Decred Journal – September 2020

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Image: Hidden Structures on Quadratic Orbit by @saender

Decred’s highlights for September:

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:

The decentralize treasury spending pull request is merged to master. It got 576 review comments, changed 115 files, added 15K lines of code, and took 5 months since the first draft was published. Several developers have been pulled from other projects to thoroughly review and test this consensus-critical code. Thanks to everyone for the hard work on this epic change!

DCP0006 describing the upcoming consensus change is under review.

Merged follow-up treasury work:

Other merged work:

@matheusd wrote a standalone tool to generate tspend transactions that can be used on air-gapped setups (without requiring a network connection to an underlying dcrd instance). It works in combination with @jrick’s ss tool for post-quantum file and stream encryption.

dcrwallet:

Decrediton:

In progress:

Politeia:

CMS:

In progress:

Status update from @lukebp:

Most of the politeia development was focused on tlog this past month. The frontend and backend work to match the existing politeia functionality is complete. The next few weeks are focused on testing tlog, working through bugs, writing documentation, and adding test coverage to the code. The only feature that has yet to be implemented is the ability to retrieve the inclusion proof for a specific piece of politeia data. The politeiad backend currently supports this, but the corresponding politeiawww routes need to be added as well as a way to display/download the inclusion proofs in the GUI. This functionality will be added before launch.

vspd:

dcrpool:

dcrlnd:

dcrdex:

A total of 35 PRs from 4 contributors were merged, adding 9K and deleting 2.6K lines of code.

Twitter poll showed interest in LTC support in mainnet beta.

The first DCR-BTC mainnet atomic swaps coordinated by #dcrdex were conducted yesterday. Testing and development continues, but talk has moved to software distribution and tutorials. Exciting times for @decredproject. (@chappjc on Oct 9)

dcrandroid:

In progress:

dcrios:

In progress:

dcrros:

Rosetta v1.4 released the Construction API (formerly Wallet API) for constructing transactions in a standard format, which was not finished when we announced Decred’s Rosetta implementation back in June. This API is supported by the latest dcrros and work is ongoing to keep it up with the spec, as well as the upcoming changes in Decred consensus.

docs:

dev docs:

decred.org:

Other:

People

Community stats as of Oct 1:

Charts of these stats are available in the social-media-stats repository (more accounts tracked) and on Planet Decred’s dcrextdata instance (dynamic charts with high resolution).

Governance

In September the Treasury received 12,300 DCR and spent 5,740 DCR. Using September’s daily average DCR/USD rate of $13.26, this is $163K received and $76K spent. At August’s average daily rate of $17.02, the USD figure billed for work completed in that month is $98K. As of Oct 3, Treasury balance is 640,000 DCR (7.5 million USD at $11.69).

See Politeia Digest issue 36 and issue 37 for more detailed coverage of proposals.

@bee published a comprehensive checklist for successful Politeia proposals based on experience with past proposals.

4 proposal updates have been imported in the proposals repository. There is no convenient index yet but direct links work (example). Please submit your updates to help collect them all in one place.

Network

Hashrate: September’s hashrate opened at ~460 Ph/s and closed ~450 Ph/s, bottoming at 338 Ph/s and peaking at 609 Ph/s throughout the month. Pool hashrate distribution as of Oct 1: UUPool 35%, Poolin 27%, Huobipool 11%, easy2mine 10%, Antpool 9%, BTC.com 3%, Luxor 0.9%, F2Pool 0.5%, okex 0.2%, CoinMine 0.02%, and the rest ~3%. Note that we have switched from dcrstats.com/pow to miningpoolstats.stream because the latter identifies about ~20% more hashrate.

Staking: 30-day average ticket price was 148.6 DCR (-2.8). The price varied between 144.7-152.5 DCR. Locked amount was 6.06-6.12 million DCR, which corresponded to 50.38-51.04% of the available supply participating in PoS.

Nodes: Throughout September there was an average of 108 public listening nodes and 133 total nodes per dcr.farm. Average version distribution for September: 26% dcrd v1.5.1, 22% dcrd v1.5.2, 7% dcrd v1.6 dev builds, 7% dcrd v1.5.0, 4% dcrd v1.5 dev and RC builds, 0.8% dcrd v1.4, 17% dcrwallet v1.5.1, 1.6% dcrwallet v1.5, 1.1% dcrwallet v1.4, 15% others.

dcronchain.com has launched four months since its proposal was approved in June. The initial version includes 5 interactive charts derived from Decred’s on-chain data, based on research by @Checkmate and @PermabullNino. The team is welcoming any feedback on Reddit. Source code is available on GitHub. Congrats with the launch!

