Proof of Work: DeFi needs a little more "De"

Hi from Beijing! This is my last day in the capital—I’m heading to Shanghai now and then back to the US. Almost immediately after my last post, the SEC announced enforcement action against Kik/KIN. Katherine Wu has a great annotated overview, so I won’t go into depth about the specifics of this case, other than to say that I think KIN did a bunch of things they shouldn’t have. In my mind most of the SEC action has been against projects that are “obviously bad” and I don’t think this breaks that mold—that said, I’ve heard there are more worse things in the pipeline. While some projects have been able to work within this extremely hazy framework well, I think a lot of other projects will end up either moving to easier (mostly Asian) jurisdictions, or will simply be copied by teams in these less regulatorily encumbered areas. The fact that jurisdiction still matters at all of course means that these “defi” projects are not sufficiently “de” yet—over the next year or so I think a combination of decentralized namespace (Handshake), decentralized storage (Sia, maybe Filecoin), and an encrypted transport layer (Nym, another secret project I heard about a few days ago, maybe Orchid) may render a lot of these concerns moot by making it possible to anonymously ship truly censorship resistant easy to use defi GUI products, but for now the US seems to be a uniquely bad place to do this.

Satoshi’s Treasure Hunter’s Journal

• This week hunters competed for the clan key by attempting to create the longest video Twitter thread out of all the clans

Bitcoin & Friends

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

• Proposed new opcode for transaction output commitments

• Presentation: A Return to Fees

Tony from Kadena

Kadena is building Pact, a formally verifiable smart-contracting language for financial applications, and Chainweb, a PoW blockchain that uses multiple chains in parallel to increase throughput.

• Kadena released Chainweb Testnet v1 on May 30. The mining whitelist application is now open.

• Pact-web support for importing external keys.

• Pact-web can now send transactions to Chainweb.

• Simple payment verification (SPV) support for Pact and Chainweb PR 192.

• Chainweb support for Pact 3.0 API changes PR 208, PR 213 and PR 218.

• Performance testing for Chainweb transaction execution PR 200.

• Chainweb improvements to mempool behavior surrounding transaction reintroduction PR 162 and PR 204.

• Chainweb improvements to memory usage and stability PR 218.

• Release of open source Haskell package for directed graphs PR 228.

• Monica Quaintance gave a presentation on Kadena's hybrid blockchain at Token Summit 2019.

• Monica Quaintance spoke to Crypto and Blockchain Talk about the crypto sharing economy.

• Monica Quaintance was interviewed by the CryptoBasic podcast about Pact and other topics.

• Stuart Popejoy and Monica Quaintance shared Kadena's roadmap on the Construct stage at Consensus 2019 (scroll down to the section with the Construct videos).

• Kadena CEO Will Martino spoke about enterprise blockchain at Amazon's AWS Blockchain Days NYC.

Aviv from Spacemesh

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

• The team is working hard on stabilizing the full node for our upcoming testnet milestone. We are running mining flows and handling bugs related to data availability, p2p and various memory performance issues

• Win/Mac/Linux App Installer

• Desktop notifications Infra + initial logic.

• Whiteboard sessions podcast from NY blockchain week is now available on Youtube. Please watch to get an overview of the consensus protocol. If you prefer reading than watching videos then please check out our new blog post - Spacemesh protocol motivation and overview

• More updates at https://spacemesh.io/weekly-updates/

JZ from Decred

Decred is an autonomous digital currency with a hybrid consensus system. It is built to be a self-ruling currency where everyone can vote on the rules and project-level decision making proportionately to their stake.

• It's been a busy week on the proposal front with five currently under discussion on Politeia.

• One interesting thing to note regarding the "Block Header Commitments Consensus Change" submitted by Dave is that it's essentially a vote to gauge whether there is support to write up a DCP as well as the actual code to be activated by a future on-chain consensus vote. That way if there is no support on Politeia we don't end up writing a bunch of code that will likely never be used.

• Richard has also submitted the follow-up to the "Decred Open Source Research Proposal" for another six months of funding.

