Proof of Work #44
Welcome to PoW44 and hi from Tokyo! A lot of exciting stuff happened last week—Coda was open sourced, Zcash Sapling went live, Dharma announced Lever, a super easy way to access decentralized margin trading via their protocol, and the Sia hard fork happened at block 179,000. This week’s updates are worth a close read.
This update was slightly delayed because I received a very weird submission and some anonymous messages from a Signal contact explaining in fairly vague terms what it’s about. I was asked to share this on the anniversary of Satoshi’s Bitcoin whitepaper, and further asked not to share anything else for now… but I will be able to give a bit more context in future PoW issues. I will say that I am pretty excited about what this person or team is up to.
Bitcoin & Friends
Daniel from Grin
26 Pull Requests were merged in the past week, by 9 unique contributors.
Community driven effort to improve the project's main website.
More preparations for Grincon0, our first conference taking place in Berlin on November 9, attendance is free but likely to cap out.
Grin Hub: A community resource hub for all things Grin and Mimblewimble.
More Grin info here.
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Aviv from Spacemesh
On the developer side: We merged PR (listening port is now sent in handshake); Gossip is in testing phase in branch p2p-gossip, published gossip protocol design doc and completed code and heavily testing new black-box POET prover and verifier GO implementation based on the shared spec
We are also testing RPC api functionality in the Liberthon hackathon branch, working on the core proofs of elapsed time (POET) server go implementation by open source contributors, starting the POET protocol spec implementation (spec draft updated with more details) and starting to working on many Spacemesh App feature tasks by open source contributors. Join us here! Gitcoin funded several dev tasks to tip open source contributors with cryptocurrency.
Extensive work on the DEVNET, that could test system scenarios on our decentralized network is gaining momentum. This week we managed to create some basic scenarios that included interaction between several P2P nodes. PR #42 merged plus 8 additional merged PRs.
On the community side we announced the first Spacemesh NYC meetup - join us downtown next Thursday (RSVP for free), published Tal Moran CESC 2018 Spacemesh protocol slides, and hosted the Liberthon hackahton prep meeting at Spacemesh TLV hq! We are also hiring full time core developers in New York City!
JZ from Decred
Crazy week, to start things off, Decred was able to obtain a free listing on Binance, which was quite exciting. We see this as an affirmation of the fact that we’re a community run project that has an eye to building long-term value and are not overly focused on chasing listings in hopes of generating short-lived price spikes. As is usually the case, patience, discipline, and focus paid off.
Richard has put together a digest of the Politeia proposals we have
received thus far. Four of the six proposals should go into the voting phase this week after we push some updates here. All Decred stakeholders that have live tickets in the pool at the point the snapshot is taken will be able to vote.Trezor Model T support got merged and should be available in the next
firmware release targeted for October 29. Decredition and dcrwallet support will follow shortly after release.Mainnet support has been added do dcrandroid and we should be tagging a beta
release imminently.
Johnny from Stellar
stellar-core 10.1 release is in progress, timeline could be roughly a month out. Active pull requests are here.
CAP-0006 is in draft, and looking for feedback - can be discussed here.
SSE fixes (rate limiting) is in PR; DB Backfill Fix for Horizon.
Horizon 0.15.0 testing is ongoing, releases the week of 10/29.
We're looking to track official SDK usage with SDF's maintained Horizon - this is being tracked here.
Izaak from Coda
We're very excited to announce that we've open-sourced Coda! This is a huge milestone on our path to making truly accessible cryptocurrency possible. A big thanks to everyone who helped us get here.
There are now lots more ways to get involved to get involved with the project: come join us on Discord or pick up a quick-fix issue!
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
We were focused on last minute tasks for activating Sapling over the weekend. Including, but not limited to, updating docs, prepping safemode alert for non-Sapling nodes and making sure ecosystem services are ready to go! Full steam ahead for Sapling!
More in the full update here
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
No Updates.
