Decred Journal – June 2020

abstract art

Image: Ambience at 3000K by @saender

June’s highlights:

Mobile Wallets v1.5 Release

After ~1 year of development, Android and iOS wallets v1.5 are now out on Google Play and Apple Store. Changes include:

Congratulations to all contributors!

Please check the full Reddit announcement and support the tweet.

Decred’s Rosetta Middleware Implementation

An implementation of the Rosetta API for Decred was released in early July, just 2 weeks after Rosetta itself was released by Coinbase:

Coinbase initially developed Rosetta as the middleware used to integrate blockchains into its platform securely and painlessly (…)

For developers of new blockchain projects, the Rosetta interface makes it easier to ensure compatibility with exchanges that use Rosetta, and can dramatically speed up the time it takes exchanges to integrate with new blockchains and protect customer funds by ensuring specific security conditions are met.

For the broader community of crypto developers, Rosetta makes it easier to build cross-blockchain applications such as block explorers, wallets, and dapps. Instead of writing custom parsing for every supported blockchain, applications can use a blockchain project’s Rosetta implementation to read on-chain data and construct transactions in a standard format; minimizing code and simplifying maintenance.

Rosetta features interesting design principles, no gatekeepers policy, strict security requirements for wallet implementations, staking support, and a test suite to validate implementations. The first released SDK is for the Go language as it is heavily used at Coinbase.

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:

The majority of the efforts in dcrd for June went into the decentralized Treasury work. The pull request is undergoing the review process and adding tests to ensure correctness, but it appears to be feature complete. Once it is finished, a Decred Change Proposal will follow.

dcrwallet:

Decrediton:

In progress:

Politeia:

In progress:

The tlog implementation in the base politeiad backend is complete. Work on adding the plugins to it is ongoing. Plugin functionality includes comments, comment likes, and proposal votes. The next step will be to load the tlog implementation with existing mainnet data and run performance tests against it. It’s possible that some things might need to be reworked if any issues are discovered.

vspd:

The core functionality is complete and developers are in the process of thoroughly testing and shaking out edge cases with mixed/unmixed tickets, with/without the auto-ticket buyer. vspd has been used to vote on tens of thousands of testnet tickets at this point.

dcrpool:

dcrdex:

A total of 48 PRs from 8 contributors were merged, adding 11K and deleting 4K lines of code.

In progress:

Addressing concerns about the project timeline, @chappjc noted:

Mainnet beta will be this summer. Dev plan is to do that by end of Q2 2020, and we are. Also, the client browser interface was barely hinted at in the dev proposal and we dramatically expanded the scope of the project to make it happen and look good. LTC and generic BTC-clone support wasn’t part of the prop, but we got that done too. We also conceived a new epoch matching algorithm based on cryptographic commitments from the clients, the preimages for which are revealed at epoch close, and completely reimplemented it halfway through the project. Not easy or quick, but it’s done too and it’s a big improvement over the original spec. (2020-06-01)

The team is working on the remaining UX issues and preparing for a limited mainnet deployment in a few weeks.

dcrandroid:

dcrios:

godcr:

godcr is an emerging cross-platform desktop SPV wallet for Decred built with Gio, an immediate mode GUI toolkit written in Go. This makes the whole application built purely with Go with no web browser or javascript in it, and a much smaller dependency graph (and audit surface) - an important property for software that controls money. As of writing, the compiled binary is ~30 MB.

The project with Gio started in Jan 2020, but before settling on Gio the developers built multiple GUI prototypes (terminal, in-browser, Nucular, Fyne) which are now archived in the godcr-old repository. The work to explore and prototype these approaches began in Sep 2018.

Next steps are releasing a publicly available demo build with basic wallet functionality and integrating the new vspd staking.

docs:

People

Welcome to new first time contributors with code merged to master: @svitekpavel (dcrdocs), @Daniel-Leedan (dcrdocs), @shjackson (dcrdocs).

Congratulations to new contractors granted the Decred Contractor Clearance (DCC): @ammarooni (Community Management), @guilhermemntt (development).

Community stats as of Jul 2:

Governance

In June the Treasury received 12,629 DCR and spent 8,340 DCR. Using June’s daily average DCR/USD rate of $16.05, this is $203K received and $134K spent. At May’s average daily rate of $14.11, the USD figure billed for work completed in that month is $118K. As of Jul 1, Treasury balance is 633,820 DCR (9.08 million USD at $14.32).

Six proposals were voted on in June, with 4 approved and 2 rejected, with relatively high turnout for these proposals as compared to some recent proposals. The proposals to be approved were:

The proposal to sponsor a book (CoinStory) for $500 was rejected with 11.6% approval and 34% turnout, while the TV marketing proposal had 8% approval and 29% turnout.

Politeia Digest issue 32 has further details on all of the above.

A new proposal from @ivandecredfan for Russian content production was published in June and started voting in July. @ivandecredfan submitted a similar proposal in Feb which was rejected with 21% approval, but continued with his video production and took some feedback from comments on the first proposal on board.

