brazilian Real from Omnitrade (DCR/BRL) as well as Tether (DCR/UDST) pairs on both Bittrex and Bleutrade.
We’ve put out a video demonstrating how the UI for ticket splitting in Decred will work. Matheus Degiovani currently has it in a beta state and brave users are coordinating through our Slack to construct transactions.
Speaking of splitting, the dcrd repo has been undergoing some code refactoring to make it more modular and pleasant to work with for prospective devs. If you’re interested in working on Decred feel free to reach out to us as we’re hiring!
James from Vertcoin
One-Click Miner v1.1.9.0 released
Over 67 commits and 6 pull requests merged for our open source website
bech32 support for P2Pool working on testnet
Katherine from Messari:
Messari's draft whitepaper for a Token Curated Registry is live on our website here.
Our volunteer community published five more new cryptoasset profiles this week. We also released our alpha version of the Agora database, which showcases the hard work of our community and developers here.
Messari held its first community meetup in Galaxy’s Soho offices during blockchain week. Great turn out among our research analysts, other open data source projects, and those in the Messari community. Email Katherine to be added to our list for the next meetup.
Ryan from FOAM
Organized a two day work shop on Ethereum functional programming frameworks, and the functional web-3 application stack and category theory with Phil Freeman, founder of purescript as well as engineers from Urbit, among many attendees. The event was held in our Los Angeles headquarters.
Two upcoming FOAM meetups on the same day, May 30th, the first in San Francisco and the second with DFINITY in Berlin.
Working to add ERC-721 NFT support natively to the Spatial Index Visualizer and API
Participated in the NFT Telegram group virtual workshop to discuss spatial NFTs, desired features and many other topics
Published and shared a growing NFT reading list
Held a private workshop with Dether in Berlin on spatial and map based integrations for dApps and organized a meet up together on 'Proof of Location' - video here.
Presented FOAM at the Bloomberg HQ for NYC's Media Lab Media + Machines event: video here.
Our fiends at SuperRare are making great progress on their marketplace or rare digital creations and are building off the open FOAM purescript-web3 library and other developer tools
Realesed a new library used in purescript-deck-gl and purescript-react-map-gl
Cliquebait now lets you persist your chain as well as preallocate ether to accounts without having to create a custom genesis block
Ari from Decentraland
This week, our dApps team is releasing a feature in the Marketplace allowing LAND owners to grant control over the content of their parcels to another user. This is the first step toward implementing the ability for LAND owners to “lease” their LAND to other users.
They have also completed the backend engineering for the Estates feature, and have begun building the front end UX.
Once our World Team has completed implementing the Babylon.js framework, we will be releasing v1.1.0 of the SDK.
Finally, our entire engineering team attended the ETH Buenos Aires hackathon, with our co-founder Esteban helping to judge the final projects.
Arthur from Liquidity.Network
Educative Video Interview with the Youtuber Crypto Love
We’re hiring business devs!
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
DDEX Native Mobile App Closed Beta VIP Questionnaire
DDEX API V2 Update
Hydro Proof of staking for pool membership test on Ropsten
Hydro starts EMEA Telegram for Europe, Middel East, Africa fans
David from Sia
2 Nebulous repo was updated this week. 4 issues were created, 11 were closed. 14 PRs were merged.
GitHub users ChrisSchinnerl, MSevey, tbenz9, and lukechampine had code contributions into Sia this week.
This week the team worked hard to make Sia more stable and predictable. A bug in redundancy reporting was fixed, resiliency was added to handle cases where a user has intermittent connectivity loss, a bug was fixed where the wallet, and consensus height got out of sync, among several others.
siac renter allowance cancel used to cancel the allowance and delete current contracts. The functionality has been changed to simply cancel the allowance, and keep the current contracts active until they expire.
Robbie from Truebit
Whole team is Berlin for a month sprint on VM implementation / Incentive Design
Published the Truebit VM spec here. Awesome Tweet storm from Engineering lead @sinahab here.
Onboarded a new researcher to the Truebit team for the summer. Warm welcome to Surya Bakshi from UIUC (coauthor on the PISA paper with Patrick McCorry).
Collaborated with open source contributors to fix errors in truebit-os/basic-client
Deep dive on Parity Wasmi tool to see if we can port our architecture to Rust. Implemented floating point emulation in rust. Made code for calculating IPFS hash for a file
Larry & Ryan from Blockstack
Putting the final touches on the onboarding flow for the browser
Finalizing plans to be at DroidCon in Berlin. Larry will give a talk and we'll have an interactive hands on session at the event before. We'll be making some improvements to the Android SDK for the event so the developers in attendance have a great experience.
Token network: Published a testing manual to testnet.blockstack.org so we can get more community involvement with it
Blockstack CLI: Improved documentation and fixed bugs as found by Justin Hunter relating to how the CLI interacts with Gaia hubs.
Brendan from Dharma
We launched Dharma Protocol v1.0 in Public Beta on the Ethereum Mainnet! Check out Dharma Protocol here, Developer Docs here, and Dharma Plex here
Use-cases for Dharma Plex so far: Brendan has been using Dharma to short Tron. An OMG hodler used Dharma to get liquidity without selling
Nadav presented at Token Summit
Our community set up a Dharma Investments Telegram to help Dharma Plex users find counterparties
Demi from Zeppelin
We’re excited to announce the first mainnet release of ZeppelinOS, a platform for developing smart contract applications in Ethereum. You can start using it right now here!
We announced ZeppelinOS to a group of 150+ hackers at EthBuenosAires.