Proof of Work #41

Oct 17, 2018

Good morning from a plane somewhere over the Pacific, and welcome to PoW #41.

I spent the weekend at a camp themed around technological and social optimism, and there were a bunch of crypto people in attendance. Naturally we all ending up hanging out a lot and talking about the immediate future of digital assets. A few interesting takeaways:

No one has a coherent bear thesis anymore, not even in the medium-term. I tend to discount heavily when people are sure something will happen in the long term but are unwilling to make a bet on the short or medium terms (related: when people say they love a given idea or vertical “even though I’m not confident in this particular company” I apply the same discount) , so it was interesting to see the sentiment so positive.
The incentives around issuing a new coin vs. joining an existing project are slowly shifting towards joining, which seems to be market driven (since the markets are increasingly skeptical of new coins.) However a premium on new things in general still exists and we still have a long way to go before we stop seeing new coins for every random feature.
Everything is still really experimental and in flux! Without, of course, naming any names, a lot of very big projects are changing big things about their monetary policy and protocols, new projects are figuring out diverse ways to distribute, etc. A frustrating corollary to this is that the valuations of new things are mostly still massively overvalued for things which are so experimental—we’d love to invest if the big risks were priced in, but they often aren’t yet. Valuations on the order of hundreds of millions are simply unjustified for unlaunched projects, with almost no exceptions. These cause weird incentive issues as well which I’ll discuss in a future issue.

Bitcoin & Friends

Daniel from Grin

Request For Funding of a Security audit. Please help if you can!
36 Pull Requests were merged in the past week, by 7 unique contributors.
Testnet 4, the last testnet before mainnet, now has its own branch getting ready for release.
Grin miner was updated to allow for cuckatoo mining on both CPU and GPU.
Project management tracking has moved to its own dedicated repo.
Governance meeting notes.
More Grin info here.

Jimmy on Bitcoin

Aviv from Spacemesh

go-spacemesh - On-going dev work on p2p layer and the consensus protocol.
Devnet - cloud testing env: Support for spawning full nodes with agents that poll commands from the automation server that sets off node's api calls.
Proofs of Elapsed Time (POET) MVP spec - published and reviewed by research team. Dev work started by open source collaborators.
Spacemesh Wallet - product work completed including detailed use cases and UX design. Dev work started by open source collaborators.
Launched new public product repo for all Spacemesh high-level product related work and published a draft of our high-level product plan.
Aannounced Hack the future of nations - Join the first hackathon for reinventing the way countries work using P2P decentralized technologies.
We are hiring full time blockchain developers in New York and in Tel Aviv! New positions.
Full update here.

James from Vertcoin

No Updates.

JZ from Decred

Decred support has been merged into Trezor Core, this means Decred is now available on the Model T as well as the Trezor One. Work is continuing on adding hardware wallet support to Decrediton.
A few of the repos which received pull requests this week: dcrweb (5), dcrd (11), politeiagui (9), dcrdata (14). Final release of Politeia is imminent which will place the fate of the project treasury in the hands of stakeholders. It sounds ominous but it’s actually great.
If you plan on attending the Texas Bitcoin conference in Austin on Oct. 27-28 you may notice that Decred will be well represented as we’re holding a conference within the conference because we’re just meta like that. We’re going to have some really cool guest speakers which we’ll be announcing over the next week or so.

Zac from Stellar

Launched a mailing list focused on protocol discussion and enhancements, to supplement the draft and completed proposals in our Github repository.
A draft of CAP-0005 has been made available. CAP-0005 proposes a combined set of changes that rationalize how we throttle the network, and also makes it easier for clients to craft transactions that will make it into a ledger even when network fees are changing rapidly.

Privacy coins

Izaak from Coda

Thanks to SHE256 for cohosting a great event where Coda Protocol engineer Deepthi Kumar described how we trustlessly distribute SNARK production across multiple nodes. Video is here and my brief talk from the event here.
We're accepting requests to join our alpha testnet. The signup link is here -- we'd love to get people involved trying things out so please get in touch.
Join us as we open source Coda on October 29th for our open-source launch party! It will be a great way to get to know more about Coda, the team behind it, and ways to get involved.

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

2.0.1-rc is out the door and we're wrapping up testing for that for the full 2.0.1 release.
Updated privacy metrics (beta site)
Now offering premium support plans for Zcash ecosystem services.
Hiring an IT Operations Engineer.
More in the weekly forum update.

Diego and Riccardo from Monero

The new version of the CLI is out, and everyone needs to upgrade if they want to continue using Monero!

