Proof of Work #28
Hi from Beijing; currently looking out my window at a sea of umbrellas and an absolutely torrential downpour. I’ll be here for a few weeks getting some projects we’re incubating set up.
My friends over at ZK-Capital wrote a little thing about a trend in Asian exchanges that might be useful for those of you who are wondering how a bunch of new exchanges suddenly popped up on the top 10. They got a few small things wrong about the mechanics but its 99% correct and explains an interesting phenomenon.
The project I’ve been posting cryptic things about for the past few weeks remains 99% ready to go. I’m going to stop talking about it until they just launch though, for all of our sanity. Stay tuned!
Kate and Dean from Agoric
Worked with Salesforce to do a careful line-by-line security review and revision of the Realms shim, which is our security kernel in modern JavaScript.
Led a workshop on secure smart contracts and object capabilities at Zcon0 [ed: worth reading this to get a better understanding of what these guys are up to]
Mitchell from Blockstack
Finished switching blockstack.js to a new fetch library, cross-fetch, which will make make the library work properly in newer non-browser environments. This gives developers a better experience and works towards our goal of happier developers.
Audited our package dependencies for known vulnerabilities and updated all packages that have known issues. This makes our platform and the apps built on it more secure.
Reviewed and merged a pull request that prevent a malicious hub from replaying authentication tokens on another hub opened by Aaron.
Reviewed and merged a pull request that enables proofs for Blockstack IDs whose usernames are subdomains opened by Will.
Deployed an emergency hotfix to Blockstack Core that prevented nodes from synchronizing under the load we were giving the system by transferring all Onename users over.
GAIA: Moonlighted a patch that allows users (via the CLI) to change which Gaia hub to use for a particular application
Coulter from MakerDAO
Announced a partnership with Tradeshift – the leader in Supply Chain payments & marketplaces – to unlock liquidity access for small businesses around the globe from the $9 trillion of capital trapped in outstanding receivables. We're also at Techcrunch Zug to discuss the partnership, along with a workshop led by CEO Rune Christensen on integrations for Dai.
We increased the debt ceiling! After seeing the largest amount of Dai created in the shortest amount of time in history, we reached 50 million Dai in circulation – the debt ceiling that was originally set to allow for stress-testing, steady growth, and stability. To address this, the new debt ceiling is 100 million Dai. #RaiseDaiRoof
Dai is now a quote currency on the HitBTC exchange, with a variety of pairs including BTC/DAI, ETH/DAI, NEO/DAI, XRP/DAI, and more. MKR is also offered for trading.
Created bounties for Hack Summit 2018 Virtual Blockchain Hackathon.
The second episode of our series around the Maker Foundation Proposal is live. A discussion dedicated to taking questions and comments from the community to help everyone better understand the proposal.
Phil from MARKET Protocol
Please welcome Travis Mathis to the MARKET Protocol team, the newest addition to our growing engineering staff. We are still looking for more awesome devs.
UI/UX work our dApp has begun - check out some of the initial mocks here
Integration of MARKET.js into our dApp continued with work on depositing of ERC20 collateral tokens for trading.
JZ from Decred
Marco announced that we’re gearing up to begin testing Politeia (Pi) on mainnet.
Those interested in playing around with Pi on testnet can still do so on the staging site.
Matheus has been making quick work of Decrediton Trezor support and gave us a sneak peek this week.His proof of concept code can be found here.
Josh is almost finished with SPV support which will be landing in our next release.
The June issue of the “Decred Journal” was released, as usual, it provides a digest of all the developments that have taken place in the Decred community over the past month.
Arthur from Liquidity.Network
The Liquidity Wallet app has shown to be stable on mainnet, supporting user’s transactions. This week’s focus was on reviewing the security, improving stability and fixing bugs. We are also setting up a faucet where everyone can get a small amount of wei for free.
For Achievement. Network, we have added two new tutorials to the platform - one on function calls and one on security. The latest is part of a new series of advanced exercises and it has been allowed by the improvement of the underlying testing framework. We have received good initial feedback from users and welcome continued engagement from the community.
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Zcash v1.1.2 released, upcoming ecosystem dev support desk, new community rocket chat channels for engineering teams, continued progress on pairing library refactor, and more information here.
Jutta from Parity Technologies
Gavin released a preview of Polkadot PoC-2 telemetry "netstats" network information service.
Dmitriy Kashitsyn wrote an overview on why we use Rust.
At the Europas, Polkadot won "Hottest Blockchain Protocol" and the blockchain-based system we built with the World Food Program won "Hottest Blockchain for Good."
Maciej Hirsz presented UX considerations of the Parity Signer at DAPPS Adoption Paralelní Polis 2018.
Jutta discussed the future of blockchain being many chains working together at TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain.
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Wasabi, a privacy focused wallet [ed note: this is really cool. it seems possible that Bitcoin will keep integrating a bunch of different layered privacy features until BTC transactions are “reasonably private” while they wait for ZKPs to be a little more well-understood]
Ari from Decentraland
We shipped the first version of Agora, our dApp for enabling districts and the community to vote on governance issues.
