Proof of Work #35
Welcome to PoW #35! Thanks to everyone who emailed us with feedback or questions. Due to a substack bug I can’t reply yet (working on it) but I read everything and am incorporating some suggestions.
We’ve added Spacemesh, a project working on a new type of decentralized consensus called Proof of Space and Time that uses spare storage, rather than spare computation, to secure the ledger. PoST is as-of-yet unproven but is an interesting idea, and Spacemesh couples with with a DAG-based ledger which potentially has its own advantages in avoiding miner centralization. We’re working on getting Chia, the other big project working in the PoST space added as well.
More next week, and if you’re interested in beta testing a new and exciting PoW feature, please hit reply and let me know :)
Bitcoin & Friends
Aviv from SpaceMesh (ed note: intro to Spacemesh here)
Our dev and research teams are working on the Gossip p2p protocol and the Tortoise & Hare consensus algorithms. This is a multi-week ongoing effort as these tasks are at the heart of the Spacemesh protocol.
2 new full-time developers have joined our growing core dev team. We are actively hiring strong crypto developers who make quality contributions to one of our open source projects.
We published a draft requirements and design for the Spacemesh public proof of elapsed time (POET) service. We fully work in the open on this (and all other projects) so you are welcome to join and participate in the api design phase
Some good product and UX work on the Spacemesh Wallet and Dashboard App. We have finalized the requirements and the initial user experience and posted everything to the repo.
We reached the alpha milestone for Spacemesh Cosmic- our open source seed project for building hyper-universal apps (desktop/mobile native/web). You can use Cosmic to build your own universal apps. We are using Cosmic ourselves as the base app scaffolding for the Spacemesh App. We also tipped major contributors for their voluntary work on this project using gitcoin bounties
Next week... we are speaking about race-free and asic-resistant consensus in dezentral.ion. Come see us if you are coming to Blockchain week Berlin!
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Bustapay, practical coinjoin protocol BIP [ed note: the meme that “bitcoin is a privacy coin” is slowly but surely coming true, it seems]
JZ from Decred
Marco has announced that Politeia, Decred’s Git powered and blockchain anchored proposal system is now feature complete, with proposal editing now implemented. Just a couple more bugs to squash before it’s ready to start accepting submissions.
This week saw dcrwallet receiving 2 commits, dcrdata getting 10, dcrdocs with 3, politeiagui 14 and politeia 8, among many others!
Luke and Corey have begun to make a concerted effort to produce and organize developer documentation that is intended to be on par with our user docs. We should have more news on this front shortly.
Two new mobile wallet integrations to announce for the week; Coinomi and Bitbill have both added Decred to their Android and iOS wallets. We’re always happy to offer developer assistance to those willing to add Decred support, so interested parties should not hesitate to reach out. Work is also continuing on our own dcrandroid and dcrios wallets.
Zac from Stellar
No Update
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Ongoing Sapling wallet support integration and code review
Sapling upgrade developer guidelines and user expectation documentation
Testing Sapling transactions on testnet (they're fast!!)
Full update here
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
No Update [ed: working on finding an alternate source for monero updates, have been approached by some devs!]
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
On Friday's core dev call, community consensus finalized itself: issuance reduction to 2 ETH per block, 12 month difficulty bomb delay, ProgPoW to be studied for next hard fork.
LibSubmarine: Temporarily hide transactions using GasToken. [ed note: clever]
Victor Maia’s first post-Devcon3 update on Moon. Massively parallel, formally verified, a VM running on GPU with a native browser in Rust.
Zaki from Cosmos
We are tracking the blow by blow of ironing out the last set of features before feature freeze in our PRIORITIES doc. More info here.
Expect Game of Steaks sign ups and the Gaia-9000 testnet in the near future.
Kate and Dean from Agoric
We've been working hard on the end-to-end proof of concept. In addition to porting over all of the contracts from Distributed Electronic Rights In Javascript, the proof of concept includes communication between "vats", a term that comes from the influential programming language E and refers to separate computational subworlds that can proceed forward simultaneously. More on this to come.
