Proof of Work #39
Welcome to PoW #39! I delayed this weeks in order to include the Bitcoin Optech updates, which are released on Tuesday, since this week had an especially interesting write-up of an exploit on testnet (not mainnet, phew) of the previously reported Bitcoin Core bug, and also a very detailed explanation of that same bug by Jimmy Song.
PoW will now have updates on the nascent EOS ecosystem—this has been long requested, and there is now enough interesting stuff getting built on it that I think it’s prudent to have some coverage.
Some of the highlights from this issue: MKR inches closer to multi-collateral dai, something which I’m pretty excited for. Zcash will be activating sapling very soon, enabling extremely fast z-transaction hashing and hopefully massively increasing the anonymity set. Coda has a live testnet that can be played around with. Compound is now live and can be used to earn interest on your ETH holdings.
Big update next week, stay tuned :)
Bitcoin & Friends
Daniel from Grin
22 Pull Requests were merged in the past week, by 6 unique contributors.
Implement Basic Auth for API and Owner API merged.
Rust Cuckatoo for verifier and test-miner merged.
Scheduled size upgrades adopted for the ASIC-friendly PoW.
More governance meeting notes here.
TMGOX.com: Grin swag shop by @0xb100d with 100% of profits donated to Grin dev fund.
More Grin info here.
Izaak from Coda
We've completed our alpha testnet along with an in-browser fully-verifying client. Check out here for a live demo of the client and to get involved. It's the first application using zk-SNARKs in the browser/mobile (not to mention the first full node that runs in the browser) which is pretty exciting!
Jimmy & Optech on Bitcoin
CVE-2018-17144 duplicate inputs bug exploited on testnet: last Thursday a block was created on testnet containing a transaction that spent the same input twice, causing a chainsplit where the chain with the most proof of work contained the duplicate inputs and a weaker chain did not. When restarted, operators of the vulnerable nodes needed to manually trigger a lengthy reindex procedure to fix their nodes’ database inconsistencies. (This side-effect of recovering from a duplicate inputs chainsplit was previously known to developers.)
JZ from Decred
We released v1.3.0 for Decrediton and the CLI tools this week. It brings a myriad of performance improvements, and new stealth features with it, such as a secure and privacy-respecting SPV mode, initial Politeia integration, 2x faster startups, and minimum fees reduced by an order of magnitude. See the release notes for a full rundown of all the goodies included in this release, and if you still haven’t upgraded you can grab the binaries here.
We also announced our seventh third-party wallet integration; Cobo Wallet for Android and iOS which had support for Decred go live in v2.9.
In other news, here’s something different, the first “Decred baby” had their birth certificate registered on our blockchain. It happened through OriginalMy which uses Decred’s dcrtime to add hashes of documents to our chain for timestamping purposes. I’ll likely spend the better part of this week seeing if we can procure metallic blue onesies in case this becomes a trend. [ed note: congrats!]
Johnny from Stellar
No Updates.
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Full steam ahead towards 2.0.1-rc. We've had some delays due to the extent of review needed for this release.
Catch the details in the full forum update here.
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
There is now a Monero Malware Response website . The Monero Malware Response workgroup is a solution to issues in which Monero is used by malicious parties to exploit others.
Kasisto, a Point of Sale payment system to accept Monero, is currently usable in production, even though it is still in development. If you want to find out how you can adopt this in your business, or if you are a developer or marketer and would like to contribute to Kasisto, check it out here, and read a recent update from one of the developers here.
Smart contracting platforms
Myles from EOS
Scatter v9.1.1 released.
Bitfinex introduces EOSFinex an on-chain DEX built on EOS.
Ben Sigman gives an overview of the EOS London Hackathon.
Tokenika releases EOSFactory v2.1.
TokenPocket releases an easy-to-use iPhone wallet with a dApp browser.
Evan from Ethereum
Al-Bassam, Sonnino, and Buterin: Maximising Light Client Security and Scaling Blockchains with Dishonest Majorities. VB’s paragraph summary.
