Decred Journal – July 2021

abstract art by @saender

Image: Proximity Scaling by @saender

Highlights for July:

Contents:

Development

The work reported below has the “merged to master” status unless noted otherwise. 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

At this point we have 3 upcoming consensus changes at different stages of development:

One less obvious benefit of automatic ticket revocation is that it simplifies ticket splitting implementation.

dcrwallet

Decrediton

User-facing:

Internal:

updated Decrediton LN page

Updated Decrediton LN setup page

Politeia

User-facing:

Internal and developer:

CMS:

Changes awaiting deployment are marked with a pi-not-deployed label in both politeiagui and politeia repos. In a similar way, changes in scope of the development proposal are labeled 91cfcc8.

DCRDEX

User-facing:

Internal:

Ethereum support:

A few fixes have been backported to an upcoming v0.2.1 release.

Work started to replace the registration fee with fidelity bonds where users lock funds to use DCRDEX (as a disincentive against bad behavior) but can redeem them after a certain time. This creates a time cost to use DCRDEX instead of a monetary cost.

dcrandroid

@raedah commented on the question of when staking will be supported in the mobile apps:

Support for new style vspd staking has been built into dcrlibwallet for godcr and is currently in final testing. After godcr is released, it will be easy for the devs to import the same staking functionality into the mobile applications. There is not a strong incentive to prioritize building the mobile staking UI though until there is a functional hardware wallet that it can be paired with. (2021-07-19)

dcrios

godcr

updated Decrediton LN page

godcr Overview page

dcrdata

User-facing:

Internal and developer:

docs

decred.org

WooCommerce Plugin

@karamble released a new plugin for accepting DCR payments in WooCommerce shops. It can generate payment addresses using the wallet account’s XPUB (extended public key). This way each payment uses a new unique address while the shop’s web server has no access to the wallet.

WooCommerce plugin checkout

WooCommerce plugin checkout page

Other:

People

Welcome to new first time contributors with code merged to master: @briancolecoinmetrics (dcrd), @devchoplife (godcr), and @jcezetah (godcr)!

Check out new interviews with community members @fst_nml, Dominic Frisby, and Notsofast in the Media section.

Community stats as of Aug 1:

Governance

In July the new treasury received 11,338 DCR worth $1.44M at July’s average rate of $127.48. 770 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $98K at July’s rate, or $101K at June’s billing rate of $131.52. As of Aug 2, the combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 703,655 DCR (96.3 million USD at $136.80).

The legacy treasury received an unusual “donation” of ~90 DCR coming out of a mix transaction.

There were 4 new proposals published in July, and two are still under discussion at the time of writing.

See Politeia Digest issue 44 and issue 45 for more details on the month’s proposals.

Network

Hashrate: July’s hashrate opened at ~71 Ph/s and closed ~316 Ph/s, bottoming at 70 Ph/s and peaking at 334 Ph/s throughout the month.

Distribution of hashrate reported by the pools on Aug 1: Poolin 58%, F2Pool 23%, AntPool 6%, BTC.com 4%, Easy2Mine 4%, Luxor 2.3%, HuobiPool 1%, ViaBTC 0.4%, CoinMine 0.09%, OKEx 0.08%, UUPool 0.06%. Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined before Aug 1 closely matched the reported hashrate.

Hashrate is recovering from June’s events in China and new mining pools are joining the network.

Staking: Ticket price varied between 146.3-203.2 DCR, with 30-day average at 190.7 DCR (+6).

The locked amount was 7.43-7.88 million DCR, meaning that 56.3-59.8% of the circulating supply participated in proof-of-stake.

Ticket price had an unusual drop below 2020 lows but then quickly recovered with strong buy support.

VSP: On Aug 1, ~8,600 (+600) live tickets were managed by listed vspd servers and ~400 (-200) by listed legacy dcrstakepool servers. Collectively the 11 legacy and 14 new VSPs managed 22.9% (+2%) of the ticket pool. Unlisted but still active legacy VSPs managed 12 live tickets (-14).