If you're attending ETHBerlin or live in the area, be on the lookout for Kate and Dean this upcoming week. You can reach them on Twitter
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
Nearing code completion of our user facing applications and backend services.
Interviewed several candidates for design and recruiter roles.
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
We hired Sid Ramesh as Protocol Specialist. Sid will provide technical integration support to projects building on Dharma, as well as continue his research into unsecured lending models and reputation schemes.
We pushed the ERC721 collateralizer to Kovan and wrote guides for this new functionality in four steps (Minting a new ERC721, Creating a Debt Order, Filling a Debt Order, and Making Repayments & Returning Collateral). If you are interested in building an app that lets people get a loan backed by NFTs, reach out to brendan@dharma.io.
We quadrupled the content in our FAQ to answer commonly asked questions (technical and non-technical) about Dharma Protocol.
Since we created the Dharma Improvement Proposal program, we've seen DIPs for creditor-driven loans, margin calling, partial fills, and fungible bonds / crowdfunding. Thanks to all of the community members who have commented, and in particular to @bohendo and @shigxx for their great PR on creditor-driven loans.
We’re hiring blockchain engineers and full stack engineers. Check out our open positions here.
Coulter from MakerDAO
Big news as we introduced the Dai Savings Rate to the upcoming Multi-Collateral Dai launch. As an example: If the DSR is 2%, a user who locks 100 Dai into DSR mode, and keeps it locked for a full year, would earn two additional Dai which will automatically be added to their wallet when the Dai is unlocked.
A vote to increase the stability fee took place, and the community answered the call to have a little part of Maker history. We asked on Twitter for a community member to take the unique opportunity to cast the spell and actually be the one to update the stability fee. The tx can be found here. We'll have more info and a technical blog post about it coming soon.
Phil from MARKET Protocol
This past week we demonstrated the first live trade on rinkeby during our engineering weekly call. These calls are open to the public and we would love for more people to join us as we talk architecture, design and do product demos each week. Here is a link to the trading portion of last weeks call
The first steps toward integration with ChainLink have also begun as we move to expand the offerings of Oracle solutions that are available to users of MARKET Protocol.
Robert from Compound
No Update
Layer two and interoperability
Tieshun from Namebase
Started our private beta to collect feedback on the Namebase v0 on Handshake testnet.
Redesigned Namebase to be mobile-first based on user feedback.
Redesigned our desktop experience based on user feedback.
Tom from 0x
0x V2 launching on mainnet this Tuesday! Now working on helping our remaining V1 relayers upgrade.
Check out our updated starter projects to start playing around with new V2 features!
Dong Mo from Celer
Partnerships: We’re excited to have L4 ventures came to our office. Ever since we announced our partnership with L4 ventures to develop better state channels through collaboration, both Celer Network and L4 have been working very closely to develop shared standards for encoding off-chain state, connecting generalized state channels into networks, developer interfaces, and more. If you would like to learn more about this partnership, please feel free to check it out here.
Backend work: We finished the implementation of all backend modules for off-chain payment (cPay), designed and reviewed cPay backend end-to-end test cases, set up backend end-to-end testing framework, finished preliminary end-to-end tests for cPay (normal case), and designed APIs and dispute flows for cApp.
Mobile: We designed the app walkthrough and launched user testing. We enhanced the UI for on-boarding, wallet/token details, token information and sending tokens. We have partially implemented recent activities in home screen and wallet menu. We’ve also fully aggregated token data from different remote sources and improved the synchronization flow.
We’ve updated our website to include new team members and partners.
We are hiring on all fronts! We’re still setting up the hiring portal, and will include a link in the next week's update!
Janine from Liquidity.Network
We are excited to announce the release of the Liquidity Wallet app on iOS. The app can now be downloaded from the Apple Store.
