Decred Journal – May 2020

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Image: Ascending Bits by @saender

May’s highlights:

Development

Unless otherwise noted, the work reported here has the “merged to master” status. It means that the work is completed, reviewed, and integrated into the source code that advanced users can build and run, but is not yet available in release binaries for regular users.

dcrd:

In progress:

dcrwallet:

In progress:

Decrediton:

In progress:

Politeia:

CMS:

In progress:

vspd:

vspd is a from-scratch implementation of VSP software that will bring a huge improvement to the privacy of VSP users, and by extension, the security of the Decred network. It will also be much easier to use for having no registration, no emails, no CAPTCHAs, and no redeem scripts to back up. Check the announcement for more details.

MVP for vspd is nearing completion and dcrwallet integration is starting. The only outstanding feature for MVP is to get cross-wallet consistency checks to ensure all wallets are voting on the right tickets, and with the right voting choices.

dcrpool:

v1.1 release candidate is ready for testing! This release includes reworked payments processing, refreshed UI/UX, higher efficiency via dcrd’s work notifications, and a host of smaller improvements and bug fixes. Check the full release notes for details.

dcrlnd:

@matheusd posted a demo of swapping between BTC and DCR invoices across their respective LNs. This is effectively an “instant exchange”, except it is using LN and is non-custodial. Note that this prototype has a known gaming vector and more R&D is required to resolve it (ideally based on PTLCs, but it is quite far away in the future). More details in this chat.

dcrdex:

A total of 59 PRs from 10 contributors were merged, adding 10K and deleting 3K lines of code.

Upcoming work includes: Server support for suspend/restore active swaps (swap state), better support for client-initiated refund or swap completion (refund) in the event of failure of the server-driven swap negotiation due to a down server or counter party inaction, expanded client RPCs, expanded server admin commands, improved client handling of server suspend/resume messages.

Testnet testing has begun and everybody is welcome to participate. There’s still a good chance that mainnet DEX will launch this summer.

dcrandroid:

Testnet build of the v1.5 release is available on Google Play. Bug reports are welcome on GitHub.

dcrios:

Testnet build of the v1.5 release is available on Apple TestFlight. Bug reports are welcome on GitHub.

dcrdata:

In progress:

tinydecred:

docs:

Other:

Dev activity stats for May (approximate): ~300 active PRs, ~340 master commits, ~51K added and ~26K deleted lines spread across 16 repositories (note: line counts exclude Decrediton #2481 that reformatted a huge repository). Contributions came from 2-10 developers per repository.

People

Welcome to new first time contributors with code merged to master: @blaltarriba (politeiagui), @dreacot (dcrandroid), @Ekeh (dcrdata), @guilhermemntt (decrediton), @rstaudt2 (dcrd) and @song50119 (dcrdex).

Congratulations to new contractors granted the Decred Contractor Clearance (DCC): @camilolwi (marketing), @itswisdomagain (development), @nachito (marketing), @tomee (marketing).

Three Decred community members were included in the list of top 50 names in the Brazilian Crypto Market by Cointelegraph: Rafaela Romano in #35, Gabriel Rhama in #31 and the number one Edilson Osório Jr.

Community stats as of Jun 1:

Governance

In May the Treasury received 13,594 DCR and spent 19,153 DCR. Using May’s daily average DCR/USD rate of $14.11, this is $192K received and $270K spent. At April’s average daily rate of $12.34, the USD figure billed for work completed in that month is $236K. As of Jun 5, Treasury balance is 630,983 DCR (11.4 million USD at $18.12).

There were 5 proposals submitted in May, and 4 of these started voting in early Jun. There was no Politeia proposal voting in May.

The new proposals are described in issue 31 of Politeia Digest and the vote outcomes will be covered in the next issue.

Network

Hashrate: May’s hashrate opened at ~357 Ph/s and closed ~386 Ph/s, bottoming at 260 Ph/s and peaking at 541 Ph/s throughout the month. Pool hashrate distribution as of Jun 1 (approximate): UUPool 38%, Poolin 18%, lab.antpool.com 12%, F2Pool 1.5%, Luxor 1.3%, BTC.com 1.3%, BeePool 0.1%, CoinMine 0.03%, Suprnova 0.02% and others ~28%.

Staking: 30-day average ticket price was 141.5 DCR (+3.7). The price varied between 132.9-159.2 DCR. Locked amount was 5.59-5.80 million DCR, which corresponded to 48.7-50.3% of the available supply participating in PoS.