Integrations

Brazilian NovaDAX exchange that listed DCR in June now added DCR support on their debit cards. This will allow access to over 23,000 ATMs and POS terminals around the country.

NovaDAX is top 3 in the BR market. With the new debit card, it’s possible to pay any bill in places that accept Elo, which in Brazil has the same adoption as Visa and Mastercard. In addition, it’s possible to make bank transfers in BRL, deducting DCR from your account and without paying transfer fees, something that all banks in Brazil charge for. It’s also possible to exchange DCR for BRL in Banco24horas ATMs, with around 23 thousand machines in Brazil. NovaDAX is opening a branch in Portugal and intends to do the same in the European market. (@emiliomann)

Australian Swyftx was added to decred.org, although it had DCR for a while. The exchange has many features and allows users to buy DCR with AUD.

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

@Exitus’ second proposal for making video content for another 6 months was approved with very high support. @Checkmate will join in the second phase to help with scripts and feedback. The proposal shared some stats for the last 6 months: 21K views gained with 98% like rate, ~500 subscribers gained and ~250 lost, 170 comments received. The most popular video was DCR 101 - How to Stake Decred 2020 with 1.6K views. Various videos uploaded to Twitter gained ~18K views.

@pavel, @pablito, and @el_capitan launched a new website withdecred.org to find a new scalable approach for how to onboard new users to Decred community. The website contains a series of articles that form a structured “funnel” that leads the person to purchase a few DCR. A proposal followed to fund the operations and a distribution of $5,000 worth of DCR to drive initial engagement, approved in early October. Historically, some community members have been skeptical about giveaways and this project will finally bring some empirical data and gauge the ROI of that model. Companion Twitter handle is @withdecred.

A few community members organized to answer a stash of questions about Decred on Quora.

@pavel started experimenting with publishing Decred content on Publish0x since it is a promising crypto portal.

@pablito and @caibarrad launched the first episode of Decred en Español podcast, available on YouTube and Spotify.

@jazzah posted a contest themed “KYC vs Shuffle++” where participants need to complete non-trivial tasks by inspecting a crazy hilarious image. Prize #1 has been claimed but prizes 2-4 are still open for anyone.

Monde PR’s achievements for September:

News coverage secured by Monde PR:

Events

Attended:

Upcoming:

Media

Decred was mentioned in a long report on blockchain governance. Full 115-page PDF is here (Decred on pages 64-66).

Selected articles:

Since decentralization is a founding principle of the crypto-space it gets a lot of lip-service but one of the oldest problems with power is that it is extremely rare that once someone has it, they will give it up voluntarily. Decred is a rare exception and notable in the progress its developers have made in converting the project’s resources into this autonomous system. Monero is another outlier here, as its development is completely funded by community donations.

Crypto media has picked up the INVDoS vulnerability disclosed on Sep 9, which brought some mixed press for Decred. CoinDesk release was the first and didn’t mention Decred at all. Notably, it was published just 45 min after the PDF was last updated at invdos.net and 28 min before the email on bitcoin-dev mailing list. ZDNet briefly mentioned Decred’s bug bounty program. Decrypt has overblown the issue and posted some inaccuracies. The Daily Chain went as far as to say that “Bitcoin engineers patched vulnerability in Decred”. A common pattern is that these outlets didn’t reach out for comments from the experts most familiar with the software (Decred developers). @l1ndseymm contacted The Daily Chain and they posted a follow-up clarification with a comment from @davecgh. @degeri addressed the misinformation in a tweet thread. A detailed account of media coverage, misinformation, timeline of events and reflection is available here.

Translations:

A list of all known translations of Decred content has been compiled here. If you enjoy DJ for reading about all the work being done for Decred, open this ~280 item list and scroll it for a minute to get a similar injection.

If you translate content, join the new public #translations chat room to coordinate with others.

Videos:

Audio:

The Decred dork has been busy this month, with 4 episodes of the new Staked Podcast:

Staked Podcast is available on YouTube (with video), anchor.fm, Spotify and Google.

Community Discussions

Comm systems news:

Selected Reddit posts:

Selected Twitter discussions:

Markets

In September DCR was trading between USD 11.03-17.30 / BTC 0.00106-0.00148. The average daily rate was $13.26.

Relevant External

The Wasabi wallet was subject to a DoS vulnerability which would have allowed an attacker to halt the CoinJoin process for all participants without revealing themselves - fixed before it could be exploited.