ZK Labs Community Audits Initiative for non-ICO projects
Securify is now open source, as well as the publicly available tool on the web.
Martin from Tezos
Started fixing our older smart contract prototypes, and automated insurance should be working by next week.
et4te has completed the first version of the Avalanche prototype that he was previously working on and is now investigating the integration of a transaction model.
Zaki from Cosmos
Julian Koh wrote an amazing overview of that led to the design thesis of Cosmos. Here’s a little preview, "we can think of the Cosmos Network as a blockchain which is sharded by application — meaning each shard supports a single application, and needs to have much less throughput capability per shard on average."
Register for Game of Stakes our testnet for incentivizing and evaluating the risk of cryptoeconomic attacks. We have a prize pool of 300,000 atoms for participants.
A bunch of key software development pieces are in process towards the key v0.25 release. We simplified handling unbonding or redelegating stake, enabled building genesis files with signed bonding transactions allowing for staking at genesis and decentralized network launch and released the long awaiting inflation and fee distribution system.
Kate and Dean from Agoric
We sent out our first newsletter this week! Sign up here to get on our email list.
We have a number of events coming up during SF Blockchain Week: 1) Dean is giving a talk on “Authority in Smart Contracts” at the Titans of Tech stage at SFBW Epicenter on October 8th at 2:20pm 2) Mark is speaking about the Agoric approach to smart contracts at the SF Cryptocurrency Devs Meetup October 10th at 7pm. There are only 8 spots left, so RSVP today!
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
Expo is live alongside the dYdX Margin Trading Protocol on 10/2! Check it out to buy your first Margin Tokens!
Hiring for engineering, design, and recruiting roles full-time in SF.
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Continued work on Creditor-Driven Loans and generic decision engines. Stay tuned!
#DeFi Summit is happening on Thursday 4 Oct. Breakout discussions led by 0x, Dharma, Coinbase Wallet, MakerDAO, and many more! Space is limited to apply here.
Published our Wishlist for Hackathon Projects at ETHSanFrancisco. Two highlights: Margin Lending for Augur Prediction Markets, NFT-Collateralized Lending.
We’re hiring blockchain engineers and full stack engineers. Check out our open positions here.
Coulter from MakerDAO
Huge news for the team as we announced that a16z crypto purchased 6% of MKR. They will be participating in governance, and the Dai Credit System, while assisting in other areas such as legal and regulatory hurdles. The deal was led by General Partner Katie Haun, who led the first government task force on cryptocurrencies and also led the investigation into the Mt. Gox hacks and into the federal task force investigating Silk Road.
Recently, the Foundation Proposal was approved with 99.86% of participants voting "yes" and was one of the earliest examples of decentralized governance in action. We recapped the vote here. [ed: the only other place I see 99.86% votes are the elections of communist party leadership—not saying this is definitely a bad sign, but it doesn’t seem like a great one]
CEO Rune Christensen hopped on Laura Shin's Unconfirmed podcast to talk the a16z deal and more.
If you're attending SF Blockchain week, we'll be speaking at several events and hosting a dappy hour. Come say hi!
Phil from MARKET Protocol
The team hit our "feature complete" milestone this week with the Simulated Exchange. Check out the demo during this week's engineering call.
A greatly improved version of the Contract Explorer's grid view was also demo'ed.
We've been working on our smart contracts to consolidate the collateral pools to streamline the deployment of MARKET contracts. This is leading to a significant reduction in gas costs. Think fast, cheap, and easy! Three words I'm always cautious to use in the same sentence...
We'd love your feedback on these improvements. Join us on Discord, in either the #design or #engineering channels.
Robert from Compound
The first version of the Compound Protocol was deployed to Ethereum and announced; testing internally and publicly.
Released a user-facing interface.
Released a public market dashboard.
Answered hundreds of user questions, which will be used to refine the product experience further.
Layer two and interoperability
Tieshun from Namebase
No Updates.
Tom from 0x
Starting beta for 0x Instant soon. Sign up and check out the spec here.
Started work on 0x.py to add Python support.
