Proof of Work #59
Today’s PoW is abbreviated a bit because I’ve been busy with welcoming a new Bitcoiner into the world. Proof of Baby here.
More next week… :)
Bitcoin & Friends
Optech on Bitcoin [ed: sign up for their newsletter too! it’s great!]
Help test Bitcoin Core 0.18.0 RC2: The second Release Candidate (RC) for the next major version of Bitcoin Core has been released. Testing is still needed by organizations and experienced users who plan to run the new version of Bitcoin Core in production. Use this issuefor reporting feedback.
Spy node ban list updated: some IP addresses are performing various attacks that are likely aimed at monitoring transaction propagation so that they can attempt to determine which nodes originated which transactions. To help node operators refuse connections from those IP addresses, Gregory Maxwell maintains a ban list that can be imported into Bitcoin Core and compatible nodes. There is absolutely no need to use this centralized list—your fully decentralized node will attempt to connect to a diverse enough set of peers that it should establish at least one honest connection—but using this ban list may reduce the amount of traffic you waste on spy nodes and other bad actors. The list comes in two formats, one for use on the command line with bitcoin-cli and one that can be pasted into the debug console of Bitcoin Core GUI. The blacklisted IP addresses are banned for one year and Bitcoin Core will remember the bans between restarts, so you only need to import the list once. Note: some users have reported that the ban list may exceed the maximum buffer size for the GUI on some platforms, requiring pasting it in chunks of about 250 entries each in order to load the whole list.
Aviv from Spacemesh
Spacemesh is a programmable cryptocurrency powered by a novel proof-of-space-time consensus protocol.
Hare Protocol test functions for testing latency and scenarios in real-world network conditions
Containers for testing node scenarios in real-world conditions
New methods for testing network scenarios
Basic GRPC layer for communication with POET server
App - new wallet core features
App - Additional new features merged PRs
Full update https://spacemesh.io/weekly-updates/
JZ from Decred
Decred’s vision is to build a self-directed, decentralized future ruled by the collective intelligence of the community. It will be built upon the pillars of sovereignty, transparency, inclusivity, privacy, and security. Everyone can vote on the rules and project-level decision making proportionately to their stake, yielding decisions and policies in the best interest of all — not just a select few.
A new consensus vote has begun to enable Lightning Network to work on Decred by activating DCP-0004. Stakeholders are encouraged to set their vote bits in Decrediton or dcrwallet so they can participate. The vote can be monitored here.
New issue of Politeia Digest covering March 1-14 on Decred's Politeia governance platform. 1 new proposal submitted, 6 proposals finished voting (5 accepted, 1 rejected).
A wild fiat pair appears... We're extremely pleased to announce that OKCoin has listed Decred and is providing us our first DCR/USD pair along with BTC and ETH pairs. Read more about it here.
The Wall Street Journal published a nice overview piece on Decred which includes some quotes from project lead Jake Yocom-Piatt.
Johnny from Stellar
Stellar is an open network for sending and exchanging value of any kind. Our global network enables digitization of assets - from carbon credits to currencies - and enables movement around the internet with ease. In doing so, it’s faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly than alternative platforms, and it empowers users and organizations to create a global, dependable network of trust while maintaining decentralization.
Core: Stellar Core 10.3.0 has been released. Includes large performance improvements when nodes first join the network (primarily due to database optimizations). Version 11 in up next.
Horizon: Horizon 0.17.4 has been released. Includes compatibility with Stellar Core 10.3.0.
Platform: Go SDK, txnbuild, and other platform tools have seen major improvements in the last few weeks. Take a look at what we're up to.
Protocol Updates: CAP-0017 accepted, CAP-0018 FCP, many additional drafts. New process for adding protocol changes here.
Stellar Development Foundation: New Stellar Logo, Denelle Dixon (Mozilla COO) joins as SDF's Executive Director & CEO.
Izaak from Coda
Coda is the first cryptocurrency protocol with a constant-sized blockchain. Coda compresses the entire blockchain into a tiny snapshot the size of a few tweets using recursive ZK-snarks
Echo began hooking in the trust and peer-banning mechanism.
Jiawei has been fixing bugs and writing several integration tests.
