Proof of Work #30
Hi from Beijing! This is my last full day in what remains, despite several “crypto bans” the crypto capital of Asia. While crypto penetration is still extremely low (single digit percentages), awareness among the elite has grown massively since I was last here—at one point I was cornered in an elevator by a drunk young guy in a suit who asked what I did, and when I said I was an investor looked excited and asked “HAVE YOU HEARD OF BITCOIN?”
Speaking of Bitcoin, Nic Carter and Hasufly wrote up an awesome post about the different ways that people have perceived BTC over the years, and StopAndDecrypt also has a nice piece about the real topology of the Lightning network.
A lot of uncertainty remains in China about how the regulatory landscape will shape up, but each of the big Chinese exchanges have hundreds of employees and giant corporate campuses in Beijing, so it appears that at least for now the government is regulating with a gentle touch. I fully expect there to be a few more “China bans bitcoin” moments but in the long term I think there will be a future for legally accepted crypto here. More next week, thanks for reading!
Evan from Ethereum
Shasper chain, v2.1
VDFs are not Proof of Work by Danny Ryan. Verifiable Delay Functions have some properties - requiring significant computation to calculate but relatively little computation to verify - that is suitable for strengthening RANDAO-based RNG. That sounds like proof of work, but Danny explains the difference between VDFs and PoW.
STARKs, Part 3: Into the Weeds by Vitalik Buterin: In Vitalik’s STARKs series part 3, he introduced how to actually implement a STARK with vivid explication.
LearnPlasma is quickly coming together as a Plasma education resource
Jimmy from Bitcoin
Zaki from Cosmos
We've been fighting our way through issues found in the gaia-7000 testnet series with major bugs found both by the testnet community and our Hacker One bug bounty program.
Gaia-7003 launched https://forum.cosmos.network/t/launching-gaia-7003/607/7
Monitor the progress of gaia-7003 on https://explorecosmos.network/, https://figment.network/cosmos/hubble/gaia-7003 and https://status.certus.one/
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
Robert Habermeier deployed the first Polkadot parachain.
CoinTelegraph interviewed Jutta on Web 3.0 and interoperability
New step-by-step tutorial on enabling smart contracts to manage secrets with Parity Ethereum's Secret Store.
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
The 0.12.3.0 GUI has been released with native ledger support. It is encouraged for everyone to upgrade, as this fixes a previous issue with the wallet that misreports the amount of Monero received in a transaction. Ledger has moved the Monero app from the developer section to the live section. Monero is not yet on Ledger Live.
Doug from Livepeer
The open claim period began on Thursday, July 26th, allowing anyone to be able to generate Livepeer Token to stake on the network. Generate yours here.
Work kicked off on video transcoding verification for non-deterministic GPU based transcoding. The goal is to enable GPU crypto miners to use the idle video encoding chips on their cards to encode video on the Livepeer network, while still verifying that the work is done correctly.
There is a proposal open to increase the number of active transcode nodes in the Livepeer network this week - the first small step on the road to greater decentralization.
James from Vertcoin
Electrum-VTC v3.2.2-rc2 released (there was no rc1 due to an error in the build process): https://github.com/vertcoin-project/electrum-vtc/releases/tag/3.2.2-rc2
David from Sia
eddiewang initiated an architectural redesign of the UI aimed to increase the security of the wallet. Currently each UI plugin can access both Sia’s API and the file system of the computer. Once completed, the MainView component of the UI will authorize or deny the access of each plugin according to the permissions granted by the user. The first half of the project, consisting on the React implementation on the MainView is now completed.
ChrisSchinnerl kept working on the new .sia file format, that will be one of the key features of the future version 1.4.0.
The external contributor wincss corrected a bug manifested when Sia reads persistent objects (.json files) with a manual checksum.
The Release Candidate 2 of the next version 1.3.4 was published for testing by contributors. It includes improvements related to the allowance formation by renters among other items. This RC should be very similar to the final general release, expected very soon.
JZ from Decred
SPV support has been completed and will be available in the next dcrwallet and Decrediton releases. https://github.com/decred/dcrwallet/issues/1000
Trezor integration for Decrediton is also coming along nicely. https://github.com/decred/decrediton/issues/1491
We’re currently still testing Politeia (https://github.com/decred/politeia) on mainnet and adding one final feature (proposal editing) before it will be ready for prime time. Testing is welcome. https://proposals.decred.org/
Ari from Decentraland
The hackathon at NIFTY was a great success! We saw lots of creative uses for NFTs and the Decentraland SDK.
Also at NIFTY, we released the Decentraland Client Alpha: if you’re a developer, send us an email at genesis@decentraland.org to request early access!
We’ve recently released version 4.0.4 of the SDK, fixing several bugs and adding secure support for Web3 using eth-connect, our TypeScript replacement for web3.js.
The team also deployed a Ropsten version of the Estates smart contract for managing groups of LANDs.
We’re also testing the Mortgage feature with power users, and have begun work on the Ropsten MANA faucet for developers.
Ryan from FOAM
Announced Technology Partnership with Status wallet that will explore the use of FOAM for integrating geospatial functionality in the Status mobile Ethereum OS.
Released an overview and statistics about our token sale standards and the registration process.