• Jake has made a formal request to have some trusted community members write up a specification for the Decred DEX.

• Ditto has also made a proposal to renew their contract for another six months and has outlined how they will continue to build upon the work that has been delivered thus far.

Johnny from Stellar

Stellar is an open network for sending and exchanging value of any kind. Its global network enables digitization of assets - from carbon credits to currencies - and enables movement around the internet with ease.

• Stellar Protocol 11 Upgrade is scheduled for Monday, June 10th 2019 at 1600 UTC. More details can be found in this thread on our validators email list.

• Horizon v0.18.0 is set to be released on Monday, June 10th, with an RC deployed to SDF's Horizon instances on June 3rd.

• The Stellar Core team is focusing on tooling and changes to make it better for quorum health on the Stellar Network.

• The Platform team is focusing on a SEP-0006 reference implementation to facilitate easy deposit/withdrawal of non-native assets on Stellar.

• Jed gave a Q&A during blockchain week in NYC about the past, present, and future of Stellar.

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.

• Stage 2 of the SNARK challenge with $95,000 in prizes for programmers and cryptographers starts today. Here is a  technical but accessible video intro to the SNARK prover we made for those getting involved.

• Paul ensured delegation works with an integration test.

• Brandon added support for changing staking keys at runtime.

• Avery created the initial settings page for the desktop wallet.

• John added persistence for transaction history.

Privacy coins

Mitchell from Monero

Monero is a open-source, privacy-focused cryptocurrency using the ASIC-resistant CryptoNote PoW algorithm. It enforces all privacy features at the protocol level to ensure that all transactions create a single fungible anonymity pool.

• Posted DLSAG preprint to ICAR, describing non-Interactive refund transactions for interoperable payment channels in Monero.

• Now have sample code and timing code available for the new CLSAG signature scheme

Daniel from Grin

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

• Merged PRs: 11 in /grin | 6 in /grin-wallet | 9 unique contributors

• @tromp proposed Cuckarood, the tweaked version of the ASIC Resistant POW that is due to go live as part of the mid-jury hard fork.

• New beta for v1.1.0 version of grin-wallet.

• Last week's dev meeting was split out over two days and covered the v1.1.0 and v2.0.0 releases and migration paths in detail.

• We're tracking Erlay, a recently proposed transaction propagation protocol for Bitcoin, and thinking about its usefulness in Grin.

• @quentinlesceller pushed an update to the libgrin Go libary. It can now use slate versions 0/1/2, and supports the new Cuckarood cycle verification.

• More Grin info here.

Beni from Beam

Beam is a confidential and scalable cryptocurrency based on Mimblewimble.

• Summer is coming? Our Roadmap Update too. Discover what will be delivered by Team Beam during the next couple of month

• Join Beam Community AMA on Youtube Live on June 10th, 6:00 PM (GMT), hosting Beni Issembert, Beam’s CMO and let’s speak frankly about Privacy

• Focus on Privacy - Team Beam is attending the Blockchain Cruise - June 9th-13th 2019 

• Cold Wallet 2.1.4915 - Release Notes

• Outgoing transaction is failed when wallet receive info about expired transactions #664

• [desktop] Show QR code in address book #629

• Multi-language #618

• HW wallet integration #624

• Atomic Swap - Display "Swap conditions match" first before claiming "Swap Accepted" #666

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. 

• Oana Ciobotaru has joined the team as lead cryptographer. Oana’s doctoral and postdoctoral researched focused on zero-knowledge cryptography and universal composability, and was most recently an applied researcher at Pegasys.

• This week we are finishing off a rework of our proof construction code to make it easier to build dapps using AZTEC, and to make building new proofs easier.

• Zac wrote a first implementation of Barrentenberg, an optimised scalar multiplication library for bn128.

• In addition to the an applied cryptographer roles, we are hiring for a Senior Solidity Engineer and a Senior Engineer. You can apply here, or by emailing [email protected] with the name of the role as the subject.

Smart contracting platforms

Evan from Ethereum

Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that aims to resist fraud, censorship or third-party interference.