Bitcoin Cash’s current situation was summarised nicely by Cain. The BCH (aka BCH ABC) chain looks set to fork over a dispute about developer funding. The Bitcoin ABC developers are adding a rule from Nov 15 that 8% of the block reward must go to an address controlled by them, to fund infrastructure development. This idea has been controversial in the BCH community for some time, and an alternative BCHN implementation is planned. This sets up an interesting hash war scenario, where ABC miners will not mine on BCHN blocks without a developers’ reward, whereas the BCHN miners will mine on anything - if the BCHN chain does not have a significant majority of hashpower, BCHN miners would be likely to see a lot of orphaned blocks. BCH has a checkpointing system, which adds some further intrigue around the possibility of chain splits and new nodes ending up on different chains. So far around 50% of PoW mining power is signalling for BCHN, and the rest is not signalling for anything.

BitShares has a forthcoming hardfork which is being supported by Binance and Huobi, after the BitShares China Association alleged that one of the BitShares developers had tampered with voting system code without community approval.

The SushiSwap saga provided peak DeFi drama in September. SushiSwap is a “decentralized exchange” running on Ethereum which copied the open source smart contracts of an established (VC-funded) decentralized exchange, UniSwap. When the SushiSwap developer, Chef Nomi, announced that SushiSwap would do a “fair launch” and grant almost all the SUSHI tokens to liquidity providers, SushiSwap began to draw a lot of liquidity away from UniSwap, and SUSHI gained considerable value in a short space of time. 10% of all the SUSHI tokens go into a development fund, and when the hype was peaking Chef Nomi liquidated the dev SUSHI (worth over $10 million at the time) for ETH and announced that he was not exit scamming because he would still be around to do development, but he had sold all the dev SUSHI. This was not well received by the SUSHI community, who sought to replace Nomi in short order, with Nomi then handing the reigns (keys?) to Sam Bankman-Fried of the FTX exchange. SushiSwap then went on to elect a set of multi-sig governors with a token vote. Subsequently, Chef Nomi returned along with the ETH they had obtained by selling dev SUSHI, offering that the community determine how much they should be rewarded for their part. There was some speculation that Chef Nomi had been effectively unmasked and did not want to live with the stigma of their hasty exit.

UniSwap launched their own token, UNI, in response to SUSHI’s success and the amount of liquidity it was attracting. 60% of the genesis tokens (intended to cover the first four years) are available to liquidity providers, with an initial 15% being allocated to people who had used UniSwap before a cut-off of early Sep. The remaining 40% of UNI is allocated to investors and employees.

Ethereum Classic Labs have teamed up with Chainsafe and OpenRelay to develop a solution which prevents further 51% attacks. 3 days after the teaming up announcement there is already a comprehensive MESS plan for weakly-subjective finality.

The KuCoin exchange (which lists DCR) was hacked, and a reported $150 million was stolen, later upgraded to $281 million, although $204 million was subsequently recovered (with help from the operators of centralized stablecoins), and KuCoin claims to have identified the suspects and reported them to law enforcement authorities.

Coinbase Pro announced that fees for crypto withdrawals would now be passed on to customers (Coinbase had previously covered these to provide “free” withdrawals).

The bZxHQ DeFi lender was subjected to another exploit, this time for $8 million, which is larger than the previous two exploits earlier this year. They have an insurance fund which is covering the damage. According to CoinDesk, “the bug managed to remain undetected in two extensive code audits from cybersecurity firms Certik and Peckshield”.

Square formed the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA), where members pledge to never assert patent rights for offensive purposes, and in turn can use the patents of any member organization defensively if required. Blockstream tweeted about joining COPA as the next step in their defensive patent strategy.

The Polkadot Treasury received its first proposals. Polkadot’s Treasury is funded by transaction fees, slashing and staking inefficiencies - and every 24 days if these funds are not used 1% of the balance is burned. The funds are presently administered by the Polkadot Council, and the first four teams to be funded this way are working on a development environment for pallet-contracts, a Go Substrate RPC Client, Polkascan, and a platform for local community currencies and self-issued universal basic income.

This article about “private mining”, where a user gives their transaction to a specific miner, who collects the associated reward whenever they mine it in a block, sees it as a possible tool for money laundering, and in the future potentially also a legitimate source of miner income.

The United States Internal Revenue Service are offering a bounty of $625,000 to anyone who can provide a working prototype of technology to trace Monero or Lightning Network transactions. The deadline was Sep 16, so unfortunately it is now too late to cash in on that privacy-breaking prototype, if you happen to have one to hand.

Relevant External fans will likely enjoy the @Scams_alarms Twitter account for more horrifying stories.

About

This is issue 30 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.

You can submit a story here to be considered for the next release. Feedback and contributions are always welcome.

Credits (alphabetical order):