Nodes: Throughout May there was an average of 144 public listening nodes and 229 total nodes per dcr.farm. Average version distribution for May: 48% dcrd v1.5.1, 11% dcrd v1.5.0, 6% dcrd v1.6 dev builds, 4% dcrd v1.5 dev and RC builds, 2% dcrd v1.4, 9% dcrwallet v1.5.1, 1.4% dcrwallet v1.5, 1.4% dcrwallet v1.4, and 13% others.

Lewis Harland published a piece of research about the Decred network that considers a number of metrics, including the ratio of hashrate to USD block reward which represents miners’ risk. It notes a decline of several metrics since Jan 2020 and suggests that DCR is trading at a loss relative to the total USD input to the network.

@PermabullNino released another on-chain research piece where he explores Decred block times and introduces the Mining Pulse indicator.

Integrations

Transak brought a new way to purchase DCR with a debit card for residents of the US, EU, and many other countries, thanks to a partnership with Wyre. “Transak uses smart contracts to connect the end-user to liquidity on centralized and decentralized exchanges. Users will have to input simple KYC information, but the process from start to finish will take less than 5 minutes”. Now Transak is live in 32 countries, supporting 14 fiat currencies and 300+ cryptoassets.

Warning: the authors of the Decred Journal have no idea about the trustworthiness of any of the services above. Please do your own research before trusting your personal information or assets to any entity.

Outreach

Decred was present at the Consensus: Distributed virtual event where 6 community members delivered 4 sessions, all of which are on YouTube now. Besides this event that was based in USA, all other (known) events in May were targeting the Latam/Brazil region.

Decred in Depth and Rough Consensus podcasts published a total of 4 new episodes.

After starting his Medium blog in April, Phoenix Green expanded to YouTube video creation and as of writing his channel has 10 videos about Decred. Congrats on the launch and keep up the original quality content!

Monde PR’s achievements for May:

News coverage secured by Monde PR:

Events

Attended:

Media

Selected articles:

Translations:

Videos:

Audio:

Community Discussions

Comm systems news:

Selected Reddit posts:

Selected Twitter discussions:

I gave my young son some Bitcoin at Christmas and was fearful he wouldn’t engage and he hadn’t mentioned it much since. Last week he came to me and asked “Should we not be stacking Decred Dad?” Ultimate Father/Son moment. (@veganreboot)

Markets

In May DCR was trading between USD 12.62-15.66 / BTC 0.0014-0.00167. The average daily rate was $14.11.

A seasonality study by OneAnalyst explored day-of-the-week and month-of-the-year effect on DCR’s daily returns (DCR seems to favor Saturdays).

A wrap-up of phase 1 market maker activity by @richardred analyzed order book depth over time for DCR and other assets, concluding that it didn’t see an organic increase beyond the orders maintained by i2.

Relevant External

Bitcoin’s long-anticipated third halving of new issuance occurred on May 11, dominating the crypto news agenda for some period around this date and even penetrating more mainstream sources - much of it focusing on what effect it might have on the price.

One of several live events to mark the occasion, a seven-hour livestream organized by Cointelegraph, was unceremoniously halted mid-stream and deleted by YouTube for being “harmful content”.

The Dash Investment Foundation has responded to some friction (rejected proposals and private criticism from master nodes) by announcing that it will no longer seek decision-making autonomy and will reduce its ask from the Dash Treasury, coming up with a new VC strategy during Q2 2020.

Reddit introduced new blockchain-based tokens to be trialled on /r/cryptocurrency (Moons) and /r/FortNiteBR (Bricks). Tokens will be awarded to users of a subreddit in relation to their karma scores (50%), 10% for moderators, 20% for Reddit, and 20% for the “broader Reddit community”. In addition to serving as a badge of reputation on the subreddit points can be used to unlock features like posting gifs in comments. Points-weighted variants of polls have also been described.

Tech giants and dozens of governments have decided that smartphones are not backdoored enough and initiated an unprecedented mass surveillance program (attributed to COVID-19). Many technologies have “privacy-preserving” added somewhere in the title and it might be really secure this time. There is even a promise to terminate the tracking systems once the pandemic “ends”. Sarcasm aside, for cryptocurrency users it means a bunch of new privacy and security risks on their mobile devices and a strong incentive to consider alternative operating systems or even hardware.

About This Issue

This is issue 26 of Decred Journal. Index of all issues, mirrors, and translations is available here.

Most information from third parties is relayed directly from source after a minimal sanity check. The authors of the Decred Journal have no ability to verify all claims. Please beware of scams and do your own research.

Your feedback and contributions are always welcome.

Credits (alphabetical order):