The biggest ticket gainers in absolute terms were stakey.com (+474), 123.dcr.rocks (+126) and ubiqsmart.com (+51). The first two have fees below 0.5%.

Nodes: Throughout July there were around 211 reachable nodes according to dcrextdata.

Node versions as of Aug 1 snapshot (250 dcrd nodes): v1.6.2 - 57%, v1.6.0 - 16%, v1.6.1 - 13%, v1.7 dev builds - 7%, v1.6 dev builds - 3%, v1.5.2 - 2%, v1.5.1 - 1.6%.

Decred’s Lightning Network has seen 36 nodes (+2), 66 channels (+6) with a total capacity of 25.5 DCR (+3.7), as of Aug 1.

Ecosystem

Welcome the new vspd instance dcrvsp.dittrex.com, coming to replace their legacy VSP which was delisted in May and shut down in July.

Legacy VSP pool.d3c.red from @karamble voted its final ticket and was shutdown. Users are welcome to the replacement server at vsp.decredcommunity.org.

So far 8 legacy VSPs have been delisted (3 shutdowns, 1 status unknown, 4 still voting) and 9 are still listed. The status of migration to the new VSP system is summarized in this table. It is recommended that legacy VSP users upgrade to vspd to avoid the risk of missed tickets when dcrstakepool stops working (e.g. if a new consensus upgrade is activated).

The VSP list has been updated to show the percentage of revoked tickets, which is a helpful metric when choosing a VSP.

ViaBTC announced the launch of DCR mining, celebrated by a “Fee-free Mining Carnival” until Aug 25. The pool supports PPS+, PPLNS, and SOLO payment methods.

OKEx pool has been mining DCR since Aug 2020 or earlier, but in July it has finally mined some blocks, according to miningpoolstats.stream.

Bitfinex pre-announced a DCR listing and in early Aug posted that DCR/USD trading is live.

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.

Join our #services chat to follow Decred ecosystem updates.

Outreach

Monde PR’s achievements for July:

Secured the following news articles:

@StakeShuffle_ bot’s author is collecting feedback on what metrics to implement in the next development phase. The tweets with generated charts would provide up-to-date content that can be used in Twitter conversations.

Events

Attended:

Media

Selected articles:

Videos:

Audio:

Art and fun:

Translations:

If you have translations we don’t know about please share in our #translations chat.

Discussions

Selected Reddit posts:

Selected Twitter discussions:

Markets

In July DCR was trading between USD 91.70-158.46 / BTC 0.00338-0.00381. The average daily rate was $127.48.

Relevant External

Thorchain has been hit by two attacks this month. The first affected ETH liquidity providers, whose pools were drained of $5M, and they will be compensated from the Thorchain treasury. The second attack claimed $8M by tricking the network’s Bifrost protocol into receiving fake assets - it could apparently have been much worse if not for the hacker’s seeming whitehat tendencies. Things may be looking up for Thorchain however, as the last attacker left instructions for how they can improve security.

Uniswap has voted to fund a “DeFi Education Fund” with 1 million UNI (worth around $20 million), half of which they immediately traded for USDC. This proposal was originally billed as a “political defence fund”, to pay representatives who can fight DeFi’s corner with regulators. There are been some criticism of the role that UNI whales who are associated with the proposers played in approving this proposal.

The ShapeShift organization is closing its doors in an effort to “decentralize itself out of existence”. It is airdropping FOX tokens to its users and users of a number of DeFi protocols, and those tokens will be used to govern a DAO (which is also receiving a token allocation). The airdrop is complex as it covers a range of blockchains, but users will only have 100 days to claim their FOX tokens before these revert to the DAO.

That’s all we have for July. Share your updates for the next issue in our #journal chat room.

About

This is issue 40 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.

Credits (alphabetical order):