Decred Journal – November 2020

abstract art

Image: Restructuring II by @saender

November’s top stories:

v1.6 Release Candidate 4

New release candidates have a lot of bugs fixed in all four parts of the upcoming v1.6 release. Get the latest RC binaries here (click Assets) and make sure to verify them.

Thanks everyone for helping to test the builds and move closer to the release of the epic v1.6.

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

Decentralized treasury consensus rules have been activated on testnet without issues.

Merged in master (work towards v1.7) and backported to v1.6 release branch:

Other merged:

dcrwallet

Decrediton

Around 60 bugs were fixed in October and ~65 in November. The growing list of Decrediton’s features requires more testing firepower. Big thanks to all testers who help to improve Decrediton!

In progress:

Politeia

CMS:

In progress:

vspd

dcrpool

dcrlnd

October’s porting of changes from the upstream lnd 0.11.1 included fixes of two vulnerabilities that may potentially lead to loss of funds. More background from the discoverer is here and here.

It is recommended to upgrade to the latest master or release candidate tag of dcrlnd.

dcrdex

Patch v0.1.3 was released fixing a possible client hang and a few smaller issues. Binaries are available as part of the v1.6 RC4.

Merged in master:

A total of 37 PRs from 6 contributors were merged, adding 7K and deleting 4K lines of code.

In progress:

dcrandroid

Merged in dcrlibwallet shared library:

In progress:

dcrios

In progress:

godcr

In progress:

dcrdata

dcrros

decred.org

Other:

People

Welcome to new first time contributors with code merged to master: @HlloWrld (dcrweb).

Community stats as of Dec 1:

Governance

In November the Treasury received 11,975 DCR and spent 13,846 DCR. Using November’s daily average DCR/USD rate of $18.19, this is $218K received and $252K spent. At October’s average daily rate of $12.01, the USD figure billed for past work is $166K. As of Dec 4, the Treasury balance is 636,385 DCR (16.4 million USD at $25.69).

There were 4 proposals published in October, 3 have been approved and 1 has been abandoned.

Politeia Digest issue 39 has more details on the month’s proposals.

decredcommunity/proposals repository has been reorganized for consistent structure. The repo currently holds 52 updates for 13 proposals. Please submit updates for your proposals as it helps to collect them in one place (vs searching across chats and Reddit) and protect from loss. (summon @bee if you don’t want to face GitHub alone)

Network

Hashrate: November’s hashrate opened at ~226 Ph/s and closed ~293 Ph/s, bottoming at 215 Ph/s and peaking at 566 Ph/s throughout the month. Pool hashrate distribution as of Dec 1: UUPool 44%, Poolin 35%, easy2mine 13%, Huobipool 2.6%, Antpool 2%, F2Pool 1.6%, BTC.com 1.2%, Luxor 1%, CoinMine 0.02%.

Staking: 30-day average ticket price was 158.66 DCR (+6.96). The price varied between 139.3-188.9 DCR. Locked amount was 6.09-6.61 million DCR, which corresponded to 49.88-53.64% of the available supply participating in PoS.

The ticket price once again reached new high of 188.85 DCR while stake participation (DCR locked in tickets) has hit an all-time high of 53.6%.

Nodes: Throughout November there was an average of 114 public listening nodes and 166 total nodes per dcr.farm. Average version distribution for November: 28% dcrd v1.5.2, 20% dcrd v1.5.1, 13% dcrd v1.6 dev builds, 5% dcrd v1.5.0, 3.4% dcrd v1.7 dev builds, 3% dcrd v1.5 dev and RC builds, 1.1% dcrd v1.4, 12% dcrwallet v1.5.1, 2.5% dcrwallet v1.6 dev and RC builds, 1.3% dcrwallet v1.5, 0.8% dcrwallet v1.4, 9% others.

In other news:

Integrations

Welcome the new vsp.decredcommunity.org service that is running a mainnet instance of the new vspd software. As of writing it has ~70 live and ~30 voted tickets.

Existing providers decredbrasil.com, 99split.com, and stakeminer.com have all launched vspd instances in addition to their existing dcrstakepool servers listed at decred.org/vsp.

As of writing we have a total of 5 mainnet vspd services to choose from. Thank you all for supporting a more private way to stake.

Stakey.net VSP is now posting status and support updates on Mastodon.

Staked announced the closure of their Decred VSP for lack of economic viability. As of Dec 8, Decred is still featured on the site and VSP stats page shows 133 active users, 308 total users and 31 live tickets.

Hotbit Korea announced that they would list DCR/KRW market on Nov 26.

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.

Adoption

dcrtime was used by VotoLegal to record and timestamp donations to Brazil’s 2020 municipal elections campaign. According to Geek Insider, more than 24K donations have been tracked totalling more than $600K as of Nov 19. (discussion)

Outreach

To address the longstanding challenge of spreading content and news, @Exitus and others have assembled a Marketing Workgroup in Telegram to help coordinate:

Thus far, it has proven to be a productive and a positive force. If anyone would like to participate and add value, please DM me.

Mastodon server launched by Stakey.net VSP for their support account is open to the Decred community via this invite link. Mastodon is an open-source, self-hosted microblogging alternative to Twitter and is part of the Fediverse.

Decred is now listed as a sponsor at gioui.org.

Decred in Spanish published 5th monthly report of activities and expenses for their second proposal that is ending in December. A big final report covering June-December was published together with the 3rd proposal to continue the effort.