A proposal has been submitted which suggests choosing a new name for the project (“Bitcoin Evolution”). The Politeia admins indicated that the proposal owner (@decredinator) should add a budget and implementation plan before the proposal would be considered valid for publication on the proposals site. @decredinator posted the proposal to Reddit so that the community can read it and contribute to making it a reality. Most of the comments are not keen on the idea and the author did not reply to any of them. @decredinator has also been called out for spamming the link to this post across a range of unrelated tweets.

To get notified when new proposals are published or go to vote you can follow @pi_crumbs on Twitter, or set up email notifications on the proposals site.

Network

Hashrate: June’s hashrate opened at ~390 Ph/s and closed ~412 Ph/s, bottoming at 280 Ph/s and peaking at 569 Ph/s throughout the month. Pool hashrate distribution as of Jul 1 (approximate): UUPool 36%, Poolin 32%, lab.antpool.com 11%, BTC.com 3.4%, Luxor 1.07%, F2Pool 0.86%, BeePool 0.09%, CoinMine 0.04%, Suprnova 0.02% and others ~15%.

Staking: 30-day average ticket price was 139.4 DCR (-2.1). The price varied between 135.1-149.8 DCR. Locked amount was 5.63-5.86 million DCR, which corresponded to 48.7-50.6% of the available supply participating in PoS.

An unusual spike of block size usage (unrelated to large Treasury payout transactions) occurred on May 29-31. Dozens of nearly full blocks were mined with 90-100 KB transactions which consolidated lots of tiny outputs into 6 DCR outputs. On May 31 the blockchain grew by a record 13 MB, compared to an average growth of 4 MB/day. It looks like a VSP was consolidating ticket fees. Many of the 6 DCR outputs were later merged into a balance of ~240K DCR (~3.4M USD, ~2% supply), known to be associated with a popular cryptocurrency exchange. tl;dr a VSP operator sent about 200 DCR (voting fees paid by users of the VSP) to an exchange, it used a lot of block space because it involved thousands of tiny fee payments associated with individual tickets processed by that VSP.

Nodes: Throughout June there was an average of 126 public listening nodes and 208 total nodes per dcr.farm. Average version distribution for June: 50% dcrd v1.5.1, 9.5% dcrd v1.5.0, 5.6% dcrd v1.6.0 dev builds, 3.2% dcrd v1.5.0 dev builds, 1.8% dcrd v1.4.0, 9.5% dcrwallet v1.5.1, 1% dcrwallet v1.5.0, 0.9% dcrwallet v1.4.0, and 18.7% others.

@Checkmate posted a chart that shows an increase in on-chain DCR volume.

@PermabullNino tweeted updated Mining Pulse, Difficulty Ribbons, ticket inflows, and Strong Hand charts. A bit earlier he shared the Staking Momentum chart.

@richardred published part 1 in a series about analyzing Decred’s blockchain data, highlights including:

The same kind of analysis was repeated with fresh data and formatting improvements for issue 27 of Our Network newsletter.

Integrations

DecredVoting VSP announced a new tickets analytics dashboard which shows users’ stats about their tickets, including some specific stats for split tickets which are devised by @decreddave himself and not available elsewhere.

Hotbit announced a Decred investment product on Jun 11, with an annualized return of 4.27% and “redemption period being (T+30)”. There is a minimum purchase of 100 DCR and it seems like the “minimum unit for the calculation of interests of current deposit investment plan will be 1 DCR”, whatever that means.

Following KuCoin’s launch of a custodial staking service in March 2020, @richardred has investigated staking activity associated with KuCoin-related addresses. Observations suggest that up until the end of Jun 2020 KuCoin has bought 213 tickets, and 185 of them have voted. The earliest tickets bought by addresses thought to be controlled by KuCoin were bought in December 2019, several months before the service was announced in Feb, and customers were automatically opted in within 48 hours of that announcement. All of these tickets have abstained in the on chain agenda voting, and none of them have voted on Politeia proposals - KuCoin is not participating in decision-making with their tickets. According to reports user DCR balances appear to have earned ~0.45% additional DCR from this staking, considering about one quarter has passed this would put it on course for an annual rate of about ~1.8%, which is considerably lower than the rate which is projected for sovereign staking by dcrdata (~6% as of writing).

Payment processor CoinPayments delisted 37 assets including DCR following a warning in May. After some of its users complained about this, they tweeted that it was due to low volume.

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

@Checkmate took the lead on Reddit and started focused and structured discussions to improve Decred’s outreach. The first post was to explore ideas for a grassroots marketing campaign/strategy and connect with people willing to help execute it. One of the outcomes is the #DidYouKnowDecred Twitter hashtag campaign. That was followed by two Skepticism Sunday and two Forward Thinking Friday threads designed to analyze weaknesses and solutions to them, as well as ideas to push Decred further. In total, they collected 155 comments and were some of the most active posts this month.

The second Latam Marketing and Events proposal passed, but it barely crossed the approval threshold of 60% in the last hours of voting. To address nearly 40% of No votes, @elian started a Reddit survey calling for any feedback to learn what is missing and what can be improved.

