Proof of Work #37

Sep 17, 2018

Hi from Boston. An interesting thing about the crypto space is the number of projects building things that will create a lot of value, but might capture none of it. DYdX, Dharma, and 0x fall into this bucket. The first two, dYdX and Dharma, are creating trustless ways to loan cryptoassets. Neither have a token, and neither have any obvious way to make money as a pure result of people using their infrastructure. However, both are starting to see some real use, and I am fairly confident the usage will increase as scalability concerns are addressed and the demand for low counterparty-risk tooling increases. Did their investors make a mistake by investing in something that feels more like FOSS than a venture bet?

I think there’s one world in which the teams building protocols are best positioned to also build the semi-centralized infrastructure atop these protocols that does make money. This might look similar to how other FOSS projects have monetized, only it’s perhaps even easier because these protocols are “closer to money” than something like RedHat and so they can make profits by actually being the exchanges on top of the protocol, and not just via consulting. However, there’s another world in which the teams that build the hybrid infrastructure atop the decentralized protocols look very different than the teams who built the protocols themselves. It’s a pretty different skillset, and a new team might have more momentum and founder-market fit. I think people who are expressing certainty on either side of this bet are being overconfident—Our fund didn’t invest in this type of protocol because we’re worried about the 2nd scenario, but I’m very ready to kick myself in a few years if it turns out the 1st scenario is more prevalent.

The situation is a bit thornier for projects that do have tokens which don’t obviously capture value. 0x Protocol falls into this bucket for me. At the moment, the value proposition for ZRX is somewhat esoteric. It’s theoretically used as a governance mechanism for avoiding contentious forks. If this is indeed valuable in the sense that it captures value, it’s certainly difficult to value in the sense of determining a number of satoshis that a ZRX token is worth. It’s possible that ZRX ends up not being very valuable, but that relayers built atop the 0x protocol become widely used and make a lot of money. However, it’s also possible that the 0x team (which in my estimation is one of the absolute best in the industry) pivots to a more value-accretive model for the token. They’ve expressed their unwillingness to do this in a way that harms the usefulness of the protocol itself, which makes sense because doing that would probably just result in relayers unceremoniously forking the token out. That said, there may be a way to have the ZRX token accrue value in a way that relayers are amenable to, and if there is, the 0x team will figure out it.

I hope the takeaway from these ramblings isn’t “no one knows” but rather “don’t be too sure.” Tech VCs have been making huge amounts of money for years by having more patience than your average person for products that are very useful but aren’t obviously monetizable, and that might be what happens here. Or, a big sector of the crypto market might end up creating a huge amount of value for other people, and not capture any of it themselves. From a user perspective, either scenario is great.

Bitcoin & Friends

Daniel from Grin

Izaak from Coda

Deployed geographically-distributed, multinode testnet and continued work on integration testing.
Implemented the Groth-Maller SNARK verifier in pure OCaml which compiles to Javascript and runs in-browser, bringing us one step closer to full-node level security with minuscule resource requirements.
Created a REST API for the Coda daemon, simplifying dashboard construction, testing, and reporting for our internal testnet.

Jimmy on Bitcoin

JZ from Decred

Jonathan Chappelow announced the release of dcrdata v3.0.0 this week. It includes contributions from 9 developers, resulting in 106 changed files with 9,064 additions and 1,822 deletions. This release also includes the new charts subpage for tracking various relevant metrics. For the unaware, dcrdata is a Decred block explorer written from scratch in Golang which also reimplements the Insight API.
Matheus has put out an explainer video showing how miner reward invalidation works in Decred as well as what happens to the regular tx tree of a block which is voted invalid.
If you’re planning on attending Consensus Singapore this week, Joshua will be there representing the project and taking some meetings. Reach out if you’d like to meet, or just look for the dude in the stylish metallic blue jacket.

Johnny from Stellar

The Stellar Network has been successfully upgraded to protocol version 10.
Stellar nodes now need to be running stellar-core version 10.0.0; the release notes are located on Github. This is mainly a stability update, with a lot of fixes to issues that could cause a node to hang or become unstable. Additionally some new features for private load testing have been implemented.
Horizon, Stellar's client-facing RESTful API server, has also been upgraded to 0.14.0; the upgrade is necessary in order to interact with protocol version 10. The release notes are also located on Github.

Privacy coins

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

Lots of work on RPC support for Sapling keys/addresses for upcoming 2.0.1 release.
Documentation on the Sapling turnstile migration and shielded monetary auditing.
First stage of a shielded light client protocol for the reference mobile wallet project.
Read more in the full weekly update here.