Paul has been making sure all network communication will be backwards compatible across protocol upgrades.
Matt has made numerous improvements in snarky, including adding a generic conditional.
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Zcash is a privacy-protecting, digital currency built on strong science.
Draft ZIPs for NU3 (the network upgrade after Blossom) are due by the end of the month
Blossom spec auditing underway next week
Continued implementation work on Sprout -> Sapling migration tool and the automatic counterfeiting plan
Open sourced reference wallet code
Full update here: https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/march-15-2019-weekly-update-engineering/32911
Mitchell from Monero
Monero is a open-source privacy-focused cryptocurrency, maintained by a grassroots community of volunteers and crowdfunded contributors since 2014. Monero uses an ASIC-resistant CryptoNote PoW algorithm, and enforces all privacy features at the protocol level to ensure that all transactions create a single fungible anonymity pool.
We’re reviewing a recent proposal to create shorter MLSAGs with hidden amounts.
Monero Koferenco is going to be hosted in Denver, CO, USA on 22-23 June. There’s still room for a few more conference speakers, so please submit an abstract.
The hashrate has remained stable at ~250 MH/s since last week’s network upgrade, which switched to the CryptoNightR variant with ASIC-incompatible random integer math.
We’re discussing a recent proposal for a bitmessage-style messaging protocol for Monero addresses, which is metadata free since no information about the sender or receiver is included, and the message is simply the ciphertext, which each user tries to decrypt with their own keys.
Daniel from Grin
Grin is a community-driven implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol that aims to be privacy preserving, scalable, fair, and minimal.
11 Pull Requests were merged in the past week, by 8 unique contributors.
@yeastplume has been busy hammering away on grin-wallet. Slate versioning and conversions. API v2, and more.
@bddap has been making Wallet API v2 contributions.
The governance meeting approved a 3 month donation for Ignotus Peverell to work full-time on the project.
We're evaluating our current security and vulnerability disclosure process.
Knockturn Allee - Open source WooCommerce/WordPress plugin to help businesses accept Grin payments, by Cycle42.
grin.report - New site for grin network performance stats, by @mcdallas.
Grin Amsterdam event is taking place on March 26th - come join us there!
More Grin info here.
Beni from Beam
A confidential and scalable cryptocurrency based on Mimblewimble.
Add API to send specific UTXO #502
Transaction in "Waiting for receiver" status should be able to live 12 hours #473
Node Explorer: Store the logs in "logs" folder #514
Bug Wallet Fix #529
Atomic Swap CLI #447 in progress
Fast Sync #454 in progress
Android wallet Mainnet in progress
iOS wallet Testnet in progress
Hardware wallet - Trezor in progress
Arnaud from AZTEC Protocol
AZTEC Protocol is an efficient zero-knowledge protocol built on top of Ethereum, making plug-and-play value transmission and asset governance privacy tools for developers and companies.
We are preparing for our full audit, with the focus being on finalising APIs, bug fixing, writing documentation and general cleanup. We merged 3 pull requests this week along those lines.
Ongoing feature work this week includes:
Improved proof versioning (to allow for upgradability of the proof verifiers through consent of assets which use AZTEC)
Our CTO Zac Williamson presented a deep dive into AZTEC at ETHCC
We’re hiring for two cryptographers and one senior engineer to join the team. You can apply here, or by emailing arnaud@aztecprotocol.com with the name of the role as the subject.
Smart contracting platforms
Evan from Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference.
Latest issue of what’s new in eth2
Connext’s DaiCard launches on mainnet. Instant Dai payments over state channels. Limited to $30 right now as it is still beta.
Vitalik Buterin “scalable blockchains as data layers” talk at Taipei meetup on getting 270,000 transactions per second through zk rollups
Erik from NEAR
NEAR is a sharded proof-of-stake blockchain that enables great usability for both developers and their end-users.
25 PRs in nearcore from 10 different authors (weekly digest for 3/3-3/13).
New Whiteboard Series episode with Stan Kladko SKALE Labs
Blockchain Layer:
Stabilizing TestNet “Alpha”: reactive catchup for blocks and bug fixes.
