Proof of Work #57
Hi from Boston! The MIT Bitcoin Expo is a student-run conference put on by the MIT Bitcoin Club, and is one of the few conferences I go to every year. I’ve got a free ticket to give away to a PoW reader. Whoever first responds to this tweet with “PoW” gets it! Malformed transactions will not be accepted.
Some housekeeping: I fixed the weird DNS bug that killed commonapp.proofofwork.news so you can now go there and fill out a simple form to simultaneously apply for a job at all the projects in PoW plus some other cool ones like Shapeshift, Coinbase etc. This tool will be getting way better over the next month, but when it died a surprising number of people yelled at me, so apparently it’s getting used now too!
I’m in the process of writing up a few long form pieces but nothing’s ready for this issue—in the meantime, I’ve found this ongoing series about the weird arb opportunities between different Tether clones to be really interesting.
If you are coming to the MIT Bitcoin expo this weekend, please hit me up on Twitter or just say hi at the conf! Would love to meet any readers there.
Bitcoin & Friends
Jimmy on Bitcoin
James from Summa
This week we released riemann-keys, a simple HD wallet library in Python.
Our Bitcoin light client, riemann-zeta, is getting a major upgrade to support transaction history
light client + keys + tx building = multi-chain wallet :)
Tony from Kadena
We're adding more functionality to our Pact smart contract language for interoperability. On track for Testnet launch of Kadena's public blockchain, Chainweb, at the end of March 2019.
Merged support for multiple key curves in a single transaction, including Ethereum ECDSA address formats, which opens the path to ERC-20 interop and ledger transfer to FungibleAsset tokens on Chainweb.
Merged programmable governance for customizable security primitives that allows module governance to be determined by code, and not just keysets. This allows for different participants to have varying levels of access in multiple signature scenarios.
Monica Quaintance gave a presentation on Chainweb and smart contracts at LedgerFest hosted by Blockchain @ Columbia.
Marie Leaf spoke about smart contract security and scalability at DeveloperWeek Bay Area.
Aviv from Spacemesh
First batch of fixes after achieving milestone 1
New validation rules for hare protocol messages
Updated p2p ping protocol
New ed25591 signatures extension methods - a drop-in replacement for golang/crypto/ed25519 with additional capabilities
View our full updates => https://spacemesh.io/weekly-updates/
JZ from Decred
Some good news for iPhone users, dcrios is now on TestFlight. Bug reports are welcome. Over the coming weeks it should approach parity with dcrandroid in terms of stability.
A new issue of Politeia Digest was released covering the most recent proposals, we're also super happy to announce that the stakeholders approved marketing and events budgets for the remainder of 2019. Dev budgets will be following shortly along with a proposal for converting Decred into a full DAO.
Our inaugural meet up for the Decred community in San Francisco will be taking place on March 6th. Decred dev Luke Powell will be presenting along with Chris Burniske and Alex Evans from Placeholder.
There will also be another special event on March 12th held at the OKCoin HQin SF featuring our project lead Jake Yocom-Piatt along with Chris Burniske (that guy is everywhere) called "The Next 10 Years: Crypto Boom, Bust, or Buidl?"
Johnny from Stellar
General: Fee Stats were launched in Horizon; it's necessary for handling Surge Pricing by any implementation that submits transactions.
Core: Getting closer to 10.3.0, ETA for snapshot (and testnet) is Mar-04, with a release planned Mar-14. Our focus will be on how we write to the ledger, with a 10x speedup on our low-end machines to join the network (from 100 minutes to 10 minutes).
Core: Next up is shifting to 11.0.0, with a focus on protocol changes (CAP-0005, CAP-0006, limits, etc.).
Horizon: Released Horizon 0.17.3, changelog: failed transactions, tools for surge pricing. Horizon Go SDK is being actively redesigned.
Kelp: Improvements mentioned by partners in the ecosystem.
Izaak from Coda
Snarky has a beautiful new monad-free interface thanks to Matt. Check out an example here (in ReasonML syntax).
Avery has started the initial work on our desktop wallet.
Rebekah implemented this map described in this paper from a field into an elliptic curve defined over that field. It's an essential component for an efficient group-valued random oracle, which is needed to instantiate Bowe and Gabizon's SNARK.
There were many robustness improvements to our implementation of Ouroboros Praos, including an amazing sequence of bug fixes by Corey.
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Progress implementing Sprout -> Sapling migration tool
New ZIP draft for prohibiting negative shielded value pool [ed: this would make it impossible if someone had indeed exploited the previous bug to inflate the old shielded pool for them to actually move more coins than should exist into the transparent pool]
Documentation and internal testing on lightwallet Android reference app
Full update: https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/march-1st-2018-weekly-update-engineering/32818
Diego and Riccardo from Monero
Working on figuring out the right person to get updates from!
