Proof of Work #78

Eric MeltzerOct 30, 2019

Bitcoin & Friends

Jimmy on Bitcoin

Optech on Bitcoin [ed: sign up for their newsletter too! it’s great!]

  • Help test release candidates: experienced users are encouraged to help test the latest release candidates for the upcoming versions of Bitcoin Core and C-Lightning.

  • Starting the first week of November, several Bitcoin contributors will be hosting a series of weekly meetings to help guide people through review of the proposed bip-schnorr, bip-taproot, and bip-tapscript changes. 

Aviv from Spacemesh

Spacemesh is a programmable cryptocurrency powered by a novel proof-of-space-time consensus protocol.

Privacy coins

Paige & Zooko from Zcash

Zcash is a digital currency utilizing zk-SNARKs to enable its privacy-protecting properties.

  • Core Team: 

  • Wallet Team

    • We’re making progress on the iOS SDK, which now can get blocks, store them, and scan blocks for transaction data. We have also created an Android SDK demo app that showcases a range of functionality (link here). The demo app exercises: get private key, get address, get the latest height, get block, get block range, list transactions, and send.

    • Librustzcash has reached good enough test coverage (mid-60%), and it not only has more test coverage, but it’s running smarter tests. In addition to this, more of our work has been based off wallet developer feedback, which I think is a good thing. Go team!

  • Zcash turns three years old on Mon 10/28, happy birthday to us! 

  • More updates here

Daniel from Grin

Grin is a community-driven implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol that aims to be privacy preserving, scalable, fair, and minimal.

Beni from Beam

Beam is a confidential and scalable cryptocurrency based on Mimblewimble.

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 have officially kicked off Ignition, our trusted setup ceremony. You can follow the progress live at https://ignition.aztecprotocol.com

  • We released our PLONK implementation benchmarks. Proof construction comes in at ~23 seconds for a circuit (built over BN254) of over 1 million gates. We think a typical private transaction on Ethereum will come in at ~128,000 to 512,000 PLONK gates.
    You can find the implementation here: https://github.com/AztecProtocol/barretenberg

  • Outside of Ignition, we’re doing final deploy tests for our mainnet protocol, preparing for our launch later this year.

Smart contracting platforms

Peter from NEAR

NEAR is a sharded proof-of-stake blockchain.

Topper from Quorum Control

Quorum Control makes Tupelo, a permissionless proof of stake DLT platform purpose-built to model individual objects that enables flexible public or private data models.

  • As part of our ongoing efforts to productionize the Tupelo Testnet, GameNet, and Community service, we have been running a range of new load tests. The most recent tests uncovered a  defect and optimization opportunity.

  • The defect uncovered (and addressed) prevented highly concurrent reads to ChainTrees in the golang and the wasm clients.

  • To improve client and associated network performance, the team separated block and dht datastores.

  • The QC team actively participated in the Diffusion hackathon last weekend in Berlin, mentoring, presenting, and networking.  We congratulate all the winners and look forward to the next one.

Andrew from Solana

Solana is a scalable blockchain that utilizes proof of history to verify the ordering and passage of time between events. It consists of a network of 200 physically distinct nodes which support a sustained throughput of more than 50,000 TPS. 

Myles from EOS

EOS is a new blockchain architecture designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralized applications.

Financial Infrastructure

Nelson from Cadence

Cadence is a digital securitization and investment platform for private credit. Cadence issues tokenized assets that are digital reflections of real world fiat and investment transactions.

  • We published our most recent case-study, exploring our first offering to feature real-time data, a breakthrough in the industry.

  • The past few weeks have seen several media placements with coverage in Forbestwice, Blockonomi and Securities.io, among others.

  • Through Oct. 25, we’ve issued over $30M in structured notes across 27 different offerings.

  • Cadence Founder & CEO Nelson Chu, as well as Prath Reddy, Head of Capital Markets, will be speaking at the Asset-Backed Tech conference in NYC on Nov. 20.

  • We're hiring engineers!

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.

  • Launched native ETH-USDC & DAI-USDC markets!

  • Working on: Isolated position closes through native market, price charts using native market data, updated UI for trade page

  • Hiring Software Engineers & Product Designers full-time in SF!

Coulter from MakerDAO

Maker is comprised of a decentralized stablecoin, collateral loans, and community governance.

Layer two and interoperability

Tieshun from Namebase

Namebase is the easiest way to buy, sell, and use Handshake.

Alexandra from Polkadot

Polkadot empowers blockchain networks to work together under the protection of shared security.

Dong Mo from Celer

Celer Network is a layer-2 scaling platform that enables fast, easy and secure off-chain transactions for not only payment transactions, but also generalized off-chain smart contracts.

  • We finished designing mobile API for depositing USD and finished UI in USD deposit flow.

  • We finished back up UI in adding USD flow.

  • We continue the implementation of Q4 OSP functionality.

  • We continue to work on the enhancements to the SGN Gateway.

Application infrastructure

Alexandra from Parity Technologies

Parity Technologies builds core blockchain infrastructure, from Parity Ethereum, an Ethereum client, to Polkadot, an interoperable blockchain network.

Wes from Theta

Theta is an end-to-end infrastructure for decentralized video streaming.

Doug from Livepeer

Livepeer is a decentralized video infrastructure network, dramatically reducing prices for developers and businesses building video streaming applications at scale. 

  • The upcoming scaling release - Streamflow - is now live on a public testnet.

  • This release includes concurrent GPU mining of cryptocurrency while transcoding video on Livepeer, probabilistic micropayments, and a more scalable architecture to support large scale transcoding. 

Matt from Keep Network

The Keep Network is a privacy layer for public chains, enabling interactivity with private data and interoperability across chains. It does this with keeps, off-chain containers for private data that help smart contracts harness the full power of the public blockchain.

  • tBTC:

    • The team has started working on a design system to accompany the open source release of tBTC.

    • Redemption dApp work is under review as we look at connecting the UX flow to our contracts. 

    • The team has been working on some code reorg for JS to reduce cyclical dependencies. 

    Random beacon: 

    • We completed work on slashing RFC; a document describing what kind of misbehaviour will be punished by the network and how.

    • We optimised block times for distributed key generation and relay entry signing - we now produce new group key and new random number two times faster.

    • We merged the PR implementing pricing for the beacon, we are still iterating on tests and fixing some minor bugs, but most of the functionality is there.

    • We figured out how can we improve the ticket submission algorithm to make it way cheaper.

    • For more updates and questions join our Slack and check out the Keep blog.

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.

  • Sia continued work this week on the file repair process and stuck uploads.

  • Matt and Chris improved the unstuck process of file chunks and speeded up the renter unstuckall command.

  • We’ll be releasing a 1.4.1.3 patch to release a considerable improvement in performance and address multiple file repairs issues. 1.4.1.3 will include this update and improvements to host churn.

  • David added logs to the repair process of files losing redundancy.

  • Chris added the allowance information to the backups that renters create from their metadata (and can later recover just using their wallet seed!). This will make easier and more intuitive to recover your renter, as your allowance will be set up automatically too.

  • Matt added the new API endpoints gateway/blacklist [POST] & [GET] that allows users to manually block other network peers and view the list of those currently blacklisted.

  • Nebulous will host a Sia meetup on San Francisco on Oct 30th together with the team of the Handshake protocol.

  • Community member @trinancrat#8374 released Sia Slice, an app that allows you to maintain a mirror of a large file stored on the Sia network. The advantage of this app over other similar is that the file is split in chunks of 100MiB, so after making a change on the file, only the affected chunks will be uploaded. This allows cheap and fast syncing of large files that need to be frequently updated.

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