Proof of Work #33
Aloha from sunny Oahu, and the thirty-third week of this newsletter.
Last week I mentioned that the first exchange for Handshake domains, namebase.io had developed an open-source chrome extension that allows you to resolve handshake domains right now. This week they have entered private beta for the main exchange, so if you would like to help squash bugs and be among the first people to register decentralized domain names on the Handshake blockchain, you can email tieshun at namebase.io and ask to get a beta invite.
I’m putting together a small overview of the OTC bitcoin scene in China, which will hopefully run in the next issue. It’s a fascinating world of giant deals being executed on via immature infrastructure, and its a pretty opaque part of the scene. More on that next week!
Other
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
DDEX Mobile APP started 2nd round of rapid user testing, DDEX Usability Questionnaire available here
Hydro partnered with SECBIT Labs for code review and smart contract auditing.
Team will be in ETHIS 9/8 in Hongkong to reveal Mobile DDEX and Hydro Widget!
Ari from Decentraland
Last week, we migrated our development and production environments for the Marketplace to a new infrastructure to increase up-time and stability. We’ve also addressed some UI bugs, and deployed the Japanese translation of the Marketplace.We’ve completed the UX testing of Mortgages, and have finished the Estates transfer implementation. We’re now adding the ability to buy/sell Estates.
This week, we’re standardizing the ERC721 LAND smart contract by updating the events and function calls.
Sam from OpenBazaar
OpenBazaar version 2.2.4 was released. This was a bugfix release to fix a few issues with wallet syncing and a bug in the chat interface.
Demi from Zeppelin
Released v1.4.0 of ZeppelinOS with major improvements to the smart contract development experience https://github.com/zeppelinos/zos/releases
Published a great tutorial on how to build upgradeable smart contracts in Ethereum, by community member Elena Nadolinski https://blog.zeppelinos.org/getting-started-with-zeppelinos/
Part of the ZeppelinOS team will be in NYC and San Francisco this week meeting with our community of projects and developers
Katherine from Messari
No update
Bitcoin & Friends
Jimmy on Bitcoin
James from Vertcoin
New Vertcoin website released, translated into 12 languages (so far): https://twitter.com/Vertcoin/status/1029764080121393154
JZ from Decred
Work is continuing on getting our 1.3 release out the door for the Decred CLI tools as well as Decrediton. Decrediton had 8 commits this week while dcrdata had 11, and dcrwallet saw 6 commits. dcrdata also has a new alpha (https://alpha.dcrdata.org/charts) which adds some nice charting features for things like historical ticket prices, transactions per block, etc.
We’ve been revamping dcrdocs as we gear up for the release of Politeia (https://docs.decred.org/governance/politeia/). Many people have had questions about the lifecycle of a proposal under the system, so we’ve tried to document it as thoroughly as possible to add clarity.
If you’re attending Voice of Blockchain from August 24-25 in Chicago be sure to catch Marco Peereboom and Alex Yocom-Piatt, they will be participating in panels on governance, scaling, and decentralized exchanges.
Zac from Stellar
We triggered a protocol upgrade on Stellar's testnet to version 10. You can read the full details of our migration schedule and what's changing in 10.0.0 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/970dye/please_read_migration_schedule_for_stellar_core/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=hot&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=Stellar
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Released Zcash 2.0.0 - the first Sapling-compatible release of the Zcash node software. This includes the official Sapling activation height of 419200 which targets the 2 year anniversary of the Zcash network: October 28, 2018! More info: https://blog.z.cash/new-release-2-0-0/
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
Two out of the three audits that the Monero community funded for the upcoming bulletproofs have come in, with only very minor fixed (already fixed as of now). The last report is in, and is expected to be released to the public very soon.
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin’s 75 tweets on the history and current plans of Casper
A comprehensive Plasma state of the nation
Eth2.0 Implementers call. Refined spec means #buidl
Zaki from Cosmos
Much of the last week fixing bugs found in simulation ahead of gaia-8000
Gaia-8000 is finally launching https://forum.cosmos.network/t/launching-gaia-8000/739
Expect an update on Game of Steaks for next week
Kate and Dean from Agoric
We started implementation of the first end-to-end proof-of-concept of our smart contract platform. We successfully ported and tested all the contracts from Distributed Electronic Rights In Javascript.
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
Building out user facing app for Margin Tokens
Working with exchanges to integrate Margin Tokens
Interviewing design and engineering candidates
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Last week was the first week of our tour in Asia. We spent the first half of the week in Beijing, where we met with several really interesting teams, including DDEX and BitPie.
