Proof of Work #46
Hi from Shanghai! A lot has happened in China since I was last here. Hong Kong recently announced official policy around licensing custody solutions and exchanges, which appears to be a pretty big deal and somewhat underreported. The regulation is official but is open to further modification, which is probably necessary because some of the provisions are fairly unreasonable—for example, exchanges in HK are required to have fully separated cold-storage accounts for each user, something which currently no exchanges anywhere do because of the extreme ops overhead. However the very existence of these regs is promising, and enables a bunch of HK based institutions (like the IBD divisions of large HK banks etc) to start to get in the game, something which our friends there say they have a large appetite for.
A lot of wealthy people in China are feeling extremely insecure these days as a result of things like the sudden disappearance of Fan Bingbing (when she reappeared months later, she paid a 100 million dollar fine for supposed tax evasion, and made a profuse public apology) and the word on the street is that many of them are starting to look at Bitcoin as a good hedge against total seizure of assets. Onboarding is pretty difficult because HNWs in China tend to have a lot of assets in corporate accounts which are completely prohibited from buying crypto, but there are several interesting workarounds that I’ll stay quiet about for now 😂.
More next week, thanks for reading!
Bitcoin & Friends
Daniel from Grin
The big update this week is that we arranged grincon0 – the first conference on Grin & Mimblewimble – to a full house at c-base in Berlin. Our anonymous project founder joined via ssh to deliver the opening of the conference through text-to-speech. YouTube video playlist of all the talks.
24 Pull Requests were merged in the past week, by 9 unique contributors.
While we've since dropped down in the ranks, Grin was briefly the #1 trending Rust repo on GitHub over a monthly basis.
More Grin info here.
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Aviv from Spacemesh
No Updates.
JZ from Decred
Quick recap of Decred dev activity for October: 310 active PRs, 297 commits, 65.5K additions & 22.6K deletions across 4-9 devs per repo.
Bee has also pushed the latest issue of the Decred Journal, turns out we had a busy month, so busy in fact that we hit Reddit's ceiling for post length when trying to document it all. There's still a thread for discussion as usual. A few of the highlights were; the addition of a new corporate contractor to the project, a near doubling of the network hashrate as ASICs from new manufacturers begin to come online, and our first batch of Politeia votes concluding (more on that below).
Richard has provided an overview of the Politeia activity over the last week. The participation rates for the 4 votes that were held varied from 31-51% of all eligible tickets, the high end of that range is similar to what we have seen with our on-chain consensus votes and is quite encouraging for such a new system, it may even rise as we get the word out. On that note, the stakeholders apparently thought it was time for us to get some professional help (not that kind...), and a proposal to hire Ditto PR to represent the project was successful. Expect me to be replaced with someone who knows what they're doing imminently.
Johnny from Stellar
No Updates.
Izaak from Coda
The proof-of-payment system making it possible for users to prove that a transaction occurred while maintaining succinctness of the blockchain was implemented (most recent PR here).
We have the initial implementation of proof-of-stake on a test network. It ran successfully for several thousand blocks.
We decided on a design for the stake delegation mechanism and began its implementation, heavily refactoring the transaction SNARK to be more easily extensible in the process.
Mitchell from Blockstack
The Stacks Blockchain is officially live and the first transaction took place. More about the Stacks Blockchain on the forum.
There's still time to register for the next round of App Mining payouts, developers can learn more hereor browse previous recipients and their dapps here.
Privacy coins
Elise from Zcash
See the weekly Zcash update here
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
No Updates.
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
MetaMask’s privacy mode (EIP1102). Right now, it’s opt-in for users, but devs should update. Their mobile app is aiming for q1 2019.
Burner Wallet runs on POA’s xDAI and exchanges value between phones without app download.
Whitelisting holders and traders of security tokens with ERC-1404.
Myles from EOS
Version 1.4.3 of EOSIO released.
LiquidEOS and Bancor released Bancor X, a protocol for cross-chain movement of tokens.
Two new proposals for the EOS constitution were released, from EOS New York and Blockhead Capital.
One of the biggest dApps on EOS, BetDice, releases a new Baccarat game.
Thomas Cox responds to the Whiteblock EOS Report
Zaki from Cosmos
This week we finished the development of Cosmos Proof of Stake and launched the Gaia-9001 testnet .
Figment Network open sourced their Cosmos Network explorer Hubble.
We did a Q&A about Game of Stakes and a community member wrote a summary.What's next? Internal bug hunting, Game of Stakes, getting signatures on staking transactions for genesis validators and launch!
Kate and Dean from Agoric
We hosted the OCAP workshop at SPLASH (the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity) in Boston. Highlights included:
A keynote by Marc Stiegler on the “Lost Wisdom of the Ancients,” the patterns that have historically been helpful for secure user interfaces.
A talk by Professor Colin Gordon on the trade-offs between static capabilities and effect systems
A presentation by JF Paradis of Salesforce on how Salesforce uses a JavaScript ocap security kernel to protect against untrusted third party applications in the Salesforce Locker Service
A demo of the Wyvern programming language by Professor Jonathan Aldrich
Financial Infrastructure
James from Summa
We're running a cross-chain dutch auction on Thursday!
We recently released bitcoin-spv -- a Solidity library for parsing and verifying Bitcoin transactions.
Here's a post about how Stateless SPV proofs work.
Riemann, our transaction construction library, now supports Zcash's Sapling hard fork, in addition to 20 other chains.