• Several implementations of snarks for private transactions, like EY’s Nightfall and JPMorgan’s implementation of Bünz, et al's Zether.    

• Also work done on several mixers, like a minimal mixer with Pedersen hashes as well as ShareLock, a mixer from multi-party ECDSA

• the DxDAO experiment in governance launched.  Here's the easiest way to get DxDAO voting power. 

Peter from NEAR

NEAR is a sharded proof-of-stake blockchain.

• 10 PRs across 5 repos and 5 authors: NEARstudio, nearcore, nearlib, near-shell and near-wallet 

• Support for viewing authorized apps from wallet and revoking access keys added to nearlib

• Ability to send tokens added to nearlib

• Account recovery working cross-browser in the wallet

• Ability to configure separate network IDs for starter project config environments in the CLI deploy process.

• Improved templates compatibility with CLI tools in the online IDE

• New react-template created for quickly scaffolding full web DApps

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. 

• The Tezos upgrade proposal, Athens, has successfully been implemented on the Tezos Protocol autonomously. The implementation has proven that Tezos can upgrade to new protocol changes in an automated, decentralized, and self-funded manner. Nomadic Labs proposal attached a 100 XTZ invoice which the protocol automatically minted and distributed after successfully implementing the protocol change. This exercise enables any developer to submit a proposal with their own invoice attached to the proposal.

• What’s next? Nomadic Labs, Cryptium, Marigold, and others will submit multiple proposals for Tezos at the end of June.

• Tezos Korea has started it’s developer program in Busan National University

• Elevated Returns, a firm that will tokenize 1 Billion USD of real estate on Tezos, is finalizing their integration of a new Tezos token standard which will launch at the end of June.

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.

• Ongoing Optimization of Production Tupelo TestNet

• Work and testing on infrastructure move to protocol buffer messages completed as described last week and new release for download imminent (Tupelo v0.3.0).

• A supplemental “Community Service” has been built which has messaging (with public storage network to come) built on libp2p for use in certain Tupelo application scenarios.

• Kubernetes implementation of signing nodes completed as part of a project to migrate Experimental Berlin to Tupelo DLT.

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.

• Loom 2.0 Release, Build 1085 – the team has been focusing on mainnet builds, so this has a large backlog of features for third-party chains. Major updates for Performance, Caching and DPoS.

• PlasmaChain averaged 34K transactions per day last week (~4% of Ethereum)

• Axie Infinity's Land Marketplace saw 3,100+ gas-free transactions and 81 ETH in volume in its first 24 hours on Loom

• Over 209M tokens have been staked on Loom, which amounts to ~26% of circulating supply and ~$17M in value

Myles from EOS

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

• Block.one has partnered with Coinbase to offer EOS as part of their Coinbase Earn program. EOS is also now available to buy and sell on Coinbase itself. 

• B1 announced the upcoming release of EOSIO v2, which features a custom VM called EOSVM. It's a version of WASM that has been tailored for blockchain use cases. They also announced an integration with Yubikey and a few other improvements that have resulted in 6-12x speed improvements for EOS execution times. 

• Finally, B1 announced its first product, a blockchain-based social network called Voice (see Voice.com) 

Zaki from Cosmos

The Cosmos Network is a decentralized network of independent, scalable, and interoperable blockchains.

• We patched a serious vulnerability in the proof of stake mechanism is the Cosmos SDK on the Hub and various downstream projects. One of validator posted some details here. Expect a detailed timeline from the Interchain Foundation this week. But 72 hours from report to patch on mainnet was pretty cool.

• Summary of the most recent IBC call. 

• We made some releases of the Cosmos Hub software to patch the security issue.

• Version 0.31.6 of Tendermint was released with many bug fixes

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.

• We’ve been continuing progress towards our upcoming initial testnet, including new releases of our Swingset environment. The new features include a different way of handling the state of our “nanokernel”, merging Mark’s higher order contracts onto trunk, and adding new devices to enable interaction with HTTP requests.

