Proof of Work #29
Hi from Beijing!
This issue of Proof of Work is a double issue with the last weeks updates, because I had issues getting through the ever-wilier Great Firewall of China to access our updates. Thanks to a new VPN setup, it should be smooth sailing from here on out.
As in America, there is an incredible proliferation of crypto-focused funds and other investment vehicles aiming to put money into promising crypto projects. The ecosystem ranges from tiny “funds” put together by amateur investors who made fortunes on early investments in Ethereum or Bitcoin all the way up to the most prestigious Chinese VC’s, and the amount of money looking to enter the primary market seems to be increasing. While China continues to lag the US in terms of protocol-level work, there is a lot of interesting work being done in gaming. Although they remain anonymous, there are some clues that lead me to think the creators of the incredibly viral Fomo3D game are from the Mainland or Taiwan, and lots of other interesting stuff in that vertical is currently being worked on.
China also continues to lead the world when it comes to exchanges—both in terms of volume, which is consistently in the top 10, but also in terms of innovative new models, including white-labeling exchange software for shared liquidity franchising, and the “exchange mining” model pioneered by Fcoin I mentioned in the last PoW.
Phil from MARKET Protocol
Extended our simplified contract deployer to support pairs from Bitfinex
Added support for order signing in our dApp
Rolled out our new blog and announced our partnership with Kleros
Jutta from Parity Technologies
New article about what Substrate is and how it makes building state machines easy.
We updated Polkadot by enabling telemetry/netstates by default for public chains, and added block propagation times and average block times. Check out the Polkadot testnet stats here.
Wrapping up work on adding parachains to Polkadot, a critical part of our upcoming PoC-2 release.
Implemented trie-db into the Polkadot Node.js client, finally getting rid of the in-memory-only-with-triehash implementation.
Worked on adding external functions to Parity Substrate runtime that allows to clear all storage entries that share a common prefix. It is crucial feature to smart-contracts: if smart-contract deleted we need to clean all of its storage.
Jutta and Jack Fransham presented at Hack Summit. Jack presented on how to develop with Substrate. Recording here.
The recording from Jutta's presentation on Polkadot at TechCrunch is out.
JZ from Decred
The switch has been flipped and we’re now testing Politeia, our blockchain anchored and git based proposal system on the Decred mainnet. Once we’ve ironed out the last few bugs we’ll reset it and enable the nominal fee paywall (spam prevention). People will then be able to begin submitting censorship-proof funding requests to the Decred stakeholders. See it in action here
Lots of commits to various repos this week including 10 to politeiagui, 4 to dcrwallet, 7 to decrediton, and 6 to dcrdata which has almost completed reimplementing Insight API in Golang.
If you’re attending Korea Blockchain Week from July 16-20 be on the lookout for Joshua Buirski as he’ll be representing us and hosting a Decred dinner. You can reach him on Twitter or Slack.
Ari from Decentraland
Our team released version 0.11.4 of the Marketplace, improving the API and monitoring
We are in the process of converting Estates into an ERC721, with composable properties.
We’re also working on adding security, ownership, and content validations to the CLI when new projects are initiated.
In the Client, we’re currently adding the default UI and player communications elements. The team is also extending the Ethereum API to sign messages and fetch data from smart contracts.
Doug from Livepeer
After a slowdown due to Ethereum gas market price hikes last week, staking in Livepeer's DPoS protocol saw a 20% increase this week.
For miners and those comfortable scripting Ethereum transactions, there's a liquidity unlocking milestone in the Livepeer MerkleMine token distribution coming up, beginning on July 26th. Read more to about how to generate LPT here.
Ryan from FOAM
Ongoing user experience and back end optimization tooling and upgrades of the FOAM Map.
Continuing work and fixes on out main net audit, led by SoHo Token Labs.
Participated in the virtual blockchain hack.summit, with Kristoffer Josefsson, Co-Founder and CTO of FOAM, presenting the talk “Applying the Functional web3 Stack to dApp Development”
Mapbox, one of the largest supplier of digital maps, highlighted the Spatial Index Visualizer API and the possibilities of combining Mapbox developer tools with the FOAM blockchain stack.
Sam from OpenBazaar
Cryptocurrency listings price modifiers (markups or discounts) are being wrapped up now.
We'll be updating to Electron 2.0 in the next client release so we've been testing the update, along with adding in some enhancements to the opt-in analytics.
Preliminary work on the buyer-only version of the web client continues.
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Blog - What's new in Sapling [ed note: Sapling coming to Zcash is one of the most exciting things happening in the space right now—worth a read]
Zcash Meetup support and sponsorship brainstorming (get in touch if you're interested in starting one! )
Zcon0 recap from the Foundation
two new agile teams including one working on building a reference mobile wallet;
heavy engineering focus on Sapling support in wallet functionality; prepping for Sapling dev outreach
Evan on Ethereum
Ben Edgington’s slides on the path to Ethereum 2.0
Justin Drake’s latest sharding slides
Zero knowledge identity and signaling on top of Miximus, from BarryWhitehat
Notes from the second sharding meetup
Vitalik’s IC3 sharding slides
Videos: getting started with SWARM poc3 (4 video series)
Ethereum on ARM. (Armbian image for NanoPc-T4)
Coulter from MakerDAO
Released Part One of a series of blogs on the governance risk framework of Maker, which will be critical to Maker's success moving forward. We also held our first of many episodes to discuss the post and answer questions from the community. Moving forward, we encourage the community to read these blogs and join our discussions!
Based on our Maker Foundation Proposal, we held the third meeting with CEO Rune Christensen to discuss it in-depth.