Blockchain Learning Challenge (co-organized by Decred in Spanish and Talent Land Network) had 6 projects that made it to the finals. Participants published source code on GitHub and presented their projects in short video pitches. 5 judges have rated each project in 5 areas (how much data was used and how, how original and relevant for Decred the idea is, how easy it is to use the app, how finished the app is, and how well things are documented). Summary of the finals with all ratings and links is here, and the final award video is here.

@michae2xl published a report of his November activities for the Brazil Marketing proposal.

Monde PR’s achievements for November:

News coverage secured by Monde PR:

Events

Attended:

Spanish Decred events keep getting announcements at Cointelegraph in Spanish.

Our events repository that serves as a master source for event data above was upgraded with new “tech”. Now key info about events is saved in (mostly human-readable) YAML files, and requires writing less prose than full reports. Such structure allows us to generate a pretty website where each event gets a nice link with everything about it. This should help with reporting and knowledge sharing. To get your event listed please follow these steps.

Media

Selected articles:

Videos:

Audio-only version of Staked Podcast is available on anchor.fm. Congrats on hitting 1,000 downloads/streams!

Audio:

Art and memes:

Translations:

Community Discussions

Selected Reddit posts:

Selected Twitter discussions:

Markets

In November DCR was trading between USD 11.71-24.78 / BTC 0.00086-0.00135. The average daily rate was $18.19.

The TIE has demonstrated a correlation between the climbing DCR/USD and 30-day average tweet volume.

An odd panic spike down to BTC 0.00075 was observed on Binance.

On Nov 12 @jy-p informed that the DEX had traded 191K DCR in total. This averages to 10 BTC/day.

Those wishing to peek at DCRDEX without installing anything can check the 24/7 streaming on YouTube.

Relevant External

The replacement for P2SH in BSV’s Electrum wallet was found to be fundamentally broken, allowing anyone to spend coins held in multi-sig hashes on the BSV chain.

The Value DeFi protocol was hacked for $7M, although the attacker returned $2M to the contract address for unknown reasons. The exploit was executed with a flash loan, coming less than 24 hours after Value DeFi had tweeted (now deleted) to boast about robust security with “flash loan attack prevention”.

The OUSD stablecoin was hacked with a flash loan used to conduct a reentrancy attack, to print and rebase (debase) OUSD equivalent to almost the entire circulating supply, allowing the hacker to extract $7M in value.

A flash loan was also used to exploit MakerDAO’s governance system, by borrowing $7M worth of MKR tokens and using these to vote before immediately repaying the loan. MakerDAO’s response has been to disable certain executive functions in case an attacker is able to access them, and extend the cooling off period during which the community can respond to unexpected proposals passing. Such a weakness would not be exposed if MKR holders were required to lock tokens for some time in order to vote - or if the amount of MKR available to borrow was less than the amount legitimately engaged in the governance system.

The soft-fork implementation of Schnorr signatures and Taproot was merged to Bitcoin Core in October, but as yet there is no agreement on the method for activating the change on the network. There is also an unpopular argument that Taproot will make Bitcoin’s privacy situation even worse for regular users by introducing a yet another address scheme. Taproot will add a new type of Schnorr signature, which will allow for greater flexibility with multi-signature wallets and for these transactions to look the same as regular transactions.

The Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain deposit contract was released in early Nov and reached the target 540,000 ETH deposited on Nov 24, with the final 150,000 ETH coming just hours before a deadline set for a Dec 1 launch. The beacon chain is the first of 4 phases to the launch and migration to Ethereum 2.0, in this initial form the chain’s only purpose is to ensure PoS validators can remain in consensus.

The latest Bitcoin Cash hard fork occurred in November, this time the focus of dispute is funding for the ABC developers. This hash war had a clear winner, with the BCHN chain (no dev funding) attracting virtually all of the mining power. Ahead of the fork, over 1 million BCH was observed moving to exchanges (selling a risky asset and receiving split coins are two common reasons for doing so).

Ethereum network experienced a disruption on Nov 11. A recent version of Geth node software silently fixed a consensus bug that was dormant for over a year. Since it changed consensus code, it had a risk of an unintended hard fork. One vendor discovered the bug independently and seeing that the majority of nodes have upgraded, decided to test it in production and see what would happen. To everyone’s surprise, among the minority of nodes running old software was Infura, a popular service provider used by “dapps” to sync with Ethereum network. The bug-triggering transaction halted Infura and a bunch of “decentralized” finance apps that relied on it, including Metamask, MakerDAO, Uniswap, Compound, and others. Binance and other exchanges have also halted trading after noticing conflicting transaction histories. Infura resolved the issue within hours and posted a post-mortem explaining why they didn’t upgrade and calling out the danger of silent consensus fixes. Ethereum developer also published a post-mortem for Geth, which explained that the fix was done silently to not attract unwanted attention from attackers. Among other things, the incident teaches us that deploying critical fixes is challenging because it is a trade-off between informing good actors while not informing bad ones.

The Aragon project is in the process of decommissioning the ANJ token which was introduced one year ago as the token to use with “Aragon Court”, a dispute resolution service for Aragon DAOs. The ANJ token is now seen as a barrier to the success of Aragon Court, and will be bought out by the ANT holders by issuing ~1-5% inflation to the holders of ANJ.

US authorities seized 69,370 BTC (and forks) worth around $1 billion, apparently with the consent of an unnamed hacker who had stolen the funds from Silk Road in 2013.

About This Issue

This is issue 32 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):