• We’ll be joining Cosmos in Berlin next week at their Interchain Conversations unconference and their HackAtom hackathon. Mark will be participating in the Interoperability panel and Brian and Dean will be presenting on our integration with Cosmos. Hope to see you there!

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.

• Did over $5.5M trade volume in the past week

• Crossed $1M in value liquidated on dYdX. Liquidators have earned over $35k so far in protocol fees from liquidations / expirations. If you're interested in liquidating on dYdX, check out our open source liquidator bot

• Working on adding TradingView charts to the app

• Working on adding DAI-USDC and ETH-DAI markets to the app through 0x

• Hiring product designers & engineers full-time in SF!

Brendan from Dharma

Dharma is the easiest place to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies. It enables non-custodial peer-to-peer lending through smart contracts on Ethereum.

• Upgraded system-wide smart contract architecture

• Began concepting and designing new borrow functionality

• Continuing work on productizing our liquidations system

• We're hiring a General Counsel and Full Stack Engineers in SF!

Coulter from MakerDAO

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

• Coindesk put together a fun explainer video of how MakerDAO works. You can watch it here.

• May was extremely busy for Maker (in a good way!). If you missed anything, we recapped all the integrations, partnerships and events in our latest Making Maker blog.

• If you missed any of our talks, parties or interviews at Blockchain Week New York, you can find them all here.

Lazar from MARKET Protocol

• Continued testing the Position Token expiration & settlement flow

• Deployed updated smart contracts to Kovan

• Many bug fixes ahead of the mainnet launch of MPX

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.

• Successfully migrated the majority of assets from v1 to v2 of the protocol

• Announced the deprecation schedule for v1 of the protocol

• Announced the hiring of a general counsel

• Began preparations to add additional tokens to the protocol

Layer two and interoperability

Tony from Liquidity.Network

Liquidity Network is a transfer and swap platform for any token

• Attention all bug-hunters! Grab the chance to earn up to 10,000 USD for finding security vulnerabilities in Liquidity Network's NOCUST smart contracts. Learn full details here.

• Liquidity Network will participate in a meetup in Singapore on 13 June. Registration is free, join us! Click here for more information.

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 iterating new wallet UI and refined game platform architecture and UI.

• We finished instant cold bootstrap flow and new user wallet onboarding flow.

• We completed new user game onboarding flow PART I and improved the CelerX JavaScript SDK.

• We are in the process of developing daily check-in GT reward UI. 

• We completed new features for the end-of-June CelerX milestone.

• We finished user referral & credit service.

• We supported multi-token game leaderboards.

Alexandra from Parity Technologies

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

• Draft plan released for Polkadot's open and permissionless auction of parachain slots.

• Snowden is speaking at Web3 Summit. 

• Anton Gavrilov discussed private transactions on Parity Ethereum. 

• We're doing a weekly online Substrate Office Hours. Follow @paritytech on Twitter to be informed of upcoming office hours. 

• Web3 Foundation is providing grants to build the Web3 ecosystem.

• We're hiring! 

Application infrastructure

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 dev team has been working hard on the seed-based file recovery process, API endpoints, and testing infrastructure. It’s working well in testing and finishing touches are being applied

• The Sia community has reported bugs that the dev team is working to resolve before 1.4.1.

• The Sia network currently has 326 TB of stored data, and that number is still climbing quickly.

• Chris implemented better duplicate handling when restoring backups.

• Chris has been working hard towards partial uploads. This will enable upload streaming, modifying of files on the Sia network, and more efficient bandwidth usage by Sia utilities.

• Community member tbenz released a new tool for Sia, Siasync. It allows you to set a local folder on your computer that have it’s contents automatically synced with Sia.

Other

Sam from OpenBazaar

OpenBazaar is an open source project developing a protocol for e-commerce transactions in a fully decentralized marketplace.

• The Haven website is ready in preparation for launch of the mobile app. The closed beta will start once we figure out some final networking issues testers are experiencing across cellular networks.

• Chat is now working in the OpenBazaar web version.

• Ethereum precision work on the server side is nearly done, which brings us one step closer to the 2.4 release with Ethereum integration.