Decred Journal – October 2021

abstract art by @saender

Image: Remote Node Outpost by @saender

Highlights for October:

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

dcrd is a full node implementation that powers Decred’s peer-to-peer network around the world.

Merged changes:

dcrwallet

dcrwallet is a wallet server used by command-line and graphical wallet applications.

Decrediton

Decrediton is a full-featured desktop wallet app with integrated voting, StakeShuffle mixing, Lightning Network, DEX trading, and more. It runs with or without a full blockchain (SPV mode).

User-facing changes:

Internal:

Decrediton LN Overview

Decrediton LN Overview

Politeia

Politeia is Decred’s proposal system. It is used to request funding from the Decred treasury.

User-facing changes:

Changes in politeiavoter command-line tool:

Backend and internal changes:

Refactoring in preparation for the user layer rewrite (largest chunk of work for the 2021 Q3 proposal):

No free money on Politeia

No free money on Politeia

vspd

vspd is server software for running a Voting Service Provider. A VSP votes on behalf of its users 24/7 and cannot steal funds.

dcrlnd

dcrlnd is Decred’s Lightning Network node software. LN enables instant and low-cost transactions.

DCRDEX

DCRDEX is a non-custodial exchange for trustless trading, powered by atomic swaps.

User-facing changes:

Internal changes:

Progress towards Ethereum support:

DCRDEX markets overview

DCRDEX markets overview. Shown data is not real.

Decred Wallet (iOS)

GoDCR

GoDCR is a lightweight desktop wallet app with integrated staking, privacy, and Politeia browsing.

User-facing changes:

Internal changes:

Merged in dcrlibwallet library (shared by Android/iOS wallets and GoDCR):

GoDCR Proposals view

GoDCR Proposals view

Development continued despite the second GoDCR proposal getting rejected (49% Yes). Looking forward to the revised version and new app builds.

dcrdata

dcrdata is an explorer for Decred blockchain and off-chain data like Politeia proposals, markets, and more.

People

Welcome to new first time contributors with code merged to master: @AdimekweEbuka (godcr)!

Community stats as of Nov 2:

Governance

In October the new treasury received 10,678 DCR worth $1.3 million at the month’s average rate of $121.57. 974 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $118K at October’s rate, or $136K at September’s billing rate of $139.56. As of Nov 1, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 733,772 DCR (82.5 million USD at $112.42).

One proposal was submitted this month, @ammarooni returns with a proposal that revises an earlier book proposal to remove the book in favor of a steady stream of papers and social media content, memes and meetups.

The two proposals from @raedah were voted on this month, the one for mobile wallets was approved with 97.2% yes votes and 66% turnout, while the proposal to continue funding GoDCR was rejected with 49% approval and turnout of 73%.

See Politeia Digest issue 47 and issue 48 for more details on the month’s proposals.

@richardred published numbers and graphs for Politeia’s third year. A few highlights:

Politeia third year

Politeia third year

Network

Hashrate: October’s hashrate opened at ~237 Ph/s and closed ~284 Ph/s, bottoming at 164 Ph/s and peaking at 323 Ph/s throughout the month.

Distribution of hashrate reported by the pools on Nov 1: Poolin 43%, F2Pool 29%, AntPool 10%, BTC.com 6.4%, ViaBTC 6%, Luxor 4.5%, HuobiPool 0.5%, OKEx 0.4%, CoinMine 0.2%

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Nov 1: Poolin 42%, F2Pool 31%, Antpool 9%, BTC.com 7%, Luxor 5%, ViaBTC 5%, OKEx 0.7%, unknown 0.3%.

Decred hashrate May-Oct 2021

Decred hashrate May-Oct 2021

Staking: Ticket price varied between 139.7-209.7 DCR, with 30-day average at 191.6 DCR (-7.8).

The locked amount was 7.65-8.20 million DCR, meaning that 56.7-61.1% of the circulating supply participated in proof-of-stake.

Decred ticket pool May-Oct 2021

Decred ticket pool May-Oct 2021

VSP: On Nov 1, ~7,400 (-200) live tickets were managed by listed vspd servers and 224 (+4) by listed legacy dcrstakepool servers. Collectively the 7 legacy and 15 new VSPs managed 18.9% (-0.1%) of the ticket pool.

Nodes: Throughout October there were around 200 reachable nodes according to dcrextdata.

Node versions as of Nov 1 snapshot (245 total, dcrd only): v1.6.2 - 59%, v1.7 dev builds - 13%, v1.6.0 - 12%, v1.6.1 - 9%, v1.6 dev builds - 3%, v1.5.2 - 2%, v1.5.1 - 0.8%.

The share of mixed coins varied between 52.3-54.4% and set a new all-time high with the sum of mixed unspent coins above 7.3 million.

Ecosystem

Legacy VSP stakepool.eu has been removed from the VSP list to facilitate user migration to the new vspd system. It is still online to vote on the remaining live tickets (7 as of Nov 1). This VSP launched in May 2016 with the codename India, just 3 months after Decred was born. Thank you for 5 years of service!