Antonio from dYdX
Started security audits on shared lender smart contract. Audits on the Margin Trading Protocol are nearing completion.
Signed a lease on our first full office in SF
Building user facing applications to help traders use Margin Tokens
Released a technical blog post on smart contract upgradability
Moved into a new office in Jackson Square
Our new software engineer, Phillip, started this week
Working with a researcher, Will, on future protocol designs
We're hiring a full-time recruiter/office manager in SF!
Mitchell from Blockstack
No update
Kate and Dean from Agoric
Announced that Agoric has officially joined TC39, the JavaScript standards working group.
Filed all issues from the Realms shim security review for reconciliation with the proposed specification.
Diego and Riccardo for Monero
CLI v0.12.3.0 released. More bug fixes. A big one that prevented people from sending transactions was fixed. Upgrade is advised for everyone.
Arthur from Liquidity.Network
We are happy to launch Liquidity.Canvas - a little side quest to show off our wallet. On Liquidity.Canvas everyone can paint pixels for 1 wei a piece using our mainnet wallet. We encourage the community to be creative and try it out!
Last week’s tutorials added to Achievement.Network are on payment in solidity and on function modifiers, and this week is Structure types and Spacecrypt Factory exercises! We aim at publishing new exercise every week so stay tuned!
Two weeks after the Mainnet Web Wallet, we released the Mainnet Mobile App for Google Playstore. We have created a short tutorial to guide the users through the installation and to demonstrate how easy the setup is. This week some bugs were fixed and a currency selector was added. It is now possible to pay on Canvas.Liquidity.Network with the Liquidity app through a simple scan.
James from Vertcoin
NextMiner project host code made public. Nextminer was part of the original effort to develop a new AMD miner for Vertcoin and consists of the new host code created as part of that effort.
OCM-go, a rewrite and simplification of our origin One-Click Miner in Go released its first version
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
Hydro Protocol(HOT)listed on Bitfinex and Ethfinex.
DDEX Mobile APP is in the second round of UX and feature sets upgrades. (so far, we’ve done 117 beta releases. )
Hydro Protocol BD Cory will be on Beyond Blocks Seoul Summit 2018
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
We released Part 3 of our Lending dApp tutorial series. Each part of this series highlights a different aspect of our new `dharma.js` developer API. In Part 3, we focus on collateralization of loans. Part 1 focused on creating a loan request. Part 2 focused on filling a loan request.
Added methods to `dharma.js` to streamline loan repayment, reclaiming of collateral, and seizing of collateral
Specced out engineering work for fungible bond issuances, which enable debt issuances with one borrower and multiple lenders (example use cases: crowdfunding, corporate bonds, venture debt)
Implemented MVP of crowdfunding through Dharma using an ERC-20 token that represents a bond
Updated our documentation to give developers a digestible understanding of the protocol and API
Zac from Stellar
We published "How and Why to Complete Your Stellar.toml file" to help token issuers ensure their assets see success. The stellar.toml file helps verify that assets are real and can be trusted. It's also an important step to getting your assets listed on many of the applications utilizing Stellar. Read the full guide here.
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Robert from Compound
Began work on the Oracle Protocol; implemented the first smart contract, and are in the process of validating gas costs. Began invariant testing with a research team. Built a proof of concept of a price setting system, a self-contained TypeScript application which pulls exchange data and posts it to the price oracle.
Updated dApp web interface with “Max” functions for each protocol action, Supply, Withdraw, Borrow and Repay Borrow.
Extended offer to an engineering candidate, which was unfortunately declined :(
Signed agreements with six new hedge funds and liquidity providers through the Fund Partner program
Zaki from Cosmos
Gaia-7001 Successfully launched. Largest Public BFT network ever, with 122 active validators on the network. The testnet participants used the new governance feature to vote on how to mitigate a bug in inflation calculation that is negatively affecting synchronization.
We finally published a formal write up of Tendermint Consensus with proofs. The algorithm is substantially the same as Jae's original 2014 white paper and Ethan's masters thesis but more precisely specified.
David from Sia
The most notable development news was the migration of the Nebulous code repositories from GitHub to GitLab. ChrisSchinnerl performed many migration tasks including changing import paths and integrating the GitLab CI tool that simplifies developers workflow (in replacement of GitHub’s, that were recently problematic) here.
ChrisSchinnerl also improved the way download speeds are reported: human-readable units, instant speeds instead of whole-file averages and more frequent updates here.
DavidVorick, as part of the renter’s reporting overhaul, changed and cleared up the formatting of the siac renter and siac renter contracts commands here.
MSevey added a way to link the new and the old file contract after a renewal, by adding the new fields RenewedFromContractID and RenewedToContractID here. This change allowed DavidVorick to perform further optimizations on how renter’s funds are spent, as the renter can now map the history of contracts with a specific host and take better spending decisions here.
Katherine from Messari
Big week at Messari! We acquired OnChainFx, a leading crypto data provider that powers the Bloomberg-Galaxy index and has pioneered fundamentals metrics like the Y2050 supply, a proxy for inflation-adjusted market cap.
We launched a new website with a content curation service, which we hope will help industry power users stay abreast of the most important developments across the industry. These content and data products further complement the work our community has done to crowdsource cryptoasset research.
We hired another full-stack engineer—welcome, Jonathan! Our team is now majority engineers.
We are growing our community of contributors (up to 112 now!), and opened up our second round of beta access to new contributors who are interested in joining our professional community.
On the hiring front: we’re looking for a designer, research analysts, and blockchain engineers.