Proof of Work #23
Hi folks. First, wanted to say that the exciting update I promised about an initiative we’re funding in the blockchain security space has been pushed back a few weeks to deal with some issues on the academic partner’s side. As everyone probably knows, things move slowly in academia, but I promise it will be worth the wait.
MakerDAO will now be providing regular PoW updates! We’ve been trying to get this to happen for a while but some wires got crossed. Super excited to have them on board. Stablecoins are an interesting experiment, and the MKR/DAI system has worked admirably well so far, even during crashes. It will be great to get a first-hand look at how the system evolves: multi-collateral DAI? Launching on other chains besides just Ethereum?
An incredibly exciting project that I have been bursting at the seams wanting to talk about is announcing shortly—I’ll be publishing some writing I’ve done on the topic on twitter, and I will have them onboarded to Proof of Work in the next week or two! 🤝
More next week. Work continues on a website-version of Proof of Work which will allow us to onboard more projects without crowding the newsletter.
Coulter from MakerDAO
This week at Oslo Freedom Forum, we announced Project Bifrost, a system that expedites payments to non-profits, and reduces the cost of delivering cash on the ground. Together with Dether and ConsenSys, we're looking to help aid groups in conflict areas.
Partnered with Colony for their hackathon, which has $25k prizes, paid in Dai
For the first time ever, the entire Maker team got together in person at an offsite in New Orleans
Following ETH Buenos Aires, we opened a new office in the city and are hiring for roles there (and our other offices globally)
Doug from Livepeer
Did an Intro To Dapp Development workshop and participated on a Token Design and Distribution Mechanism panel at EthBA.
Streamed the Ethereum Core Developers Meeting #40 through the Livepeer Network.
Updated the protocol explorer and video player.
Conducted the first bug fix / protocol upgrade since mainnet launch.
Livepeer is looking for a new video engineer to join our team!
Antonio from dYdX
Hired an awesome software engineer, Bryce Neal. Welcome Bryce!
Building our user facing products, as well as working with exchanges to list dYdX Margin Tokens
Sam from OpenBazaar
We published an article this week explaining the difficulties of gathering stats on a decentralized network, and how we're dealing with the problem.
Work continues on improving the cryptotrading feature, and we're now deliberating on how best to start building the OpenBazaar buyer-only web client.
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
We released zcashd v 1.1.1 which is a huge milestone towards the Sapling network upgrade.
We wrote about the new transaction expiry feature in the upcoming Overwinter network upgrade.
Final opportunities to apply for the first Zcash conference, Zcon0 [ed note: I'll be here!]
Just posted the weekly update here
Demi from Zeppelin
1000+ downloads of ZeppelinOS, the platform for secure smart contract applications. You can start using it right now at zeppelinos.org. [ed note: extremely exciting to see this launch!]
Hosted our first developer conference -zepcon0. We had presentations delivered by Manu (CTO), Fran (core dev) and Elena (community member) on ZeppelinOS design, proxy patterns for upgradeability and ZeppelinOS' next steps and community involvement. 200+ people registered, but we could only let 100 people in due to capacity constraints. Great vibe and community!
We want ZeppelinOS to be extremely easy to use—that’s why we were its first users, with two sample smart contract apps we enjoyed building: Basil and Crafty. Taking a look at these two apps will help show how easy it is to either build or integrate upgradeability into any smart contract application.
We uploaded all talks and panels from ETHBuenosAires to YouTube.
Ari from Decentraland
We've just launched version 0.8.0 of the Marketplace, adding the ability to share access to the content settings of LAND parcels with other users.
Our dApps team has also fixed some UI bugs in the mobile Marketplace, they've completed the frontend development for LAND Estates, and they are in the process of completing the MVP for Decentraland's voting dApp, Agora. The dApps team is also building an endpoint allowing third-parties to display a .png preview of LAND parcel details.
Our World Team is continuing to make progress with the migration from Three.js to Babylon.js.
Finally this week, Decentraland appeared at Montreal's iX Symposium, a conference dedicated to VR and immersive experiences, where we held a workshop introducing the Decentraland platform and the SDK.
Zaki from Cosmos
Slashing V1 feature just landed in Cosmos
Slashing V2 and Governance are coming together for launch.
Cosmos also adopted the Bech32 Address format for our ecosystem.
