Proof of Work #38
Hi from Boston, and thank you for reading Proof of Work!
I promise I didn’t know that dYdX was about to launch a margin token product called Expo when I mused last issue about whether or not protocols would try and build the value-capturing product layer atop their capture-free protocols! But they did, and it looks pretty cool. At the moment it actually doesn’t have any fees, but there are obvious places to add them in the future. I will use Expo as soon as I can, and report back on whether it’s a good experience—looks pretty sweet.
A nasty bug was found in Bitcoin Core, and predictably the reporting on it mostly missed the point. The bug could be exploited to DoS the Bitcoin network, and could also used to create Bitcoins out of nowhere, in a form of illicit inflation. A few important things to note:
The bug was verifiably not exploited, which anyone can verify by running a patched (or pre-bug) fullnode.
The bug would have been risky to exploit, because the produced block would be invalid, requiring the miner to be willing to burn the 12.5BTC block reward in hopes they’d be able to keep the inflated BTC from the doublespend (unlikely)
That said, this was a bad one, and it points to the need for more eyes looking at Bitcoin code. The problem isn’t entirely financial, but that’s probably a part of it, and we will be looking to increasing our financial support of Bitcoin devs.
Big stuff happening in the Maker DAO world: A16z announced a purchase of a large amount of MKR at a significant discount, and the code for multi-collateral DAI was released. The A16z purchase is almost certainly good for MKR, but I do wish it could have been publicly floated like the Polychain purchase back in the day was. Transparency is a great norm for crypto and backroom deals run counter to that. Multi-collateral DAI should be thought of as the baseline for when MKR/DAI gets really interesting; the ETH only version was only a beta test basically. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this. More next week!
Bitcoin & Friends
Daniel from Grin
25 Pull Requests were merged in the past week, by 8 unique contributors.
Mega-PR ready to go ahead of Testnet4 launch. Includes BIP32 support, AggSig, and BulletProof updates.
Automatic binaries for macOS & Linux to be supported for T4, PR ready for review.
The dev team is expanding: @garyyu was added as committer to the repo.
More info here.
Izaak from Coda
No Updates
Jimmy on Bitcoin
JZ from Decred
Matheus has begun the initial work for porting Decred support to the Trezor Core platform which will allow Decred to work with the new Model T in addition to the Trezor One.
Decred developer Fernando Abolafio published a piece providing “An overview of the Politeia system architecture”.
Two new wallet integrations were completed this week; Atomic Wallet which has built-in support for exchanging coins via atomic swaps, as well as AnyBit an open source mobile wallet for Android and iOS. This brings the total number of third-party wallets supporting Decred to six.
Johnny from Stellar
No Updates
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
zcashd 2.0.1-rc due early next week followed by 2.0.1 later in the week or early the following week.
Sept 27 there is the first Denver Zcash Meetup that a fair amount of Zcash Company employees will attend. Join us if you’re local or are in the area!
Oct 2nd is the second Boston Zcash Users Group meetup! Join if you’re local or are in the area!
Further details in the community forum
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
Parity v2.1.1 beta and v.2.0.6 stable. Parity 1.x end of life.
Avsa’s Universal logins working demo: first code release.
What Eth 2.0 layer 1 scalability will look like, by the numbers
Martin from Tezos
No Updates
Zaki from Cosmos
Tendermint became aware of gas which enables setting a gas limit on blocks.
Game of Stakes signups will begin this week. Expect a blog post by Wedensday.
Kate and Dean from Agoric
We’re excited to release the proof of concept for our distributed smart contracts system. Read our announcement here.
We've updated our website to include an About and FAQs page. We explain object capabilities, why we chose JavaScript, and why we're doing this in the first place.
If you’re heading to Rebooting the Web of Trust in Toronto this week, say hi to Kate, our Community Lead.
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
Announced expo - the easiest way to trade Margin Tokens. Expo is launching alongside the dYdX Margin Trading Protocol on the mainnet on October 2!
Testing expo on staging with testnet smart contracts.
Implemented final designs of expo for launch.
Hiring for engineering, design, and recruiting roles in SF.
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Started work on generic creditor driven loans with generic decision engines that enable creditors to specify requirements for loans they fill.
The first decision engine that we'll enable is the ability for a creditor to specify a collateralization threshold (aka a Loan-to-Value ratio or LTV) enforced by a real-time price feed.
Kicked off planning for DeFi Summit, a unique gathering that ditches the typical presentation-and-panel-style, instead focusing on participatory breakout sessions and technical workshops. Date: 4 Oct, right before ETHSF. Space is limited, so apply here.
We’re hiring blockchain engineers and full stack engineers. Check out our open positions here.
Coulter from MakerDAO
A major milestone for the project has been reached. The code for Multi-Collateral Dai has been released. It is also the first time a major dapp has been formally verified.
Over the past two weekends, we've been involved in three hacktahons, leading to 14-Dai-related projects and $9,000 awarded in Dai.
Changelly and Totle both listed Dai on their exchanges, giving more liquidity for their users and stability for those seeking it.
Phil from MARKET Protocol
MARKET Protocol is in the top 15 of the hottest ÐApps on the market as listed by "State of the ÐApps". Please sort by column "DEV (30D)".