Diego and Riccardo from Monero

As a part of the October Hard Fork (Network Upgrade), a Proof Of Work change to mitigate any potential centralisation from ASICs (Monero promotes decentralisation via CPU/GPU mining only) has been taking place.
The code merge of BulletProofs to testnet took place early last week. Bulletproofs improve scalability, providing an ~80% reduction in transaction size and cost.

Smart contracting platforms

Evan from Ethereum

Remix v0.7.2 with better testing, API, library deployment
Parity Ethereum v2.0.4-beta
iden3: new SNARK tools for an identity system from Jordi Baylina

Martin from Tezos

Juraj and his team finished integrating Tezos with the Trezor hardware wallet, so after the next update you will be able to use your Trezor to send, receive and delegate XTZ, publish smart contracts, etc.
et4te has been working on an Avalanche consensus prototype with MirageOS in order to investigate consensus based amendments in Tezos.
Dee from Kukai wallet added support for sending to multiple addresses and support for translation and translated the app to 5 different languages. New version coming out soon.
tezos.blue has published the wallet code for all platforms on GitHub. They have produced a video about the concept behind the system.

Zaki from Cosmos

Tendermint v0.24 was released. When the validator set changes, the previous validator set commits to validator set change and then the change is activated on the next block. This simplifies the efficient light client proofs that make IBC and trustless mobile clients possibles.
Tendermint also now providers a secure monotonic time source we called BFT Time in consensus.
Our YubiHSM Rust library now supports directly connecting to the YubiHSM via USB. This allows us to support ARM and other architectures that Yubico's closed source HTTP connection does not support. This would be useful to anyone who want to build YubiHSM support into a lightning node or Tezos baker.
Finally we've released some more product overviews of the Cosmos SDK , a general toolkit for build DApp specific blockchains. This includes a new product page, and some slide decks (see here and here).

Kate and Dean from Agoric

To let people know where we’ll be headed and where we will be speaking, we’ve created a new upcoming events page on our website. Check back after events for links to recordings and slides!
As part of SF Blockchain week, we will be doing an overview of the Agoric platform and approach to smart contracts at the SF Cryptocurrency Devs meetup on October 10th at 7pm in San Francisco. Additionally, Dean will be giving a talk during Epicenter (Oct 8th 2:20PM - 2:45PM) on “Authority in Smart Contracts” and the problems of identity-based access control in smart contracts.

Financial Infrastructure

Antonio from dYdX

Added an exchange wrapper for 0x V2 (#439). This allows our protocol to use 0x V2 orders to open and close positions.
Added 0x V2 support to our backend services and frontend app.
Implemented an optimized version of openzeppelin's ReentrancyGuard contract (#443)
Work trialed a technical recruiter candidate. We're hiring for engineering, design and recruiting roles in SF!

Brendan and Nadav from Dharma

Pushed our ERC721 Collateralizer to mainnet in public beta. This feature is considered "experimental" and has yet to be formally audited. We believe the feature to be safe for public use but discourage users from engaging in high-value loans that are collateralized by 721s until the feature is out of beta. To learn how to build your own dApp that leverages 721-collateralized loans, check out the tutorials in bullet #4
Improved the API methods for making loan repayments and returning/seizing collateral (see bullet #4 for tutorials)
Finalized work on v0.1 of a liquidity sharing API
Published 8 new tutorials! We now have tutorials covering the entire lifecycle of a loan for loans collateralized by ERC20s (Create Loan Request, Sign Loan Request, Load a Loan Request, Fill a Loan Request, Make Repayments, and Seize Collateral) and for loans collateralized by ERC721s (Minting, Approving Transfers, Creating a Debt Order, Filling a Debt Order, Repay and Return Collateral)
We’re hiring blockchain engineers and full stack engineers. Check out our open positions here

Coulter from MakerDAO

Maker has a new website! All new designs, a new Dai page, and new voting UI. We're still working out some of the kinks, but feedback is welcome!
Speaking of a new voting UI, we put it to use for the first time last week. MKR holders held a Governance Vote for our Foundation Proposal. A walkthrough of how the process works can be found here. We encourage all MKR holders to read and join us for the next vote!
Needslist integrated Dai with a "Donate with Dai" button (built by Request Network!) to aid in Hurricane Florence relief and beyond. We're honored to help streamline aid in conjunction with our other partners at Project BiFrost.
Totle integrated OasisDEX into their platform, adding more liquidity for their users.