Daniel from Grin
18 Pull Requests were merged in the past week, by 9 unique contributors.
Preview windows binaries available for both wallet and server now, courtesy of @yeastplume.
A paper was published by GandalfThePink proposing extensions of Mimblewimble to enable user-issued assets among other things. [cool]
Developer Antioch Peverell was awarded a donation from the dev fund to enable full time work on Grin for the next three months.
Funding income and spending logs were added to grin-pm.
More Grin info here.
Beni from Beam
Wallet API and Node Explorer API 2.0.4429 (#497, #499, , #500, #489, #488, #484)
Payment proof (#415) in progress
Atomic swap POC (#447) in progress
Update syncing mechanism, to be faster and more effective (#454) in progress
Update API protocol and integration guide (#496)
Update CLI subcommands #487
Integration with Trezor hardware wallet in progress
Started iOS wallet development (Github)
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
The Constantinople upgrade so far has forked successfully, so Eth issuance now comparable to BTC. [ed: it’s currently .5% higher, but unlike Bitcoin the future inflation is not explicitly knowable]
Useful walkthrough and context on Eth2 from Danny Ryan on the Zero Knowledge podcast. You can use Trent’s notes to follow along.
Layer 2: Plasma Group: toward a general purpose Plasma to make it much easier for devs to write plasma apps. Also, zk-channel payments on Ethereum
Erik from NEAR
NEAR is working on getting a multi-node AlphaNet shipped.
23 PRs in nearcore from 12 different authors
AlphaNet (fully operational blockchain w/ fixed validator set, showing @ ETH Paris):
Stabilized mempool and transaction gossiping;
Nightshade consensus is now integrated with network, mempool, and the rest of the infrastructure;
AlphaNet is producing blocks;
DevNet (a single node blockchain for development purposes):
Improved debug logging of the internal state;
Improved ease of use for local development;
AJ from Tezos
The first Tezos on-chain proposals has been injected into the protocol! The community will now commence with a voting period.
Learn on how you can vote for a Tezos proposal with your Ledger Nano S
Keep track of the ongoing protocol proposal here
Introducing a new RFP process for Tezos Ecosystems grants
Topper from Quorum Control
We added IPLD storage support for chaintrees
Made significant progress towards Go client
Published two articles: Building Something Real on Blockchain and a primer analysis on TPS in blockchain
We’re hiring a Community Developer. Check out the job description and apply online or send resumes to careers@quorumcontrol.com
Michael from Loom
More than 6% of the total circulating supply (and $2M+ in total value) was staked on PlasmaChain after its first week!
Added Ledger support on the PlasmaChain Dashboard. Note: the most recent Chrome update from broke Ledger, so those users are advised to downgrade to an older version of Chrome or wait for an upcoming fix from Ledger.
The second CryptoWars tournament has started with $3,750 worth of prizes for winners. Go play!
Myles from EOS
EOSIO v1.7.0 release candidate issued
Read our commentary on full history nodes on EOS
LiquidApps DAPP Network goes live
EOSIO toolkit update released by Block.one
ITAM announced their digital goods exchange
Zaki from Cosmos
Launch blockers:
Simulator caught an inconsistent state when a slashing event and redelegation event for the same validator occur in the same block.
A subtle rounding error. Fractional values are the final boss of proof of stake systems.
Expect a final launch date/time when those fixes are released.
Kate and Dean from Agoric
Mark Miller gave a presentation to TC53, the standards committee for JavaScript applications on wearable devices/IoT, on SES and Jessie. Peter Hoddie of Moddable described it as an “amazing talk about a future where JavaScript code from multiple parties securely co-exists, where program logic is exchanged as easily as JSON data, and standard JavaScript works even better on constrained devices.”
Metamask presented their browserify plugin, sesify, at our weekly meeting on SES. Recording here.
We’ve been working on making our utility libraries usable as CommonJS modules, ES6 modules, and UMD files, so that they can easily be used in Node.js, the browser, and bundlers.
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
Heads down building towards our next product release. Stay tuned for additional info in a few weeks!
Undergoing an audit of our new smart contracts with Open Zeppelin
Hiring engineers and designers full-time in SF
Brendan from Dharma
Prepped Dharma Lever for a feature launch coming on Wednesday. #DeFi lovers will rejoice
Dharma Lever saw strong growth in weekly volume across both borrowing (>100k USD, ~100% WoW growth) and lending (>150k USD, ~95% WoW growth). Borrow volume split was ~75% ETH, 25% USDC
Our team is growing! We recently hit 10 people, and now we're hiring for a front-end engineer and a full-stack engineer. Check out our open roles at: https://angel.co/dharma-labs/jobs.
Coulter from MakerDAO
Our recap of ETHDenver went live, featuring some drama, crime, and a whole lot of charitable giving.
For any developers looking to build on Maker, we've released a resource blog to help guide you.
If you're interested in how the Maker governance process works, we would suggest joining our weekly Governance calls on Thursdays, or the new r/mkrgov subreddit. Recently, a lot has been happening on them, including the discussions about raising the stability fee.