Over the weekend we attended ETHIndia, where we were blown away by the 9 (!!) awesome teams that built projects on Dharma. We awarded first prize to a team that built the first functioning bond issuance platform (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/DharmaProtocol/comments/975elj/ethindia_project_submissions_on_dharma/)
We released a new and improved Developer Portal (developer.dharma.io). Developer Portal includes a conceptual overview of Dharma Protocol, deep API documentation, tutorials and starter kits, and an extensive FAQ
Started work on a collateralizer contract for ERC721s. This enables loans of any unique NFT -- crypto kitties, plots of decentraland, invoices represented by NFTs, etc.
We're always hiring (https://angel.co/dharma-labs/jobs). Current hiring priority is for blockchain and full-stack development. If you don't see a great role fit but are interested in working with us, shoot Brendan a note at brendan-at-dharma-dot-io
Coulter from MakerDAO
Announced a partnership with Wyre, giving businesses immediate access to Dai in over 30 countries (including the US). This enables a fiat on-ramp to Dai that's nearly instant.
To celebrate the partnership, hosted an AMA on r/ethtrader with both CEOs taking a wide range of questions. Lastly, Wyre and Maker are also putting on a hackathon over the weekend called unBlock.
Based on community feedback, announced an update to the 20% Principle in the Foundation Proposal and updated the timeline for the vote.
Phil from MARKET Protocol
Our new explainer video is finally done, check it out.
Lots of work going on in our typsecript library MARKET.js this week, with a heavy focus on watching for events that can alter the validity of orders. Decentralized exchanges will be able to utilize our new OrderStateWatcher functionality to aid in order book pruning, receiving a simple call back anytime the state of a order has been updated.
The design for our simulated exchange trading interface has been completed. Feedback is still greatly welcome and appreciated! You can check it out here, please direct any feedback to our #design channel in discord
Robert from Compound
Completed infrastructure for development and staging environments, beginning work on production environment
Continued implementation of updated UI (final designs) for dApp web interface
Continued work on Historical Market Data API
Presented Compound at the ChainXChange conference
Layer two and interoperability
Dong Mo from Celer
No update
Janine from Liquidity.Network
The team have been prioritising and making improvements to the UI/UX of the wallet.
Our 1st Community Competition which called upon participants to create a work of art on Liquidity.Canvas (https://canvas.liquidity.network) came to a close on the 15th. We got 44 submissions that have been logged and the top ten will be put to a community poll on Monday, Aug 20.
Achievement Network (https://achievement.network) continues to grow and its scope increase, new exercises were added on Struct and Optimisations.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
No update
Application infrastructure
Doug from Livepeer
Livepeer now has a video metrics/monitoring dashboard. Check out the Rinkeby version, to be deployed to mainnet with next week's Tributary release.
Early experiments with torrent-style CDN acceleration of p2p live video content have shown promising results, but we're developing a real world testbench to quantify how much broadcasters can save off their CDN bills using Livepeer's network to orchestrate P2P delivery.
Ryan from FOAM
As we continue main-net launch preparations and Rinkeby testing for the end of August we have also started on a mobile track for the FOAM Map. While the map will not be optimized for mobile on day 1 we are excited to share that our application already works our of the box with Coinbase Wallet and Status, preview here.
Uber Visualization Newsletter featured our work, writing: "Ever wonder if blockchain could be applied to democratize maps? FOAM is leading the way and recently published the Spatial Index, a general purpose blockchain visual explorer. See how they are utilizing Uber deck.gl to visualize an interactive map of network activity utilizing the FOAM protocol here."
David from Sia
Nebulous repo was updated. 2 issues were created, 1 was closed. 2 PRs were merged
GitLab users tbenz9 and MSevey, and GitHub user lukechampine, had code contributions merged into Sia.
The external contributor tbenz9 corrected the permalinks format on the documentation, that stopped working after the migration to GitLab (https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/merge_requests/3197).
MSevey corrected a bug where files with blank names could be uploaded, what was problematic for handling. Now Sia returns an error if the user tries to upload a file with a blank name this instead (https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/merge_requests/3188).
After the migration to GitLab, the import paths from the GitHub repository were left not working. Lukechampine has corrected the last changes, so the paths are working again (https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/pull/3189). Also, the old GitHub repository has been archived and the readme.md file has been replaced to refer to the link of the new GitLab repo instead (https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/pull/3188).