Smart contracting platforms

Evan from Ethereum

Vlad’s sharding PoC that won at EthSF was a joint project with NEAR. Vlad’s viz. The NEAR folks also published TxFlow: Towards faster cross-shard transactions by rerouting transactions bypassing the beacon chain.
SpankChain got hacked with a reentrancy bug from an ERC20 call, but for less than a security audit would cost. Here’s a walkthrough of the hack. Subsequently the hacker gave the money back and received a smaller bounty, but also offered a ~free MolochDAO audit.
shadowlands - a Python, text UI platform to use dApps in terminal without a web browser.

Myles from EOS

Zaki from Cosmos

The big news is that the final large piece of MVP Cosmos Proof of Stake went into final review. It's been a punishing nearly 8 weeks in the making but this week should see our first feature complete Proof Of Stake release.
As result, we started planning for the gaia-9000 testnet.
Sentinel did a long post about their plans to migrate from Ethereum to a Cosmos zone.
Tendermint did a long post of their work with Playlist.com on building a consumer scale cryptoeconomic DAPPS.
We extended the registration deadline for Game of Stakes to Oct 22nd.
Zaki wrote a blog post on the the kinds of attacks we would like to see during Game of Stakes e-game-theory-278608c94e6e

Kate and Dean from Agoric

We had a blast meeting everyone during SF Blockchain Week. Mark Miller has uploaded a recording of his talk about secure smart contracts to the SF Cryptocurrency Devs which can be listened to here. Videos of our various talks from SFBW coming soon!

Financial Infrastructure

Antonio from dYdX

Working on adding Leveraged Ethereum to expo. LETH will be the next Margin Token, and will move at a multiple of the price of ETH.
Open sourced dydx.js - a typescript library to make it easier for developers to interact with the protocol.
Merged protocol support for OasisDEX (#369) and improved the lending proxy contract (#469).
Hiring for multiple engineering, design, and operations roles fulltime in SF.

Brendan and Nadav from Dharma

Putting finishing touches on a soon-to-be announced exciting set of features
Continued planning for #DeFi Summit - Prague, a full day event that will take place on October 29 at MeetFactory in Prague. If you'd like to lead a session, please apply here. If you'd like to attend, please apply here.
We’re hiring blockchain engineers and full stack engineers. Check out our open positions here.

Coulter from MakerDAO

Dai is now on Wanchain, becoming the first-ever cross-chain ERC20. This allows BTC to be exchanged for Dai in a fully decentralized manner, and potentially add Bitcoin as collateral for Multi-Collateral Dai!
Maker is one of the launch integrations on the Delta portfolio app for their new feature, Delta Direct. If you use Delta, you can get Maker blog posts and updates pushed instantly to you.

Phil from MARKET Protocol

We are feature complete on the Simulated Exchange! Check out the update during our last Engineering call demo.
In preparation for ChainLink integration, we released version 1.4.0 of our Solidity contracts.
We published version 0.7.3 of MARKET.js. Please update your code as this will give you access to the latest contracts.

Robert from Compound

Improved interactions between dApp and Infura APIs; began implementation of dApp Voting to select the next Compound market.
Built a system for creating developer/public API keys and logging usage.

Layer two and interoperability

Tieshun from Namebase

Implemented testnet referral program so that Namebase users can earn testnet HNS to experiment with (along with bonus rewards!). We’ll release this publicly once Handshake releases testnet3 which is built on sha3. Users who sign up at Namebase.io will be the first to get access.

Paul from Veil

We built and launched the first version of our explorer for all Augur markets. Ultimately, Veil will support all Augur markets, and this is a first step towards that goal.
We added support for binary (yes/no) Augur markets. Veil's alpha thus far has included just two products—Bitcoin futures and gas price futures, both implemented as Augur scalar markets. Supporting binary markets will let us list many more markets.
We made changes to improve usability of our consumer-friendly market order UI that we launched last week. Sign up here to try out the alpha.
Our team gave a short presentation and demo at the 0x v2 launch meetup.

Tom from 0x

No Updates.

Janine from Liquidity.Network

Liquidity Network’s SDK has now been launched and feedback from developers using the SDK is being considered for future updates.
Smart contract updates to Solidity 0.5 guidelines have been implemented.
The Liquidity Network bounty is still ongoing. The bounty is for the creation of the first off-chain hub explorer, inspired by how Etherscan visualises onchain transactions. Resources can be found here.

