Proof of Work #25

Hi from Boston! A few quick notes:

1. I skipped a few projects from this issue whose updates were largely promotional. I intend to be a bit of a nazi about this, because the only thing that keeps this worth reading is the brevity and pithiness of the updates—if we allow promotion, this just becomes any other crypto newsletter. Those projects will be back next week with substantive updates!

2. I’ve been advising that we largely pass on presales and early rounds, and focus instead on incubating and secondary market trading. This is painful for me because I love early investing and think I’m pretty decent at it, but the current valuations on the early market are often 200 million+ pre product, which limits upside too much for us. The projects asking for these numbers seem to think that if they can get it, they should, but they are missing a huge cost: the complete lack of investors and supporters with a low basis. If the cheapest anyone got involved with your project is 200 million dollars, then you simply cannot have a community similar to that of Bitcoin, where there is a mass of HODLers who got in at a very low price and are almost completely unperturbed by subsequent price volatility.

3. Work continues on a Proof of Work website that will aggregate these updates in a slightly more permanent fashion, along with some extra info about each project. Ultra excited to share that with everyone as soon as possible, and may be hiring for a few more roles there soon…

Ari from Decentraland

• We announced Decentraland as a host for the NIFTY conference and hackathon, the first global event around NFTs and blockchain gaming, in Hong Kong, July 24-26. Early bird tickets are now on sale!

• Our team contributed a PR Microsoft's Babylon.js game engine, adding support for positional audio in 3D scenes, and made improvements to our CLI, developer preview client, and docs. 

• Released version 0.9.0 of the Marketplace, adding performance improvements, better node stability, and an improved map API.

• Finished an early version of the frontend for Agora, our off-chain voting dApp, and we are performing security audits on our latest version of the LAND contract.

• Finally, we have achieved 100% test coverage for Estates (groups of LAND parcels), which will be launched soon.

Coulter from MakerDAO

• Followed up with Part Two our three-part blog series on stablecoins. After the introductory post last week, this update gives a primer on Dai, it's functionality, potential use cases, and shares what users should know about the first decentralized stablecoin. 

Doug from Livepeer

• Livepeer Protocol Economics Update (6/11/2018). Since the post, some of the predictions has already come true, showing the power of real-world cryptoeconomics.

• Livepeer presented at the New York Video Tech Meetup. Video will be posted soon.

• Livepeer is hosting the next community call on 6/21, 12pm EST (via hangout).

• Livepeer hiring a javascript engineer and a video engineer.

JZ from Decred

• Lots of dev activity across many of our repos this week including 23 PRs for dcrd, 3 for dcrwallet, 6 for politeia, and 5 for dcrdata. 

• Also a busy week for exchange listings as Decred was added to Huobi Pro (BTC and ETH pairs), OKEx (BTC, ETH, and USDT pairs), and DragonEx (ETH pair)

• BlueYard Capital published their Decred investment thesis this week. The team cites Decred’s governance, transparency, and sustainable funding model as core differentiators that set the project apart.

• Chris Burniske of Placeholder joined Decred Assembly’s Trace Trebilco for a wide-ranging interview on Decred and the broader cryptocurrency space.

Phil from MARKET Protocol 

• Began work on new automated market making bot for our upcoming trading simulation

• Finished up work on our new jobs page and blog to appear at https://marketprotocol.io/ next week.

• Continued work on MARKET.js and our dApp

Jutta from Parity Technologies

• New article on how Polkadot tackles interoperability, scalability, speed, security
  privacy, developability, and governance.

• We're enjoying seeing people experiment with Polkadot PoC-1. 

• Lee Azzarello from Quantstamp reviewed our demo PoA tutorial.

• We're hiring! Check out our open positions or just send us a speculative application.

David from Sia

• 3 Nebulous repo were updated.  5 issues were created, 13 were closed.  14 PRs were merged

• GitHub users MSevey, ChrisSchinnerl, eddiewang, lukechampine and DavidVorick had code contributions into Sia.

• A bug that was preventing the UI from showing the transaction history in the recently released version 1.3.3 has been corrected by eddiewang and a hotfix was applied. Users with this problem just need to download and install the fixed 1.3.3 version from sia.tech to solve it. If you are still using an older version of Sia, be sure to update! 

• MSevey added the optional async flag to the renter download API to facilitate queueing downloads.