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
Kyokan’s prototype of Lightning on Ethereum
IfDefElse: Understanding ProgPOW
Myles from EOS
Zaki from Cosmos
Cosmos SDK v0.25 was released. This is the first release with the full Cosmos Proof of Stake mechanism and brings us to feature completeness for the MVP mainnet of the Cosmos Hub. This is the first Proof of Stake blockchain to feature in protocol fee distribution to thousands of delegators.
We launched a new tutorial for building an simple Handshake/Namecoin style application on top of the Cosmos SDK.
Our gaia-9000 testnet will launch this week.
Game of Stakes registration is closed and we are tracking for a Nov 5th launch date.
Kate and Dean from Agoric
Our in-house economist, Bill Tulloh, will be presenting at Research and Practice on Blockchain October 27th, on “A Principal-Agent Approach to Securing Smart Contracts.”
Mark Miller and Bill Tulloh are organizing this year’s OCAP Workshop during SPLASH in Boston on November 6th. The workshop is designed to explore the latest developments in the theory and practice of the object-capability approach, and provide a forum for knowledge exchange and collaboration.
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
Finished work to add Leveraged ETH to expo. Leveraged ETH is a token that moves at a multiple of the price of ETH.
Working on designs to improve onboarding for expo.
Work trialed a technical recruiting candidate.
Hiring for design, engineering, and operations roles full-time in SF.
Brendan and Nadav from Dharma
Announced Dharma Lever, a trustless service for accessing margin in high volume from anywhere in the world, affordably and instantly. Read more here and sign up to be an Alpha Partner here.
Hosting #DeFi Summit - Prague on Monday 29 Oct. The event will be filmed and livestreamed -- check out the livestreams here (1, 2, 3, 4).
Our team is attending DevCon this week. If you want to meet us, shoot an email to brendan@dharma.io.
We’re hiring for a product manager, a product designer, and more. Check out our open positions here.
Coulter from MakerDAO
Headed to Devcon or just want to know what Maker is up to during the event? We've got talks, workshops and parties. Stop by and say hello!
Announced the Core Community Development Group. An initiative to foster and grow some of our most motivated community members through incentives and support structures.
We have FINALLY launched an official public telegram group. Join us for news, discussions, and maybe even some teasers before they go public :)
Lazar from MARKET Protocol
We have been doing the final clean up of our simulated exchange dApp and we would appreciate anyone wants to check it out and let us know if they have suggestions on the UX or a feature or find any crazy bugs. Join the discussion on our Discord #engineering chat
We have launched the MPX upcoming page on Product Hunt. Please subscribe to be notified on its official release date.
Robert Joran and I attended the DeFi Summit and we'll be attending DevCon, as a part of the Prague blockchain week! We would love to meetup if you're there!
Robert from Compound
Built API to deliver protocol data in one fast, cached API call rather than multiple calls to Infura. Started work on tracking Compound financial data to build additional APIs.
Released a significant update / redesign to the Compound web application, focused on improving user experience.
Layer two and interoperability
Tieshun from Namebase
Built initial version of our exchange for HNS, which is working with Handshake testnet coins.
Deployed testnet referral program so that Namebase users can earn testnet HNS to experiment with.
Paul from Veil
Opened up Veil’s alpha, so users not using a web3 wallet like Metamask can view markets and other pages without having to first log in. Here’s the list of open markets.
Added the first version of user profiles, including an activity feed and stats. Here’s mine as an example. We think of this as an important first step towards social prediction markets and derivatives.
Added a leaderboard, ranking users by their returns across Veil. The leaderboard is the best way to discover other users’ profiles right now. Here’s the link.
Added a new registration process, so anyone can join and onboard to Veil’s alpha. Sign up here.
Rahul from 0x
No Updates.
Janine from Liquidity.Network
New endpoints have been added to the Liquidity Network Hub, to help developers retrieve statistics about various hub metrics. For more information please use our dedicated developer Telegram group.
Improvements are being made to the mobile app available on both iOS and Android. Performance improvements of our libraries and also improving our developer experience. Please see our SDK.
