Proof of Work #24
Good morning from Boston, where I’ll be for the next 24 hours before going back to my other house, the UA-888 flight to Beijing. The global nature of the cryptocurrency movement is great, but I’m beginning to be pretty jealous of old-school VCs who got to just sit around in cushy offices on Sand Hill Road all day.
The most pernicious myth in crypto is that Bitcoin development is somehow slower or less active than newer coins. This week saw two interesting things emerge from the BTC community: an esoteric vulnerability that could theoretically effect SPV wallets, and a new set of mining protocols from Matt Corallo that will allow small miners to remain in large pools but not have to rely on the pools for block construction, something which could greatly increase Bitcoin mining decentralization (more discussion here)! If you want to be kept appraised on Bitcoin dev at a deeper level than what you get here at Proof of Work, you can sign up for the Bitcoin dev mailing list, or read its archives here.
Proof of Work stalwarts Decred have proposed an interesting new decentralized exchange setup which would allow fee-free transfers of cryptocurrencies using atomic swaps. The proposal has several interesting ideas (a decentralized reputation system, pseudoranom order matching) and like 0x, keeps as much of the work off-chain as possible using a client/server architecture.
We made some (sort of obnoxious, sorry) shirts which are guaranteed to get dirty looks from nocoiners, and I’m giving away 3 on twitter here.
Welcome to new Proof of Work project MARKET protocol, a system for creating trading contracts on Ethereum. Notably, you can create extremely simple shorts or other margin-based trades using MARKET without having to manually source borrowing liquidity. Neat stuff.
Finally, the project I’ve been teasing everyone with for the past few weeks is still in the final stages of wrapup with lawyers… the wait will be extremely worth it, though.
Sam from OpenBazaar
We released 2.2.1 this week in order to fix an electron vulnerability for Windows users.
OpenBazaar.com is progressing nicely. It's a web interface for OpenBazaar, and is currently browse-only. Not finished but usable now.
In the three weeks since 2.2.0 was released we've had more than 2,200 OpenBazaar users opt into sharing anonymous usage data with us.
Coulter from MakerDAO
Kicked off a three-part series about why stablecoins matter. These blogs will dive into the importance of stability and why Dai provides a solution to many issues in crypto. We'll be releasing each new portion weekly
GOPAX opened a global crypto-to-crypto exchange featuring Dai-based trading pairs, including BTC-DAI, ETH-DAI, and XLM-DAI
Maker's Head of Risk, Steven Becker, will be speaking on a Governance panel at Stanford's Crypto DevCon this week
Phil from MARKET Protocol
We shipped market-solidity v1.0.1, an npm package of smart contracts that is being used by our dApp
Released a simplified version of our Contract Deployer allowing for users to quickly deploy a MARKET Protocol smart contract to rinkeby test net with only a few steps.
Began work on MARKET.js a typescript library to simplify interacting with our protocol.
Updated our documentation
Doug from Livepeer
The Livepeer Protocol Economics Update (6/4/2018)
The first Chinese translation pull request of the Livepeer Whitepaper
Livepeer is holding a decentralized hackday on 6/13 and 6/14
JZ from Decred
More dcrd optimizations from developer Dave Collins. “New PR achieves roughly 3x-4x faster header serving. Great for SPV! Now takes around 4 seconds to fetch all headers for current chain height versus about 16 seconds before.”
Decred project lead Jake Yocom-Piatt has released his proposal for a DEX (decentralized exchange) based on atomic swaps which would not have trading fees or be tied to any particular blockchain.
The second issue of the Decred Journal is out, covering all the community and development activity for the month of May.
Arthur from Liquidity.Network
This week’s main focus is the upcoming ICO, which will occur on Thu, 14 June at 14:00:00 GMT.
Development has been advancing very quickly for the mobile app that will provide real time metrics for both android and ios during the ico
Due to the high number of participation requests the KYC backend process was made smoother
We are also preparing the release of the protocol to ethereum mainnet
Arthur’s last podcast interview with Daily Crypto
Working on stablecoin support: MakerDAO and Swissdiamondcoin
Jutta from Parity Technologies
In an 18-hour sprint, we patched a consensus bug and released an updated Parity Ethereum client. Please update your Parity Ethereum clients to 1.11.3-beta or 1.10.6-stable asap.