Legacy VSP from 99split.com has handled its final live ticket and was shutdown. It has served since late 2019 and was one of the few vendors to actively support ticket splitting by coordinating sessions and creating user-friendly video tutorials. Users are welcome at its new vspd instance with a 0.99% fee and 1.7K voted tickets.

For anyone still using legacy VSP, it is recommended to switch to vspd providers to avoid the risk of missed tickets, e.g. in case the legacy VSP shuts down or stops working with the coming consensus upgrades. As of Nov 1, all legacy VSPs managed less than 260 tickets or 0.6% of the ticket pool.

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

Monde PR’s achievements for October:

Secured the following news articles:

In response to a common question “What’s up in Decred and where it is heading?” @bee wrote a summary of recent developments and mid-term goals.

@cryptotivo congratulates everyone with 600K “boring” blocks milestone:

👂Ever heard of the great #Decred hack?

How about the recent #Decred rug pull?

Yeah, me neither because they don’t exist.

#Decred has recently produced its 600 000th block.

That’s 600 fucking thousand bullshit free blocks.

Congrats to the team, stakers and visionaries. 🎖️ (@cryptotivo)

Media

Selected articles:

Videos:

Translations:

Other non-English content:

Markets

In October DCR was trading between USD 102.40-140.10 / BTC 0.0018-0.0025. The average daily rate was $121.57.

@tacorevenge published the second part of an investigation of The Suppressor entity that is suspected of manipulating DCR markets. This time on-chain analysis was used to see how funds have been flowing between miners, centralized exchanges and DCRDEX.

DCRDEX October trading volume

DCRDEX October trading volume

Relevant External

Zcash has been polling its coinholders again, this time on the subject of whether to change the consensus mechanism away from Proof of Work. 85% of the 41,000 ZEC (0.3% of circulating supply) that voted put a switch from PoW as the number one priority for the project. The aim is to move away from Proof of Work entirely, to some form of Proof of Stake or equivalent.

Sam Altman and other Silicon Valley VCs revealed their vision for a universal basic income that people must submit unique eyeball hashes to claim, and privacy advocates have piled on to say it’s a bad idea. Notable features are the orb-shaped eyeball scanners reminiscent of dystopian science fiction, and the 20% VC premine.

The latest DeFi airdrop farming controversy concerns Ribbon Finance, where one researcher from Divergence Ventures successfully met the qualifying criteria with hundreds of different wallets and received tokens worth $2.5 million. An independent researcher noticed the pattern and identified the wallet owner through association with an ENS domain, they suggested copytrading them on Twitter, but it blew up and Divergence Ventures ended up giving back all the airdropped tokens.

Cream Finance has been hacked for $130 million, which is the second major hack in the last 3 months. This attack used a flash loan to repeatedly lend and borrow funds across two addresses and took advantage of a pricing vulnerability to drain many of Cream’s liquidity pools. Analysis by a DeFi insider suggests that this hack was executed by a skilled DeFi developer, likely working on a rival project. The attacker also left a cryptic message which appeared to taunt a list of projects and blame Yearn developers, and some DeFi developers have started referring to a “war” in their tweets.

The DeFi protocol Indexed Finance was hacked for $16 million, but identified the attacker. The story of how the attacker was identified is an interesting one, involving an edit to Wikipedia which they made to describe themselves as a “notable mathematician”. It subsequently transpired that the attacker is a teenager, and rather than hand the funds back, or 90%, they have decided to test the “code is law” conjecture in court to see if they can keep their flash loan bounty.

The Creature Toadz NFT community was scammed by an attacker who posted a fake minting link in their Discord - in the 45 minutes before it was taken down 88 ETH was sent to the attacker. The funds were quickly returned after the hacker’s identity was discovered.

In the dog eat dog world of dog money, AnubisDAO executed a speedy rug pull with $60 million of investors’ money, 20 hours into the initial token sale for this new dog token with no website. There is some dispute over whether the attack was executed by a project insider or someone who phished a project insider.

A new crypto news wire has launched, and it is run by a DAO, PubDAO.

Popular patronage service Patreon is considering to drop the ban on its users offering and promoting social tokens on their platform.

The infamous $1 trillion infrastructure bill has returned to the house of representatives and someone has discovered an even more egregious anti-crypto provision: 6050I. This provision would require recipients of digital assets to, in many cases, collect a variety of information about the sender and report this to the IRS within 15 days. This provision has only recently been discovered, but it is apparently already too late to do anything about amending the infrastructure bill on its passage through the house of representatives.

The latest crypto fad is not a new blockchain but small blocks of tungsten, which people are buying to touch and hold. It didn’t take long for someone to come up with a Tungsten DAO which has minted an NFT representing a very large block of tungsten, and sold this for $250,000, to a holder who is entitled to visit it once a year for looking and touching (it’s too heavy to hold or deliver).

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

About

This is issue 43 of Decred Journal. Index of all issues, mirrors, and translations is available here.

Most information from third parties is relayed directly from the source after a minimal sanity check. The authors of the Decred Journal cannot verify all claims. Please beware of scams and do your own research.

Credits (alphabetical order):