Dong Mo from Celer

We have released our first production-ready Testnet Centauri (not a black window, something you can use TODAY and build on TODAY).
We have released our cWallet as a gateway to Celer Network (find the Android version here). You can send instant transactions on testnet and play some super fun board games with off-chain ETH with it!
SDK can be accessed here and the SDK tutorial can be accessed here.
We participated in ETHSanfrancisco and had 4 teams build on top of Celer. It is so amazing to see all these application on the first time we release our SDK and testnet!
Catch up and listen to our State Channel Researchers Calls #4 and #5. (Welcome Raiden and Funfair!)
Check out “The Future of Layer 2” meetup here and hear CESC talk about "The role of crypto economics and mechanism design in layer 2 networks" here.

Alexandra from Parity Technologies

Gavin Wood discussed blockchain history, on-chain governance, Polkadot, and Substrate on Zero Knowledge podcast.
Parity Ethereum 2.1.2-beta released: Constantinople support for Ropsten and Kovan.
Parity Signer v2.0 Beta is now live on iOS App Store and Google Play Store.
Web3 Summit is funding ticket reductions in order to make the summit inclusive to everyone contributing to web 3.

Application infrastructure

Doug from Livepeer

Development continued on a Probabilistic Micropayments implementation, as a scaling solution to mitigate on chain costs and congestion for reconciling payments in the network.
Pull request merged into a fork of ENS to allow Livepeer nodes to register on chain identities using the Ethereum Name Service.
Staked.us produced an excellent Livepeer Staking Guide (pdf), complete with economic analysis and network overview.

Ryan from FOAM

Built new version of staking contracts and ERC-721 tests for Signaling, depositing tokens into a signal on the map now mints an NFT of that signal, which opens exciting possibilities in the protocol incentive model of signaling for radio hardware coverage.
First published results of the FOAM radio hardware testing by our partners "How To Solve The Hardest LPWAN Geolocation Problems": "Low-cost LoRa gateways can implement an ensemble-averaged time measurement system, with better than 11 nanosecond precision. In other words, less than four meter precision, which is better (yes, only in the lab so far) than GPS and without a centralized management authority."
Published Reading List: The Path to Web3.0 for Location Data, Web2.0 Geospatial Vulnerabilities Highlighted

David from Sia

3 Nebulous repos were updated. 10 merge requests were accepted into the Sia project.
The team was very active this week with over 90 commits into the Sia repository. Most commits support upcoming features expected in Sia version 1.4.0 but a number of bug fixes, and testing improvements were also added this week.
One feature I’m excited about is the “Host whitelist blacklist” merge request that msevey has been working on. This feature will enable renters to select hosts to use, or avoid, and is expected in Sia 1.4.0.
Another big upcoming change that saw a lot of development this week is the “Add allowance to the hostWeight function and make contractor update it” merge request. This change means that the amount of collateral a host posts will weigh into the hosts score or weight starting in version 1.4.0. This is good because it means hosts that post too much, or too little collateral will be penalized, and are less likely to be picked by renters.

Other

Martin from Tezos

I rewrote a setup script for our automated insurance system, using the Go RPC package I've been working on recently. It's event driven so we avoid all timing issues.
Andreas Hassmann and Edward Tate talked about their work in an interview series by Will Peaster of bitsonline.
Stephen Andrews has integrated Legder support into TezBox web wallet. He's working on Chrome extension support, as well as integration of Ledger with Bakechain. Wireframes and concepts for a UI update of TezBox have been completed as well.

Ari from Decentraland

Last week, we launched version 2.0 of the Decentraland Marketplace, which supports buying and selling LAND Estates.
We’ve also begun testing our new communications protocol, we’re working on an OpenSea integration for NFT support, and we’re continuing to improve the Entity-Component-System for designing and building more complex interactive experiences.
Finally, the mobile interface now includes a joystick!

Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io

DDEX Wallet: DDEX Mobile App Public Beta Version on Apple Store and Google Play.
Hydro Swap and DDEX will upgrade to 0x V2.
DDEX web UI improvements on market, balances and orders panel.

Sam from OpenBazaar

The wallet user interface on the desktop client is nearly completed and testing has begun. There are a few other areas in the client where the multiwallet changes will impact (settings, currency selector, listing creation), but the wallet UI itself it the most substantial piece.
On the server and the mobile side bug fixes resulting from the multiwallet changes continue.

Martín from Zeppelin

Zeppelin and Aragon introduce EVM Packages: Open source collaboration in the blockchain era: EVM packages.
Manuel Araoz shared his vision for the hackers in the blockchain space: The Global Coordination Machine.