In early July Decred Latam published an activity report for the first month of their new proposal.

Monde PR’s achievements for June:

News coverage secured by Monde PR:

A spreadsheet of all media coverage secured by Monde PR since February 2020 was published on GitHub.

Events

Attended:

Upcoming:

Media

Selected articles:

Translations:

Videos:

The only thing holding Decred back in my honest opinion is more people coming up with creative ways to shout about it. It is all this thing needs. Because once you get the level of attention, the fundamentals just speak for themselves.

Decred videos are now also posted on BitChute as a fallback in case anything happens to the YouTube channel. This is good timing since as expected earlier, YouTube removed a bunch of crypto videos during the COVID-19 wrongthink cleanup.

Audio:

There has been an uptick in Decred-related artwork published this month. @OfficialCryptos impressed the folk with a Decred Dargon (which might be the armored lizard mentioned by Murad on the podcast), unicorn and btcsuite drilling rig. @aithzakaria1 posted a digital city, a shuttle and a other images on his Twitter. @AGNFAB announced that some of his artwork will be exclusively available on decentralizedboutique.com, a new store selling crypto related jewellery and artwork for crypto (including DCR).

Community Discussions

Comm systems news:

Selected Reddit posts:

Selected Twitter discussions:

photo

Image: @LolekBolek74 enjoying DCR in Polish mountains

Markets

In June DCR was trading between USD 14.01-18.76 / BTC 0.0015-0.0019. The average daily rate was $16.05.

In his latest post @Checkmate analyzed how realized cap, MVRV ratio and gradient oscillators apply to Decred. Realized cap tends to act as support or resistance level for both Decred and Bitcoin, but for Decred it is more closely related to market cap, because coins are repriced much more often.

The Decred realised cap captures an important psychological level in that it represents the aggregate price where the market last interacted with their coins, capturing a sort of ‘recency bias’. People who regularly interact with their DCR holdings via tickets, CoinShuffle++ mixes or governance votes are likely to have heightened awareness of coin price. Therefore, the opportunity cost of realising profits or losses on their DCR is baked into each transaction. The explicit decision to buy a ticket over sending coins to an exchange for sale is a reflection of meaningfully bullish sentiment for each individual, and vice-versa.

Another market-related analysis from @Checkmate noted bullish RSI divergence vs both DCR and USD and charted the price against on-chain indicators.

@PermabullNino charted how DCR market cap is testing the realized cap and a possible correlation between historical instances of huge ticket pool outflows with market downtrends.

Relevant External

There has been some controversy about a bug with Blockstream’s Liquid service whereby the “emergency backup keys” held by Blockstream were repeatedly taking custody of funds in a way that should only have happened in an emergency. The controversy is largely around how the disclosure of the bug has been handled, with James Prestwich (who discovered it) not impressed by the way its severity has been downplayed by Blockstream. This comment on r/cryptocurrency has a good timeline, including an observation that the story was not being covered on r/bitcoin.

Reddit have opened a call for ideas about how they might scale the recently launched points system (currently running on Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet) to the whole platform.

The cost of transactions on Ethereum has increased by 500% since April and developers are looking at ways to bring this down, including an EIP (1559) which would see users pay a “base fee” to the network plus a tip to miners when making transactions.

One Ethereum user has been paying particularly high fees this month, with two separate transactions each paying $2.6 million worth of ETH as a transaction fee to miners, for a transfer of a small amount of ETH (~$100). Speculation about the cause of the high fees included mistakes and blackmail attempts. Adding to the mystery, the pool which mined one of the transactions appeared to offer to return some of the fee, but nobody came forward.

A bug with the Bancor smart contracts was detected which would have allowed attackers to drain the funds of anyone who interacted with it, so “Bancor acted preemptively to ‘steal’ user funds before malicious parties could intervene”. The severity of the problem was compounded by the use of “infinite approvals”, which save on transaction fees and offer a better UX, but expose users to much more risk (in this case the potential attacker could get all of the depositor’s tokens, not just the amount they chose to deposit). Use of infinite approvals is common to many DeFi apps.

USDT supply has surpassed $10 billion, up from ~$5 billion this year.

CoinGecko partnered with Hacken to add cybersecurity ratings for exchanges listed on the site (see Trust Score tab).

Chainalysis announced the support of Zcash and Dash privacy coins in their products. The vast majority of transactions in these networks can be traced because privacy features are used by very few people. This comes after the May’s news of several exchanges delisting Monero because it is better at protecting users’ privacy, and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University claiming that 99%+ of Zcash transactions are traceable and that inputs of Monero transactions can be revealed with accuracy of 30% (full article).

Submit Your Story for Next DJ

As Decred and wider cryptocurrency ecosystems are expanding it becomes hard to track all important events. You can help DJ to capture more relevant stories by submitting them on GitHub. To do that, open GitHub issues, find one for the next release (e.g. “DJ July 2020”) and comment with a link and a short description for the story.

About This Issue

This is issue 27 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):