• DavidVorick restricted the connectivity to reject peers using the outdated Sia version 1.3.0 or bellow. While incompatible with the blockchain since the hardfork of January, these outdated wallets could provoke in current clients an excessive network traffic while they attempt to share blocks with them.

• eddiewang joined this week the Nebulous team as a UX designer. He has started to redesign the UI of Sia right away, and so far, has merged 3 PRs updating graphical assests. Congratulations, we are all looking forward to see the final result!

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

• Last chance for Zcon0 participation. Check out the schedule and send an application if you'd like to join us.

• Reminder about Overwinter activation scheduled forJune 25th. If you're running a Zcash node on version 1.1.0 or later then you're good to go. If you're running a Sprout version still (1.0.x) then you'll want to update before then (preferably ASAP). Download the latest client and check out our new user guide.

Demi from Zeppelin

• Incorporating all community feedback on ZeppelinOS (issues here and here). Planning our second release. 

• OpenZeppelin reached issue #1000 and 132 contributors in Github

• Lots of progress on the Solidity compiler audit commissioned by the Ethereum Foundation

• We're looking for someone to lead our amazing global Zeppelin community full-time. If you love what we do and have great communication skills apply here!

Sam from OpenBazaar

• Substantial work has been completed this week on the server and client repos to allow users to send and receive multiple coins within the OpenBazaar client instead of being limited to using one at a time. 

• Ethereum integration for payments has begun, and work has started on the smart contract needed for Ethereum escrow payments.

Zaki from Cosmos

• Gaia -6002 testnet is kicking. 

• Epic postmortem on gaia-6001. 

• Beginning planning for Starfish phase of launch where we collect bonding transactions to bond community validators at genesis

• Expect Gaia-7000 series to start when governance lands. 

Jimmy on Bitcoin

• 0.16.1 Release

• PR for Hybrid SPV mode

• Pieter's Thoughts on BIP174

Antonio from dYdX

• Working with relay and exchange partners to list dYdX Margin Tokens

• Work trialing a software engineering candidate

• Hiring for multiple design and engineering roles

Diego and Riccardo for Monero

• No update.

Zac from Stellar

• Nicolas Barry is asking for feedback and answering questions related to a proposed change to SDEX: 

• Stellar Build Challenge 7 is accepting submissions

• We're hiring.

Brendan and Nadav from Dharma

• In the first week of our API sprint, we added a new layer (currently in beta) to the `dharma.js` API, adding new functions for generating, filling, and making payments on basic debt orders. This dramatically lowers the technical barriers to getting started with Dharma. 

• Created `dharma.js` fiddle to help developers familiarize themselves with the new API functions in `dharma.js`

• The first Dharma debt relayer, bloqboard.com launched in public beta on Mainnet

James from Vertcoin

• Vertwallet iOS app re-submitted to Apple after reported policy change on "approved currencies". However, it appears in reality the policy has not changed. Once again we will appeal Apple's decision.

• Newly optimised Lyra2REv2 AMD miner code acquired from bounty claimant. Public code release and open beta coming in the next week or so.

Tom from 0x

• Published Mission and Values post.

• Formal V2 spec draft is up.

• Angel0x launched.

Michael & Tom from Dfinity

• No update.

Evan on Ethereum

• Counterfactual: generalized state channels. Academic paper. Also Jeff Coleman Reddit comment on the history and progress of state channels. The rest of that Reddit thread is worth reading as well.

• Justin Drake: “we are considering changing the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap to skip Casper FFG with 1500 ETH deposits. Instead Casper and sharding validators would be unified from the get-go in the beacon chain, and deposits would be 32 ETH.” Two less technical Reddit threads worth reading: one and two.

• Karen Scarbrough's guide to generalized state channels for developers. And part 2.

Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io

• DDEX New Landing Page.

• Hydro Portfolio Manager Bo will be in Switzerland | 2018 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology.

• Hydro COO Bowen will be in Seoul  | Blockchain Open Forum-June 28–29,2018

Ryan from FOAM

• Published Research on Exploring Ethereum On-Chain Storage Costs for TCR Metadata with the FOAM Web3 Dev Tools. We used all the components of our Web3 stack to rapidly iterate on some visualizations of how gas costs scale with the size of the data being stored on the chain.