Katherine from Messari
Our community analysts have published 40 project profiles and the data is being added to our Agora database every day. Check it out!
We made another tech hire and not stopping there. Our data engineering team from Palantir, Bloomberg, MSFT, etc. is aggressively hiring and looking for candidates with front end, back end, full stack, and blockchain analytics chops.
Messari's draft whitepaper for a Token Curated Registry is live on our website here. Looking ahead, we are incorporating feedback received for the whitepaper and getting ready to build the product in Q4.
Jutta from Parity Technologies
We released a Polkadot UI for easily interacting with the testnet, complete with vanity url generator. There's a web version, or there's the Polkadot-js repo to run it on your own node.
Parity Casper testnet is live to test tx propagation and networking works before the main Casper testnet goes online. Here's the stats page.
The recording from Gavin's presentation on Substrate from Event Horizon is now online.
The recording from Bjorn and Maciej's deep dive on Private Transactions, Permissioning, and Wasm is now online.
Fabian discussed GDPR and blockchain at the Blockchain4EU Summit in Brussels.
We now have bounties on Gitcoin.
We're hiring! Check out our open positions or just send us a speculative application.
JZ from Decred
Our monthly public development recap for May is in. We had 238 active PRs, 195 commits, 32,831 additions, and 22,280 deletions in total spread across 3-10 devs per DCR repo.
Decred project lead Jake Yocom-Piatt was featured in an AMA on r/CryptoTechnology and covered a wide variety of topics including governance, privacy, and the way the treasury (project subsidy) will be spent by the stakeholders.
Decred community member Zubair Zia published a piece entitled: “Apples to apples, Decred is 20x more expensive to attack than Bitcoin” which outlines the added security benefits of using a hybrid Proof-of-Work/Proof-of-Stake system.
Alex Evans of Placeholder also released a report (PDF linked) examining “the core systems and performance of Decred, with a focus on the economic drivers underpinning consensus, governance, and asset demand on the network.”
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
~20k USD in loan volume since launch
Added functions to `dharma.js` relating to getting past logs (PR 175, PR 170)
Finalized automated build process for Dharma Plex (PR 152)
Improved our mock blockchain set up for development and testing with `dharma.js`
David from Sia
2 Nebulous repos were updated. 10 issues were created, 18 were closed. 22 PRs were merged.
GitHub users ChrisSchinnerl, MSevey, DavidVorick, tbenz9, Fornax96, and lukechampine had code contributions into Sia.
Sia version 1.3.3 RC3 was released. This release candidate fixes some of the incorrect allowance reporting, fixes a Sia shutdown bug, and persists the renter cache settings and bandwidth limiter settings.
The team has 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.
Zac from Stellar
Stellar Build Challenge 7 Submissions Are Now Open
Monthly Newsletter will be available on the Stellar.org Website on Tuesday 6/5
Amsterdam Meetup on 6/6 with Lisa Nestor
James from Vertcoin
Vertcoin Core v0.13.2 released
Jimmy on Bitcoin
BetterHash Mining Protocol [ed note: this is intriguing]
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
Hydro Partnership with MakerDao , aim to support more DAI quote pair on all relayers on Hydro
DDEX launches Korean trade interface
DDEX Native Mobile App Closed Beta
Tom from 0x
Published Relayer Report #3
Hired a Melanie Oberto, our office manager / EA!
Hired Peter Zeitz, our first governance researcher!
Preparing for our first V2 audit with Quantstamp starting on June 10th
Evan on Ethereum
Amis: implementing Casper FFG in Geth. Mitigating spam votes with NULL_SENDER
buidler: a new development framework from Nomic Labs
84 interviews with developers on what Ethereum needs to improve on, compiled by EthPrize.
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
Monero 0.12.2.0 Lithium Luna is out! Ledger functionality, and tons and tons of bug fixes that make running monero on Linux a lot easier.
Ryan from FOAM
Participated in the Mapbox Locate conference and workshopped the Spatial Index Visualizer with the Uber Visualization team the deck.gl and new Kepler.gl tools. Additionally Uber has merged FOAM commits on the react-map-gl repository.
Held workshop sessions with Urbit and separately with DFINITY and Orchid protocol.
Our developer team is representing FOAM at LambdaConf the functional programming conference
First internal release of the main net candidate for geographic Points of Interest Token Curated Registry