Dong Mo from Celer
We released v0.7.0 (fixing bugs and enhancing functionality), successfully tested out hot migration of OSP servers with no service interruption (critical to mitigate any DDoS attacks) and added retry functionalities in the protocol and implementation for concurrent payments.
We added configurable confirmation delay for on-chain events and transactions to counter re-orgs, added persistence for AuthOpenChannel and add 60-block timeout for AuthOpenChannel, added Piggyback expired/onchain-resolved condition groups with new conditional payment msgs, significantly reduced the number of on-chain event subscriptions of OSP server and fixed bug functionalities and gRPC memory leaks based on testnet's running feedbacks.
We released Android 0.7.4 (which fixes bugs and improved stability on various phone types and OS variants), and an iOS cWallet (which finished joining Celer UI and cApps listing UI. For the Mobile SDK, we finished iOS multiplayer game sample and designed JoinCeler API for Android and iOS.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
At Web3 Summit, Gavin Wood announced that Substrate 1.0-beta would be released in November under the Apache 2.0 license, and used Substrate to launch a blockchain on a new computer in under 60 minutes. TechCrunch and Coindesk covered the news. Full presentation and demo recording here.
Jutta Steiner's first piece for Forbes is out: "What the Heck is Web 3.0 Anyway?"
Polkadot cofounder Robert Habermeier presented on the implications of interoperability at Web3 Summit.
Also at Web3 Summit was a lively governance panel with Vlad Zamfir, Gavin Wood, Arthur Breitman, and Adrian Brink. Recording here.
New how-to on installing and running a Substrate node on BBQ-Birch testnet.
Going to Devcon? There will be a Parity + Polkadot meetup the evening of Tuesday, October 30th.
Application infrastructure
Doug from Livepeer
Released a series of updates to the Livepeer Protocol Explorer, including easier navigation + search, and links to popular protocol statistics via Supermax.
Topics Livepeer is exploring at Devcon include Probabilistic Micropayments, STARKs, Data Availability, Generalized Mining, and of course, web3 infrastructure and video. Join our talks and breakout discussions, as listed in our research post.
Ryan from FOAM
Published "Signaling on FOAM: A novel staking mechanism to incentivize location-specific mining" that specifies the design of signals as Non-Fungible Tokens. This will be launched prior to November 9th, when the FOAM "Initial Use Period" concludes and tokens become unlocked.
David and @tbenz9 from Sia
2 Nebulous repo were updated. 8 issues were created, 10 were closed. 11 MRs were merged.
GitLab users xurious, Shatnerz, MSevey, ChrisSchinnerl, lukechampine and DavidVorick had code contributions merged into Sia.
Sia version 1.3.7 was released, this release includes a small bug fix that is required for the hardfork scheduled for block 179,000 (expected to be Wednesday). If you rent space on the Sia network or run a Sia host please make sure you upgrade to Sia version 1.3.7 before Wednesday. More information about the fork and the exchanges supporting the fork can be found here.
Chris began working on transitioning the .sia file format from JSON to binary blob. This change will enable Sia to modify parts of the .sia file without reading and writing the whole file. It is expected that this change will dramatically improve the performance of having thousands, and potentially millions of files owned by a single Sia user, and allow Sia to scale to hosting very large single files (on the order of tens of Terabytes).
From external contributors: Shatnerz adapted the Sia-Ant-Farm repository (a sort of local testnet for developers) to comply with the new API password requirement and also corrected the path of its dependencies. Xurious corrected a vulnerability in the block headers validation. Thanks to both of them.
Other
Martin from Tezos
No Updates.
Ari from Decentraland
No Updates.
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
DDEX Wallet (iOS, Android) selective test for recovery words feature and wallet connect feature in development.
Hydro and DDEX assist in the launch of WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin Tokens) for bringing Bitcoin to Ethereum.
Sam from OpenBazaar
Social posts within OpenBazaar are an upcoming feature that is mostly working and we're now figuring out the best way to search and display them within the mobile app.
Client and server work continue on the multiwallet feature, and we've been doing work to ensure there is reliable infrastructure in place once it's rolled out in the desktop and mobile clients.
Martín from Zeppelin
No Updates.