Improvements continue to be made to the mobile app, bugs identified and fixed. The ongoing focus for the team being assigned to the design and UX including deep links, also being integrated is a unified redirection service for invoices, tips, canvas and future applications.
As according to our timetable new exercises have been added to Achievement.Network, this week they cover Call Context and Storage vs Memory.
Next week we look forward to mentoring at and sponsoring ETHBerlin. We will also be speaking and presenting NOCUST at the Ethereum Industry Summit Hong Kong. The team looks forward to meeting everyone at both!
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
Gavin went on Bloomberg to discuss the evolution of ICOs, lessons learned from Ethereum, and Polkadot.
We completed Trail of Bits' review of our codebase.
"Polkabot," the Polkadot network monitor bot, released.
Parity Ethereum 2.0.3-beta released.
In addition to other positions, we're hiring a Research/Business Analyst.
Application infrastructure
Doug from Livepeer
Livepeer has carried out three sets of on-chain protocol smart contract updates since launch, including the latest this week. On chain upgrades are a tricky technical and governance topic, and we'll be speaking about the experience doing it live in production at this week's Ethereum Security Unconference.
A community member has open sourced a MerkleMiner script, allowing users to automatically generate LPT according to their configuration and preferences.
Ryan from FOAM
We have had to further delay our launch to September 6th.
Currently working on the guide for Proof of Use and the main net map, as well as audit publication.
David from Sia
1 Nebulous repo was updated. 14 issues were created, 2 were closed. 7 PRs were merged.
GitLab users MSevey and ChrisSchinnerl had code contributions merged into Sia.
MSevey created a new API endpoint, /renter/contract/cancel (using the contract ID in a [POST] call), that allows the renter to manually cancel a specific contract. The command sets the values of GoodForRenew and GoodForUpload as false, making Sia to find a different replacement host. More info here.
Many fixes have been applied to the code related to file contract renewals: MSevey corrected a divide by zero error; ChrisSchinnerl added a check on unapplied changes on the write-ahead log (WAL) to avoid mismatches on the revision number (what would cause the renewal to fail); MSevey finished the fix for the duplicated contracts some renters occasionally ended up with after a renewal.
The Release Candidate 3 for the upcoming version 1.3.4 has been released for beta-testing among #contributors. This RC adds support for multiple parallel streaming, fixes renter’s financial reports and corrects multiple bugs. Most probably this will be the last RC before the general release of 1.3.4.
Other
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
We announced Hydro Swap, a 0x based swap widget for developers.
In terms of DDEX product updates, we officially changed wrapped Ethereum (WETH) as ETH market's base token, improved order book's trade form autofill logic and tested/prepared to launch DDEX 1.7 with a black theme. More info here.
We officially partnered with MakerDAO and launched DAI market, supporting ZRX-DAI, OMG-DAI, WETH-DAI, MKR-DAI trading pairs. More info here.
Ari from Decentraland
Last week, we released version 0.13.0 of the Marketplace which includes the first version of LAND Estates.
We also released version 4.1.0 of the SDK, which includes performance improvements in static scenes, new lighting configurations in scene previews, and inclusive parcel limits.
We've also launched version 1.3.0 of the CLI which includes some minor bug fixes, a new UI for scene deployment, Ledger hard wallet support, and the ability to upload scenes to services like this. More details here.
Sam from OpenBazaar
No Update
Demi from Zeppelin
Decentraland released their EstateRegistry smart contract to mainnet using ZeppelinOS. Validation from a high-profile project doing interesting things with NFTs.
We released version 1.4.0, which includes automated contract verification on etherchain, security checks for potential selfdestruct calls, gas estimation for all transactions, and multiple fixes.
We are adding support for multiple dependencies, so a ZeppelinOS app can load code from several libraries, such as OpenZeppelin, LevelK's Tidbit, or Gnosis Safe.
We are designing new lightweight functions for handling upgradeability in projects that do not rely on the ZeppelinOS CLI, as a means to increase adoption of the brand for developers who fear lock-in into the platform.
Katherine from Messari
No Update