Phil from MARKET Protocol

Breaking the build sucks...check out the latest MARKET.js release this week so you're sync'ed!
New releases this week include adding API endpoint testing, supporting API keys and “postman” and “newman” for API testing.
Need an oracle solution?? Get a preview of our Chainlink Integration.
How do you fill open orders on the MARKET Protocol SimExchange?
Hear Phil Elsasser, CTO and Co-Founder, discuss EIP 1052...we're excited!
Looking for work or want to get involved with MARKET? Lot's of open issues so come join us!

Robert from Compound

Added new public APIs for surfacing historical market data.
Added logging-based metrics and alerting for protocol admin functions, APIs and web pages in preparation for public launch.
Modified PriceOracle contract to handle gracefully an edge case error instead of reverting, as identified by formal verification of the contract.

Layer two and interoperability

Tieshun from Namebase

Shipped Firefox version of the Namebase Handshake extension
Shipped mobile + desktop redesign to our private beta users. People not in our private beta can request access here.

Tom from 0x

No Update (ed note: team has been on retreat, expect more next week)

Dong Mo from Celer

Research: We co-organized State Channel Researchers Call #1
Backend Technology: We implemented reliable on-chain event watcher and monitoring service, added service to check if a peer has connected to Celer, implemented cPay-related mobile interfaces, finalized design of cApp-related mobile interfaces, fixed various bugs in the backend.
Mobile Technology: We designed and implemented new cPay UI, tested and integrated off-chain onboarding APIs, developed cOS SDK sample apps for Android and iOS, implemented transaction fee management for on-chain wallet, implemented cGomoku UI.

Alexandra from Parity Technologies

We finished implementing Constantinople into Parity Ethereum.
Gav's article on why the internet is at risk and how to fix it is now on Medium.
Alistair Stewart discussed Polkadot's finality gadget in Shanghai.

Application infrastructure

Doug from Livepeer

Proposal for Livepeer transcoders being run as Aragon DAOs being discussed on Github.
The Livepeer React.js component video player "Chroma" now supports adaptive bitrate streaming resolution selection.
A very deep dive on the cryptoeconomics of the MerkleMine token distribution method for PoS networks by Coinfund Research.

Ryan from FOAM

Launched the FOAM Map interface for the point of interest TCR over 2,000 points have been added by Cartographers within the first week. The Map is hosted at map.foam.space.
Launched our bounty partnership with GitCoin to fund issues on the FOAM Ethereum Functional Programming Developer stack. These bounties are sponsored by a grant from the Ethereum Community Fund and are listed here.

David from Sia

3 Nebulous repo were updated. 17 issues were created, 7 were closed. 12 MRs were merged.
GitLab users eddiewang, MSevey, ChrisSchinnerl and lukechampine had code contributions merged into Sia.
Last week the Address filter was implemented to prevent the renter from forming more than one contract with hosts in the same subnetwork (a single entity controlling multiple hosts). This week ChrisSchinnerl has expanded this protection backwards to renters with previous contracts: the contracts maintenance routine will now get rid of contracts violating the new rules.
Consistency in the renter’s financial reports has been added in multiple places: MSevey added the full allowance price breakdown in the command renter allowance. Eddiewang fixed the spending report of the UI.
The Ledger Nano S apps suffer a potential vulnerability, as the characters l and I are represented identically and this could be used maliciously to deceive the Ledger user. Lukechampine has circumvented this issue for the Sia beta app by changing the encoding of the Sia public keys (when stored in JSON files) from base64 to hexadecimal.
Lukechampine has also added a fast shuffle function to the fastrand library that can be used as a staple in future code improvements.

Other

Ari from Decentraland

Last week, we released version 0.13.2 of the Marketplace, which includes several bug fixes. See details here.
We’ve been working on version 2.0 of our Marketplace smart contract, and are now auditing the new contract with Level-K.
We’re also adding support for LAND Estates in the CLI and Client, building a new in-world UI for chat and user profile views, and making performance improvements in the Client rendering engine.

Sam from OpenBazaar

OpenBazaar version 2.2.5 has been released. The release is primarily a bug fix release focused on the server side.
Work on the multi-wallet feature continues; the server side APIs are completed and testing and integration into mobile and desktop clients continues.
We're released a tool that allows users to create a widget for their OpenBazaar store to display on other sites.

Demi from Zeppelin

No Update

🥚Easter egg for anyone who read to the bottom🥚

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