Caching authority computation to speed up startup time
Application / Development Layer:
AJ from Tezos
Tezos is a self-amending blockchain that features formally verified smart contracts, on-chain governance, and a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm which enables all token holders to participate in the network.
Introducing a new smart contract langauge for Tezos, Ligo. LIGO is a simple smart contract language designed for developing longer contracts than one would naturally write in Michelson. It is an imperative language that compiles down to clean Michelson code, featuring a Pascal-like syntax and a simple type system.
Tezos smart contract initiatives announced so far in 2019: SmartPy.io, Ligo, ConseilJS, Liquidity 1.0 with ReasonML toggle, and Fi.
Prestigious Thai University, Chulalongkorn University, has partnered with Tezos Southeast Asia to create the nation’s premier blockchain education and research programme.
Tezos 101: B9labs has launched its free Tezos introductory development course, sign up here
TQ will be hosting a ‘Tezos Day’ event on April 18th in Paris during Paris Blockchain Week.
Topper from Quorum Control
Tupelo is a permissionless proof of stake DLT platform purpose-built to model individual objects that enables flexible public or private data models.
We spoke at this year’s NFT.NYC conference in February. Hear our full talk “Moving NFT Checks Off Chain”
We made scalability and efficiency improvements to our gossip protocol
We introduced more flexible and configurable storage options for data that interacts with the platform
Michael from Loom
Loom Network is a platform for building highly scalable DPoS sidechains to Ethereum, with a focus on large-scale games and social apps.
Over 100M LOOM now staked on PlasmaChain, around 15% of the circulating supply.
Integrated the top 100 ERC20 tokens on PlasmaChain, including major stablecoins DAI, USDC, TUSD, PAX, GUSD, and EURS.
2 more external validators went live on PlasmaChain -- Bixin and Hey Network
Launched BNB payments and released limited edition Zombie Battleground Card Packs with a chance to win $10,000 in BNB prizes.
Myles from EOS
EOS is a new blockchain architecture designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralized applications.
EOSIO v1.7.0 was released
EOS Rio's Hyperion History API went live (listen to our interview with the team!)
EOS Weekly released a fantastic video explaining the brilliant EOSIO accounts and permission systems
dfuse released new contract debugging tools
Zaki from Cosmos
The Cosmos Network is a decentralized network of independent, scalable, and interoperable blockchains, creating the foundation for a new token economy.
Cosmos community launched the mainnet for the Cosmos Hub with the suggested allocation of ATOMs from the fundraising process: https://cosmos.network/launch 67 validators participated in launch and stability was achieved within minutes of the expected genesis time.
More than 70 million of 238 million atoms have been staked. I am super pleased that 3 of the top 10 validators were not participants in the fundraiser.
What next? The Hub might halt and recover. The Hub might vote for a software upgrade that enables transfers.
Look for governance proposals here. I'm surprised there hasn't been one.
Work is in progress on the next Tendermint and Cosmos Hub software release but no upgrades on Hub will happen without governance.
Kate and Dean from Agoric
Founded by pioneers in secure development and distributed systems, Agoric uses a secure subset of JavaScript to enable object capabilities and smart contracts.
Agoric began work on a new "Vat" implementation, codenamed SwingSet, to use techniques from the KeyKOS operating system and apply them to SES-confined JavaScript execution. Github repo here.
Kate was a guest on the free software podcast Libre Lounge, talking about Object Capabilities.
We created a website for our safe modules program for JavaScript. More on this to come.
Financial Infrastructure
Antonio from dYdX
dYdX is a decentralized exchange for margin trading, borrowing, lending, and eventually derivatives. dYdX allows traders to trustlessly short and get leverage on crypto assets.
Gearing up for the alpha launch of our new margin trading product
Testing internally on Kovan Testnet
Wrapping up security audit with Open Zeppelin
Hiring software engineers and product designers full-time in SF!
Brendan from Dharma
Dharma is the easiest place to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies. We enable non-custodial peer-to-peer lending through smart contracts on Ethereum.
R
Coulter from MakerDAO
Maker is unlocking the power of the blockchain for everyone by creating an inclusive platform for economic empowerment -- allowing equal access to the global financial marketplace.