We released version 0.11.0 of the Marketplace, which has improved stability and allows you to clear your Activity History, and version 4.0.2 of the client API, which fixes issues related to rotation, transparency and comms.
We’re also working on improvements to avatars and the user’s profiles, providing better sample scenes, and in improving the CLI’s UX to help new developers ramp up.
Demi from Zeppelin
Drafting a guide to help a few large Ethereum projects fix or add new functionalities to their already deployed smart contracts using ZeppelinOS, without having to re-deploy new instances.
Created changelogs for zos-lib and zos-cli for users to keep track of new developments by core team and community of contributors
Lots of work in improving ZEP token mechanics -- one of our core devs working on this from Full Node in Berlin
Lots of work in improving the developer experience for ZeppelinOS' CLI
By working on ZeppelinOS, we've been thinking a lot about the dilemma between blockchains immutability and smart contract upgradeability. Shared our thoughts here. [ed: worth a read, one of the Big Problems in crypto]
Doug from Livepeer
Landed the code for "partial unbonding", which enables token holders who have staked in the DPoS protocol to withdraw a portion of their earned token rewards without having to unbond their entire stake and forgo future token. This will enable community run nodes to distribute token to the community and transcoders to better cover their operating costs.
Addressed the recent Ethereum gas price hikes and their effects on on-chain protocols such as Livepeer.
The Ethereum Client Developers Conference and Ethereum Sharding Meeting were streamed through Livepeer's network.
Evan on Ethereum
Scalability: Loom Network releases Plasma Cash code for NFTs. Github
Solidity Gas Golfing contest results. Greg Hysen’s winning code.
Karl Floersch has 6 more lectures out on cryptoeconomics.study
Ryan from FOAM
We are now supporting over 20 independent FOAM communities globally, with many upcoming planned meetups and events. In addition, this week we interviewed three local community leaders to find out what motivates them.
Hosted the 4th FOAM Community Call with guest Harrison Hines of Token Foundry to discuss 'Proof of Use' and the main net launch.
Have begun our third-party audit for the FOAM main net launch with plans to publish by the end of the month.
Launched a new Token Page on our website
Continued improvements to our map search system
Antonio from dYdX
Completed shared lending contract implementation. This contract makes lending as simple as sending a token
Building asynchronous transaction/task processing service
Interviewed several design and engineering candidates
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
DDEX added support for Chinese and Korean as landing page languages.
DDEX partners with Blockchain game HyperDragons to support in-game decentralized transactions.
Hydro COO Bowen gave a speech at the panel of “Can EOS replace Ethereum ?”on TechCrunch China Summit.
James from Vertcoin
Vertcoin June Developer update.
One-Click-Miner with Vertcoin AMD miner support released.
Zac from Stellar
No update
Robert from Compound
Completed Liquidate function testing; merged into master. The core Compound Protocol is finally code complete (subject to external auditing)
Completed the design and specification for the Oracle Protocol, with features for securing against invalid data or malicious attacks. Ready to break ground on formal verification and implementation
Updated dApp web interface to work with the protocol on multiple networks (e.g. to adapt to Rinkeby or to Main-net deploys without reloading the app); identified problem parsing nested Structs returned from the MoneyMarket observed in multiple web3 parsing libraries and implemented workaround
Interviewed several engineering candidates; we're hiring!
calvin@compound.finance began signing hedge fund & liquidity partners to the Compound partner program; public announcement of the program will follow in the coming weeks
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
The 0.12.2.0 GUI is released! This is not a hard fork, so an upgrade is not required, but it solves a lot of bugs, especially for Linux users!
Zaki from Cosmos
The Cosmos Team is hard at work on the Gaia-7000 testnet which is delayed a bit to resolve some bugs reported in prior testnets.
Work continues to prepare for the Game of Steaks competitive testnet
Michael & Tom from Dfinity
No update
Tom from 0x
Removed web3.js from 0x-monorepo
0x forwarding contract for WETH and allowance abstraction has been merged! Now being audited
David from Sia
2 Nebulous repo were updated. 5 issues were created, 7 were closed. 8 PRs were merged. GitHub users jkawamoto, eddiewang, MSevey, ChrisSchinnerl, DavidVorick and lukechampine had code contributions into Sia.
eddiewang keeps working on improving the UI of Sia, applying fixes to the estimated displayed costs when a renter is forming an allowance and performing the initial overhaul of the whole UI. This first phase of the overhaul was focused on adapting the visual style to the new Sia branding guidelines introduced on January, and on facilitating future improvements (by enabling React hot loader and Electron css reload). Some screenshots of the result are included on the PR link.
MSevey added the new API endpoint /renter/downloads/clear to allow removing downloads from the download history, either the whole history or just specific downloads or time periods.
DavidVorick worked on optimizations to file downloading, including the removal of an unnecessary 1 second delay and new error handling functions.
A new version 1.3.4, focused on improvements for renters, is expected to be released for testing by contributors in the next two weeks, approximately. It will be followed by 1.4 where file backups will be introduced, among other features.