Antonio from dYdX
Added new in-product education to expo.
Implementing trade history and wallet connect on expo.
Adding OasisDEX integration to improve liquidity
Brendan from Dharma
Continued building Dharma Lever.
We’re hiring for a product manager, a product designer, and more. Check out our open positions here.
Coulter from MakerDAO
For those waiting on an update to Multi-Collateral Dai, we released a blog detailing the roadmap and the scope of the project.
Published a repo that we've dubbed "everything you wanted to know about MakerDAO and Dai." It's an incredibly in-depth resource for anyone even moderately interested in how the the Maker ecosystem works, from official documentation, to beginner guides, to analysis pieces, tools, and beyond.
Devcon was busy for the team, from talks to workshops to pirate ships and raves. Get caught up on everything we did here.
We were also at BSL2018, checking out the vibrant crypto ecosystem in Latin America. You can read our recap and hackathon winners here.
The SwapOnline team listed DAI pairs with BTC and USDT.
Phil from MARKET Protocol
After many months of work and 13,000+ lines of code, we are thrilled to announce the beta release of MPX – the first decentralized exchange built on MARKET Protocol, launched on the Rinkeby Testnet! Visit https://mpexchange.io/ to start trading today and check out our official announcement to learn all about the DEX features!
Robert from Compound
Completed a community vote to select a stablecoin; conducted internal audit of the winner’s (DAI) ERC-20 source code, and oracle system as a source of pricing data.
Published developer documentation for the Compound protocol, APIs, and code samples.
Completed a “Quick Borrow” sample contract which will be open-sourced as a developer example, and and deployed to Rinkeby.
Layer two and interoperability
Tieshun from Namebase
Registered with FinCEN as an MSB.
Paul from Veil
Last week we added support for meme markets—Augur markets that track the popularity of r/MemeEconomy posts. This week we’re letting anyone submit memes and create markets. Try it out here.
Added a portfolio page (note you have to be logged in to see the page), so users can quickly view all the markets they’ve participated in as well as their current performance in those markets.
Various bug fixes and usability improvements.
Rahul from 0x
No Updates.
Janine from Liquidity.Network
Liquidity Network test hub is now successfully running and RPC endpoints have been added.
A monitoring dashboard has been created and is currently being tested.
Achievement Network has a new interface this will improve the overall UX and UI experience for the user.
Off-Chain amount bug has been fixed within the SDK. Please continue to send us your feedback try our dedicated developer Telegram group.
Dong Mo from Celer
No Updates.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
The alpha release of Parity Fether is out. Parity Fether is a light client-based, decentralised Ethereum wallet. It paves the way for developers to embed light clients in their applications instead of relying on centralised nodes.
The recording from Gavin Wood's Substrate workshop is out. The workshop includes deploying a smart contract on the Substrate testnet.
Thibaut Sardan wrote a new tutorial on setting up a private blockchain using Parity Ethereum, Aura consensus, and a dynamic validator set contract.
CoinTelegraph covered the upcoming Substrate launch.
Jack Fransham presented on "Parity Substrate: A Blockchain Framework with Magic Powers.”
We have new job openings, including technical content creator.
Application infrastructure
Doug from Livepeer
No Updates.
Ryan from FOAM
No Updates.
David from Sia
12 MRs were merged into the Sia repository.
GitLab users tbenz9 (community contributor (“cc”)), starius (cc), drexel1 (cc), nielscastien (cc), chrisschinnerl, msevey, davidvorick, and lukechampine had code contributions merged into the Sia repository.
It’s great to see so many community contributors this week, if anyone is interested in getting involved in the code and needs help getting started please reach out to me (tbenz9) or a member of the Sia team.
Several large features were merged into Sia this week. Sevey’s “host whitelist blacklist” was finalized and merged into the master branch, along with, community contributor, Drexel’s “ability to overwrite existing file when uploading” merge request. These are both features that have been in development for several weeks and are now officially in the code.
Chris had his “Move SiaFile on-disk encoding from JSON to binary” merge request merged into the “unstable” branch which has been the main development branch for 1.4.0 features. Luke merged an exciting feature enabling partial downloads to be validated through “Merkle range proofs”.
As always, you can see a full list of code contributions, and development conversations here.
Other
Martin from Tezos
No Updates.
Ari from Decentraland
Last week, we released Marketplace version 1.3.0, adding support for LAND Mortgages.
Also released Marketplace version 1.3.3, fixing bugs in the Map API.
Released Agora version 2.1.1, improving performance when querying results.
We began deploying content to the Alpha Client for the Public Plazas.
Finally, we worked on adding Estate support for Public Plazas and Districts in the Marketplace.
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
Ready to ship DDEX Wallet 1.1 with new features of retrying or accelerating stuck transactions, Wallet Connect, and multi-base-pair,multi-language and multi-currency support.
Added MetaMask's privacy mode.
Changed Market's price and price change to CoinMarketCap's data (refreshed every 1 min).
Sam from OpenBazaar
OpenBazaar 2.0 is celebrating its first year online.
Work continues on the multiwallet feature for the upcoming 2.3.0 release. Bug fixes and integration testing is happening on the server side as the client side finishes the last remaining pieces.
On the infrastructure side we realized a limitation on the Insight servers relating to Segwit transactions will pose a problem in the wallet, and we are investigating possible solutions now.
Martín from Zeppelin
No Updates.