The Rinkeby version of the MARKET Protocol Simulated Exchange ÐApp is now available for initial feedback. We'd love to hear from you on Discord, in either the "design" or "engineering" channels.
The initial Chainlink POC is complete. Participate in the discussion here. We're excited about this Oracle integration into MARKET's platform!
Robert from Compound
No Updates
Layer two and interoperability
Tieshun from Namebase
We’ve added a new FAQ that answers some of the most common questions we’ve been asked about Handshake.
Tom from 0x
0x V2 officially out! All tooling and projects have been updated — start building today!
Dong Mo from Celer
Dr. Mo Dong discusses how Celer Network tackles the issue of liquidity, state availability, and channel routing here.
We had our second State Channel Researchers Call here.
We’ll be doing a series of developer outreach events at: ETHSF (10/5 - 10/7); SFBW Epic Center (10/8 - 10/9), 500 Startups blockchain developer panel (10/10), CESC conference (10/11) and Devcon 4. Come say hi if you’re around!
On the backend, we finished cApp integration test with mobile apps, setup the testing environment for our mobile-backend integration test, fixed bugs in concurrency, error handling and security, and conducted cPay throughput and latency performance benchmarking. We finished our hackathon developer and SDK and API usage docs. And also setup TLS certificate and security enhancement and added some new features to sampleApp to test SDK.
In terms of mobile development, we finished off-chain tester on-boarding, which included finishing UI and API integration for off-chain wallet, integrating game matching APIs and cApp client APIs and finalizing UI and refining UX for our alpha tester program.
Janine from Liquidity.Network
Launching beta version for android of our Liquidity Tips bot, an inline tipping bot currently running on Telegram and integrated with the Liquidity wallet (web and mobile). Latest improvements on the bot include deep links on Android. The bot allows anyone to tip inline by simply tagging the @liquiditytipsbot and following instructions from the bot. Once tipped, the receiver will receive a bot generated message to retrieve the tip. Official announcement of the final version will follow.
Creating Liquidity’s developer kit that will be used at ETH San Francisco. It will provide developers with the same environment used internally to create Canvas.Liquidity.Network and Liquidity Tips. It consists of a docker image communicating with liquidity hubs and managing a given wallet. It is self hosted by developers and is delivered with javascript libraries.
Our educational platform Achievement.Network was completed with a full range of exercises covering Structure types and Spacecrypt Factory, Hints update and Arrays, Mappings and Enum, Struct and optimizations, Multiples contracts and Spacecrypt Armada, Built-in operations, Call context and Storage vs Memory.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
Rob Habermeier introduced the new finality gadget for Polkadot.
Jack Platts wrote an update on the growing Polkadot ecosystem.
Jutta Steiner spoke at Bloomberg’s Inventing the Future on building more usable and upgradable decentralized networks.
Web3 Foundation is providing grants to teams to build a second implementation of Polkadot Runtime Environment.
We’re hiring, with priority boarding for top DevOps/QA Engineers.
Application infrastructure
Doug from Livepeer
This week the Livepeer network surpassed 10% participation rate - which measures the ratio of staked token to outstanding token. This occurred faster than projected, with the target being to eventually achieve a 50% participation rate through the continued MerkleMine and inflationary LPT allocated to active, staked, participants.
Technical progress was focused on the R&D for moving the broadcaster -> node operator payment flow off chain to make overhead of using Livepeer's video transcoding network independent of volatility in Ethereum gas pricing.
Ryan from FOAM
Continued to add features and interface upgrades to the FOAM Map and published an overview of the deign and incentives of the Token Curated Registry.
David from Sia
2 Nebulous repos were updated. 8 issues were created, 11 were closed. 17 PRs were merged.
GitLab users David Vorick, Christopher Schinnerl, Luke Champine, and Matthew Sevey had code contributions merged into Sia.
It was a busy week for the Sia development team! A variety of bugs have been squashed such as fixing the “DaemonUpdateGet” function which was causing siac update to fail for some users, a number of missing file locks were fixed which may have been causing issues with Sia contracts, and various small bugs in the Sia testing infrastructure.
The team also tackled some new features expected in the 1.4.0 release such as setting timestamps in the new .sia file format, ability to upload directories to Sia via the API, and adding Threefish support.
Threefish support is particularly interesting, it will enable significantly better upload and download speeds for users who were CPU bound during file encryption and decryption. Threefish also enables the ability to update encrypted files already stored on the Sia network.
The Sia team also introduced various issue templates into GitLab. If you need to open an issue you can now select whether it’s a bug report, Feature request, or programming task.
Other
Ari from Decentraland
This week, we released version 0.13.3 of the Marketplace.
Our audit of version 2 of the LAND smart contract is still in progress.
We’ve completed a new UX design for Agora, which we'll deploy in early October, and we’re building a new ephemeral-key authentication system for the Decentraland platform.
We’re also completing version 4.1.1 of the decentraland-api, to be released soon.
Sam from OpenBazaar
Work continues on the multi-wallet feature on the client side. On the server side the multi-wallet API is completed and now is going through testing and bug fixing.
For the buyer-only web version we need to work out how to do web-based messaging between nodes, so a proof of concept has been started to determine our approach.
The new multi-wallet approach requires some server infrastructure (Insight-based) and work is being done to test the reliability of the infrastructure as well as improve monitoring.
Demi from Zeppelin
No Updates