The vote to raise the Stability Fee to 3.5% passed and went into immediate effect. We encourage anyone to join our Governance & Risk calls where these are discussed.
For PiDay (3/14), we worked with @SendCrypto to create #PiDai for #PiDay, where anyone could send Dai to charities, just by tweeting.
Helena Network became the first project to create a dapp on the xDai sidechain, bringing their prediction markets platform a better UX.
Connext released Dai Card, a browser-based wallet for low cost payments instantly in Dai.
Lazar from MARKET Protocol
MARKET Protocol is a framework for creating tokens that track prices of traditional or digital assets, providing financial access to anyone.
Another big week! We have a full version of MPX up and running for internal testing
Implemented Error logging across dev, staging, and production environments
Completed work on admin panel API, now focused on user account API
Completed user account design flows for new & returning users
Lots of bug stomping across APIs, admin, & DEX
Robert from Compound
Compound is a money market protocol on the Ethereum blockchain — allowing individuals, institutions, and applications to frictionlessly earn interest on or borrow cryptographic assets without having to negotiate with a counterparty or peer.
No update this week.
Layer two and interoperability
Tieshun from Namebase
Namebase is the easiest way to buy, sell, and use Handshake.
No updates this week.
Paul from Veil
Veil is a peer-to-peer prediction market and derivatives platform built on top of Augur, 0x, and Ethereum.
Launched market creation feature. Now any Veil user can create their own prediction market and collect bets for free. Read more about the feature or create your own market now. We’ve already seen people create markets on the future Celer token price, Andrew Yang’s Twitter followers, and Boeing’s 737 Max grounding.
Added feature, so users can respond to markets by liking them as well as betting in them.
Revamped home page to make it easier to filter markets by category and sort by volume or likes. Go to home page.
Rahul from 0x
0x is an open protocol that enables the peer-to-peer exchange of assets on the Ethereum blockchain.
New Relayer Report, covering the Ethfinex V2 switch and an interview with Tokenary
ZEIP-23 is live on mainnet: trade arbitrary bundles of tokens
Announcing the addition of Daniel Pyrathon to the 0x Core Team
Tony from Liquidity.Network
Transfer and Swap Platform for any Token
Bug fixing on client library, which is fully compatible with all major browsers
Revive Liquidity Canvas
Liquidity Faucet included on coming V2 mobile app
Dong Mo from Celer
Celer Network is a leading layer-2 scaling platform that enables fast, easy and secure off-chain transactions for not only payment transactions, but also generalized off-chain smart contract. It enables everyone to quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable decentralized applications through innovations in off-chain scaling techniques and incentive-aligned cryptoeconomics.
We continued on our design and implementation of the CelerX platform.
Investigation of OSP performance with a larger number of users.
Design enhancements for OSP protocol and system storage.
- We finished the following CelerX game UI: game menu, history, history detail and quick match.
- We continue to fixed bugs and improve stability.
Alexandra from Parity Technologies
Parity Technologies builds core blockchain infrastructure. From Parity Ethereum, the most advanced Ethereum client, to Polkadot, the next-generation interoperable blockchain network.
New PolkaDAO, a user-led platform for the Polkadot community
Initial version of off-chain worker threads for Substrate
First draft of Universal Offline Signatures for Parity Signer
New guide: How to build a (simple) Token Curated Registry DAppchain using Substrate.
Substrate has a subreddit: /substrate
Polkawallet released their 0.1.0 beta version featuring asset management, staking, democracy, and more.
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
Theta is an end-to-end infrastructure for decentralized video streaming.
Theta mainnet successfully launched on March 15th
Exchange integration with mainnet expected to wrap up early to mid-week
Theta Fuel (operational/gas token of the protocol) distributed to all Theta tokenholders on mainnet
Announced partnership with MovieBloc startup to distribute movies + other video content
Doug from Livepeer
Livepeer is a decentralized video infrastructure network, dramatically reducing prices for developers and businesses building video streaming applications at scale.
Active contributions from collaborators Epic Labs on a classifier to very non-deterministic GPU video transcoding.