Lazar from MARKET Protocol
MPX nearly fully set up and back to parity with our pre-0x December release
Reintegrated 0x order watcher, now begins observing valid orders on startup
The MPX UI and dashboard look amazing, we can’t wait to show this off
Authentication via ETH address is in place
Added ‘settled’ filter to GET API endpoint
Added tokens whitelist API endpoint
Robert from Compound
Began audit with Trail of Bits for protocol extension
Layer two and interoperability
Tieshun from Namebase
Nothing public this week
Paul from Veil
Listed new scalar markets on Binance Coin (BNB) and Maker (MKR). You can now take 5x leveraged long or short positions on either asset.
Updated the orders table to let users filter by order status (open, canceled, or filled).
Listed markets for the Cosmos community, including when the Cosmos mainnet hub will launch and what the price of $ATOM will be post-launch.
Added a clearer order confirmation message to the default market UI.
Added Augur market ID to market and feed pages for easy access by users and reporters.
Rahul from 0x
Announcing the launch of 0x Extensions: forwarder contract, dutch auction contract, and templates for a whitelist contract
Extension contracts are safe to deploy since they do not modify the state of the protocol, working by plugging in before the order is pushed through the 0x core pipeline. Check out our documentation to build your own extension contract
ZEIP 23 was passed! Check out our guide to using the MultiAssetProxy contract in the 0x-starter-project
0x Instant now integrated into EtherScan; Product lead Tom speaking at DeFi meetup this Thursday (3/7) in SF
Tony from Liquidity.Network
Rolled out a hub with passive delivery on Rinkeby
The nocust-client JavaScript library 1.0 is out and available to developers to use at docs.liquidity.network
Liquidity network had an AMA with Unitimes
Dong Mo from Celer
We've finished the design review of the CelerX platform plan and the API flows.
Deployed a multi-server scalable OSP configuration and a new OSP protocol working end-to-end on the multi-server OSP.
Designed a more efficient on-chain dispute process.
On our mobile side, we finished the referral flow and game matching engine client API testing.
We fixed bugs and improved stability for CelerX.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
Constantinople happened!
We had a rare all-hands meeting at our Berlin offices to discuss the year ahead.
Gautam Dhameja spoke on building a TCR on Substrate.
New guide on setting up a Polkadot node the easy way.
Thibaut Sardan published his user research on Fether wallet.
Interested in building on Polkadot? The Web3 Foundation is providing grants.
Like talking to devs and traveling? We're hiring a Tech Ambassador.
Application infrastructure
Wes from Theta
iOS/Android Theta wallet polishing
New version of Theta explorer released
Streamer reward auto-split testing and fixes
Blockchain snapshot with stake deposits/withdrawals
Blockchain state-trie auto-pruning improvement
Doug from Livepeer
This week was heavily focused on research, with meaningful progress made on three open research areas for Streamflow: Probabilistic Micropayments double-spend security, GPU transcoding verification, and efficient node selection/negotiation algorithms. Follow along with progress in the research repository.
The network expansion successfully rolled out with 10 additional transcoder nodes, including two governance focused nodes campaigning DAO style tools for node operations, and one infrastructure focused node.
Ryan from FOAM
Released new post "Rise of the FOAM GeoPickle TestNet: Simulating zone anchors for dynamic Proof of Location" highlighting our recent progress.
Released FOAM Community Call — Dynamic Proof of Location Part II Summary
New Heatmap Layer released and added to the Map
New Notification system released and added to the Map
Leaderboard Beta Currently Live - Adding 3Box identity profiles this week
David from Sia
R
Other
Ari from Decentraland
No update this week
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
Hydro Starter Kit in progress ETA Q2 2019 - Empower developers to build (Order book) DEX with matching engine (No front-running, No order collision).
DDEX Mobile design 2.0 - Support MutiChain wallet and simplify mobile user experience
Internal beta testing HydroScan - Visualization tool developer to see on-chain transaction, volume, DAU through Hydro Protocol
Sam from OpenBazaar
A release candidate for the 2.3.1 update was published and is undergoing testing. 2.3.1 includes a significant IPFS rebase and the ability to update accepted coins on listings in bulk.
Work continues on the new web client, the current focus is on creating and authenticating a peerID in the browser.
Martín from Zeppelin
Shipped OpenZeppelin 2.1.3—a minor bugfix release
Ramon Recuero announced the ZepKit and Dennison wrote an introductory guide for it!
Santiago Palladino published the ZeppelinOS Feb 2019 development update
Leo Arias shared his ERC20Snapshot for OpenZeppelin draft review
Leo Arias wrote a quality checklist for smart contracts before an audit
Dennison Bertram hosted a live coding workshop with the community in New York
The Zeppelin team went to ETHDenver and Dennison wrote a recap and bounty Winners!