ETHNews interviewed Gavin on Polkadot, a broken internet, and the future of crypto.
We're hiring! Check out our open positions or just send us a speculative application.
Evan on Ethereum
First beta release of Vyper
gnarly optimistic UI library is in alpha.
Loom Nework: Ethereum Will Be the Backbone of the New Internet
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
work on ZIP32 (HD shielded addresses)
progressed on privacy metrics and network monitoring tools
first draft of reworked user documentation is ready for community feedback
AMA next Friday
James from Vertcoin
May 2018 Montly Development Update
New optimised AMD miner testing benchmarks
Antonio from dYdX
We are live on testnet!
Open sourced protocol smart contracts
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Katherine from Messari
We have been fairly heads down as we expand our Agora Database and fine-tune its design. To date, our community analysts have published 40 project profiles and the data is being added to our Agora database every day. Check it the latest of our ever-growing data collection here.
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.
We will be in London for BAIConf 2018 next week and in Asia second half of this month (Seoul, Hong Kong, and Shanghai). Drop us a note if you are based there!
Zac from Stellar
The Stellar Monthly Roundup is out.
We’ve started monitoring long-term uptime for core nodes in the dashboard. Check it out here. [ed note: love this!]
Are you an open source developer working on an exciting Stellar project? We recently conducted spring (well, summer) cleaning on our Community Open-Source Project Directory, removing all inactive projects… and now the directory is feeling a bit empty. We’re looking to update the directory so if you are working on a project that you want others to know about, open a PR and we’ll add your project!
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
0.12.2.0 CLI tools is out
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
DDEX 2.0 Update on Main Network
Hydro co-founder Tian presented DDEX growth and Hydro Protocol plan along with Vitalik Buterin at Conference on Ethereum Technology and Application 2018
DDEX Native Mobile App Closed Beta
Zaki from Cosmos
The Cosmos Testnet Gaia-6001 completed our first distributed network launch. 15 validators from Europe, North America and Asia participated in the creation of the 1st block.
The Gaia-6001 promptly halted from errors in the staking/slashing logic that were being tested in this testnet. We will most likely launch Gaia-6002 as soon as complete root cause analysis and deploy a fix.
Larry & Ryan from Blockstack
Blockstack.js work: improved errors, auth api improvement
Additional testing and review of Stacks network
Prep for Droidcon, see you there?
Ryan from FOAM
Started Experimenting with IPFS Cluster to facilitate archival of POI metadata, to help ensure that it doesn't get lost when the original submitter goes offline and reduce the burden on non-technical end-users having to archive it themselves.
Released a Literature Review on Distributed Hardware Networks
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
We spent two days as a team deep diving into our high level strategy and mapping that to a Q3 roadmap. Highlights of the roadmap include: `dharma.js` sprint, documentation sprint, and more terms contracts
Started work on `dharma.js` sprint
Michael & Tom from Dfinity
DFINITY completed their airdrop this week.
35M Swiss Francs worth of DFINITY tokens were offered to over 320,000 people from the DFINITY and CoinList communities.
Ari from Decentraland
Last week, our dApps team completed all backend development for our voting dApp, Agora. This week they are working on the final front-end development.
We have also completed the frontend development and UI for Estates - a feature allowing users to group LAND parcels together for easier management. We've also completed designing an new API endpoint that will allow third-parties to fetch previews for parcels.
Last week, we launched an integration with imToken, allowing users to visit the Marketplace dApp from the imToken browser and wallet manager.
We are very excited to announce NIFTY, the first global NFT and Blockchain Gaming Conference & Hackathon, which we will be hosting in Hong Kong from July 24-25.
Tom from 0x
Merged EIP-712 for signing typed data!
Made decision to move back audits two weeks in order to spend more time testing internally
Generated first test coverage reports for our contracts using sol-cov, our open source Solidity test coverage tool
Started running CI tests against geth nodes
David from Sia
Latest Sia release features fully functional video streaming. A fuller update coming next week!