In an effort to continuously increase reliability of the network for the Streamflow release, work continued on the orchestrator failover and redundancy strategies for video broadcasters.
On the research track, we explored a multi-registry construction for nodes on the network, in an effort to aid double-spend prevention in probabilistic micropayments and make additional services available on the Livepeer network.
Network participation surpassed 31% of LPT actively staked.
Ryan from FOAM
FOAM is building spatial applications and proof of location that bring geospatial data to blockchains and empower a consensus driven map of the world.
Hosted a talk on The Importance of Time Synchronization by way of historical examination and updates on Proof of Location Developments, video here.
Progress on time sync simulations on our local test net and Tendermint based MVP as well as on the custom firmware we are developing for the radio nodes.
Leaderboard moving out of beta with 3Box web3 identities now integrated
David from Sia
Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform leveraging blockchain technology to create a data storage marketplace that is more robust and more affordable than traditional cloud storage providers.
The path towards the final 1.4.0 release: The public testing of the latest Release Candidate 3 has revealed issues for renters using the Windows version. The team is currently working in their correction:
- DavidVorick identified a misuse of the Sia paths in multiple parts of the code, that while compatible with Unix systems, are incorrect on Windows
- eddiewang is finishing the last 2 tasks from a list of 8 issues identified on the UI: a problem of stuck uploads on the UI and the correction of paths on WindowsBug fixes and other improvements
- A bug that could throw a panic error while shutting down Sia, repaired by ChrisSchinnerl
- Two bugs related to writing logs during file repair checks, corrected by ChrisSchinnerl and DavidVorick
- An optimization during file chunk repairs, by MSevey
- eddiewang updated the contents of the Sia website, as links to the Sia blog and the Sia Youtube channel. Also, some biographies of the team were corrected by stevefunkStats
- 3 Nebulous repo were updated. 5 issues were created, 2 were closed. 7 MRs were merged.
- GitLab users stevefunk, zherbert, eddiewang, ChrisSchinnerl, MSevey and DavidVorick had code contributions merged into Sia.From the community: Decentralizer 1.0
The community member @hakkane released the UI version of Decentralizer and the updated 1.0 version of its CLI tool. Decentralizer is an app that allows renters to micro-manage their contracts, detect and avoid hosting farms, manual selection of hosts, and geo-fencing. It is free and open source: https://keops.cc/decentralizer
Other
Ari from Decentraland
Decentraland is a virtual world where you can build and explore 3D creations, play games and socialize.
No update this week.
Bowen from Hydro/DDEX.io
Hydro Protocol is an open source framework for building Decentralized Exchanges. DDEX is the first decentralized exchange for Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens built on the Hydro Protocol.
Hydro Contract update 1.1 : Remove EIP 712 Domain, Add isMakerOnly field, Update makerRebateRate logic,
- 0xE2a0BFe759e2A4444442Da5064ec549616FFF101Hydro Relayer Starter Kit - Read.me ready, ETA Launch by the end of March
Mutli Chain Wallet in Development - Flexible framework to support more Public chains, ETA 4/18
Sam from OpenBazaar
OpenBazaar is an open source project developing a protocol for e-commerce transactions in a fully decentralized marketplace.
2.3.1 release candidate testing has found some bugs relating to the IPFS rebase. Data migrations weren't handled properly and are being fixed now. We're working on a 5th release candidate now.
An external audit for an OpenBazaar token smart contract that controls a major aspect of token distribution was completed and only minor issues found. They are being resolved now.
Development on the Haven mobile app continues. The 2.3.1 rebase is needed for the social and messaging aspects of the app and is expected to speed up parts of the app significantly.
Martín from Zeppelin
Zeppelin builds tools for the secure development, deployment and operation of decentralized systems. We also help companies secure their systems by performing security audits.
Ramon Recuero wrote Bootstrapping a Developer Ecosystem with Zeppelin explaining why Zeppelin provides a strong foundation to kickstart an ecosystem of decentralized systems
Zeppelin & TabooKey announced the Gas Station Network Alliance
Released OpenZeppelin 2.2.0!
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 and another one in Paris during ETHCC
The Zeppelin team went to ETHDenver and Dennison wrote a recap and bounty Winners!