Released a new video explaining dynamic Proof of Location
Released a new FOAM FAQ
Final implementations based off our audit by SoHo Token Labs
Ongoing back end, front end and user experience optimization for our main net launch
Antonio from dYdX
Heads down building. Anticipating a mainnet beta launch of our Margin Trading Protocol in mid September
Added support for multiple signature types, including Trezor
Work trialing and interviewing several candidates for engineering, product, and design roles
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
QuickLine [https://quickline.market/], a Dharma debt relayer, launched on mainnet. QuickLine was built by AMP, the same group that built EasyCDP [https://easycdp.com/]. QuickLine introduces the notion of a creditor-driven open loan offer, which enables lenders to specify parameters for loans that they accept and post these loan offers to an open order book. This enables 1-click borrowing, as borrowers tap right into an open line of credit.
Volume Milestone: We hit 115,000 USD in cumulative lending volume!
Finished work on a fungible bond issuance contract. If you are interested in conducting a bond issuance on Ethereum (e.g., venture debt or crowdfunding), we'd love your feedback. Contact Brendan (brendan-at-dharma-dot-io) and let's chat.
Putting the finishing touches on a huge new suite of developer tools #LetsGetReadyToRelay
Getting ready for our trip to Asia. From 5 Aug to 19 Aug, we'll be traveling to Beijing, Bangalore, Hong Kong, and Seoul. If you live in one of these cities and want to meet our team, join our chat [t.me/dharmalabs] and shoot Brendan a note.
Sam from OpenBazaar
OpenBazaar version 2.2.2 was released. This new version makes two substantial improvements to the cryptocurrency trading feature:
1. You can add percentage markups or discounts to the market price
2. We've increased the number of cryptocurrencies to trade from ~60 to over 1,500 by integrating the CoinMarketCap API.
Demi from Zeppelin
ZeppelinOS team in Berlin for DappCon. We've participated in two talks and a panel, and had a lot of fun meeting with the European community!
Working on the second deliverable of the Solidity Compiler Audit with the Ethereum Foundation.
Wrote a guide on upgradeability governance in ZeppelinOS with a Gnosis MultiSig.
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
We launched new reduced fee structure:0.05% trading fee for all users and 0.01 trading fee for HOT(Hydro Protocol Tokens)holders.
We announced bug bounty program: $100~$10,000 USD equivalent rewards for a white hat hackers.
Hydro Relayer— Delta Relay is the second functional DEX on Hydro Protocol.
Katherine from Messari
Since the announcement of Messari’s acquisition of Onchain FX and website relaunch (messari.io), we have been working on incorporating early feedback. Still open to any suggestions and would appreciate comments here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegi9t4rbgiUOKShcWe2ngmpBqUi0Cs0I7emLgdtnR2wggUCQ/viewform
Help us grow our open source library! Applications are open to join over 100 other community members focused on bringing transparency to the cryptoasset space. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DxH-QgSn57BzGC_qAsIElF5UJGg_b10jplqbRs798fQ/edit
On the hiring front: we’re hiring for a designer, research analysts, and blockchain engineers. https://angel.co/messari/jobs
Janine from Liquidity.Network
This week’s focus was mainly on improvement of the Liquidity App. We’ve been in contact with our community on reporting bugs and UI considerations. We are happy to receive any feedback at https://t.me/liquiditynetwork/
The new exercies on Achievement.Network are about Mapping and Enum and can be found under https://achievement.network/
This week we are launching our first Community Campaign. It will require the download of the app and some creativity :) The announcement will be made via Twitter and Telegram, stay tuned!
Coulter from MakerDAO
Posted a blog detailing plans to increase the Dai Stability Fee. The post goes into detail about why this is being done and how it affects Dai in the near- and long-term.
Announced an integration with bZx, a margin lending protocol, that will integrate Dai into their platform, as well as a partnership with Swarm Fund.
MakerDAO President Matt Richards spoke at DappCon in Berlin on what's to come from Maker. The video of the talk can be viewed here.
Phil from MARKET Protocol
We released a large set of features in MARKET.js this week which (release notes here) that we plan on integrating into our dApp over the course of the next week.
Rolled out our new project planning board using ZenHub (available to anyone with a GitHub login here) that will help new contributors find tasks to pick up as well as organize our growing team
As announced previously our dev team has grown! - check out the medium article about our new hires here
Here are some demos from our Engineering Weekly call (also open to the public to join).
Robert from Compound
Completed the Oracle Protocol smart contract, and validated gas costs. All protocol Solidity is now code-complete, pending audit
Began security audit process with Trail of Bits. First read-out uncovered some interesting areas to continue further research into
Finished requirement gathering and architecture design for Instrumentation layer on top of the protocol. Two systems will be built: (1) User Risk, and (2) Market History, which will be public APIs
Began updating Liquidate in dApp web interface using the latest MoneyMarket
Selected final list of hedge funds and liquidity providers through the Fund Partner program, which will be announced in the next week
Kate and Dean from Agoric
We announced the release of SES, a secure subset of JavaScript. SES enables untrusted JavaScript programs to execute in the same environment safely.
To showcase SES’s ability, we’ve released the SES Challenge. A random code is generated, and we invite you to put SES to the test with various attacks and guess the code! Any security-sensitive issues can be reported using our vulnerability disclosure process.
At the TC39 meeting, Mark Miller of Agoric presented on the results of the Realms shim security review. Realms is a standards track proposal for JavaScript that SES builds on.
Brian Warner of Agoric will be speaking at the Decentralized Web Summit. Hope to see you there!