Finishing up documentation and developer on-boarding redesign.
Started work on Relayer Template, a forkable, out-of-the-box relayer.
Dong Mo from Celer
In terms of backend technology, we finished integration with mobile app, finished the deployments of OSP and bots on private Ethereum and Ropsten, and fixed various bugs in concurrency and error handling.
On the mobile side, we are debugging and finalizing off-chain cApps for the release, and finishing off-chain to on-chain bridging process. We also refined off-chain service on-boarding UX, and are preparing sample app and SDK documentation.
Janine from Liquidity.Network
Beta version of the Liquidity Tips bot has been updated, an improved onboarding process, the ability to tip non registered users and the addition of a notification of success. Liquidity tips is an inline tipping bot which runs on Telegram and is integrated with the Liquidity wallet.
A payment request feature has been added to the wallet app. The feature will be tried and tested in a real world use case by a pizzeria in Lucerne and will enable the set up of POS in restaurant and b2c businesses.
Developments on Liquidity’s SDK include full wallet management, invoice generation, hub checks to ensure it is not cheating and the facilitation of seamless off-chain transactions. SDK allows Liquidity enabled Dapps, our first SDK will be launched during ETH San Francisco.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
Core developer Tomasz Drwięga went on Zero Knowledge podcast to discuss the lifecycle of a transaction and the mempool.
Phil Lucsok wrote a blog on why on-chain governance.
The Polkadot testnet telemetry got updated with setting filters.
The recording from Jutta Steiner's TechCrunch Future of DLT panel is out.
The recording from core developer Jack Fransham's Zero Knowledge Summit presentation on private Ethereum transactions is out.
We’re hiring for business development, DevOps/QA Engineers, among other positions.
The team is working on some special presentations for Web3 Summit.
Application infrastructure
Doug from Livepeer
No Update
Ryan from FOAM
Published a summary of the recent FOAM Map through the front and back end architecture and worked on finalizing our "Signaling" contracts as non-fungibles.
David from Sia
2 Nebulous repos were updated. 10 PRs were merged. GitLab users tbenz9, David Vorick, Christopher Shinnerl, Luke Champine and Matthew Sevey had code merged into a Nebulous repository.
Several interesting features were added to Sia this week. Matthew Sevey submitted a merge request to add whitelist and blacklist host lists. This will enable a user to block hosts from their host database or block all hosts except what’s on the whitelist.
A new subset of command under siac utils has been added. Various offline transaction utilities are included, but other utilities and helper functions are being developed.
From the community: The alpha version of Repertory from Sia contributor @drexel#2633 was released. Repertory allows you to mount Sia blockchain storage solutions via FUSE on Linux/OS X or via WinFSP on Windows. The UI is available here (currently windows only). The command line is available here.
Discord user @hakkane released Decentralizer version 0.2.0. This new version is powered by SiaStats.info databases that extend the search of hosting farms to those using sophisticated decoy strategies.
Hakkane also released a tracking tool for hosting farms at SiaStats.
Other
Ari from Decentraland
Last week, we released version 1.3.1 of the CLI.
We’re continuing to improve the DX of the SDK. Our current focus is adding NFT integration, and integrating a new communications server into the Decentraland Client.
We’ve just finished the new authorizations flow for the version 2.0 of the Marketplace smart contract, which will support buying/selling Estates in addition to other NFTs.
We’ve also begun testing our LAND Mortgages feature on MainNet.
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
Added TUSD as the third base pair after WETH and DAI. Users can start trading with WETH/TUSD. We will add more trading pairs upon market demand.
Improved ledger wallet usability. Users can now switch among more than 10 different Ledger addresses.
Improved browser wallet usability by adding a browser wallet usage confirmation page and wallet deletion warning.
Sam from OpenBazaar
No Updates.
Demi from Zeppelin
OpenZeppelin now has 100% test coverage. Getting ready for upcoming 2.0 release. Congrats to the team and community! More info here.
Began working on the first implementation of ZeppelinOS's ZEP token.