Decred Journal – June 2022

Highlights for June:

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.

dcrwallet

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

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).

Politeia

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

Backend:

GUI:

GUI migration to the new plugin architecture:

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.

Lightning Network

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

DCRDEX

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

User-facing changes:

Asset support progress:

Internal, developer, and other changes:

GoDCR

GoDCR is a lightweight desktop GUI wallet with integrated staking, privacy, Politeia voting, consensus voting, and more.

Feature development:

Optimization for mobile devices:

UI design updates:

Internal changes:

Bug fixes:

Image: Improved mobile layout in GoDCR.

dcrdata

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

TinyDecred

TinyDecred is a Python toolkit for integrating Decred. It includes an experimental light GUI wallet based on PyQt5.

@buck54321 has shared an update on the second version of TinyDecred he’s been working since early 2021:

A lot of this is still work-in-progress but is quite exciting already. Read the full post in Matrix and join the #tinydecred chat to follow the development.

Documentation

dcrdocs is the source code for Decred user documentation.

Image: Updated DCR issuance projection.

decred.org

dcrweb is the source code for the decred.org website.

Other

People

Community stats as of Jul 1 (compared to Jun 1):

Governance

In June the new treasury received 9,134 DCR worth $256K at June’s average rate of $28.06. 2,426 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $68K at June’s rate, or $100K at May’s billing rate of $41.46.

With the activation of DCP-0007 it was once again possible to pay contractors from the new treasury using the proper stakeholder-approved method. This transaction hit the required voting threshold (with 4,822 Yes votes and 0 No votes) on June 27th, meaning the vote ended in 10 days versus the full possible 12 days due to being guaranteed to pass regardless of the remaining votes, and so the turnout among the ~14,400 tickets that had a chance to vote was ~33% (above the quorum of 20%). There were 23 outputs, suggesting roughly this number of contractors/intermediaries were paid in the month, amounts ranging from 2.87 DCR to 767 DCR. Check the May 2021 issue for a recap on how the new treasury works.

As of July 3, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 799,639 DCR (17.9 million USD at $22.39).

Three new proposals were submitted in June:

Voting was held for four proposals, three of which were approved and one failed to reach the quorum requirement:

See May issue for a recap on voted proposals and Politeia Digest issue 52 for more details on June’s proposals.

Network

Hashrate: June’s hashrate opened at ~117 Ph/s and closed ~85 Ph/s, bottoming at 68 Ph/s and peaking at 132 Ph/s throughout the month.

Image: Hashrate has somewhat stabilized around 100 Ph/s.

Distribution of hashrate reported by the pools on Jul 1: Poolin 51%, ViaBTC 20%, F2Pool, 17%, AntPool 7%, BTC.com 4%, LuxorTech 1.2%, CoinMine 0.5%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Jul 1: Poolin 50%, ViaBTC 20%, BTC.com 5%, LuxorTech 1.3%, CoinMine 0.3%, unknown 24.1%.

Staking: Ticket price varied between 216-235 DCR, with 30-day average at 223.7 DCR (+0.1).

The locked amount was 8.97-9.17 million DCR, meaning that 62.9-64.2% of the circulating supply participated in Proof of Stake.

Image: Staking participation crawling up.

VSP: On Jul 1, ~7,150 (+250) live tickets were managed by listed vspd servers. Collectively the 16 VSPs managed 17.3% of the ticket pool (+0.5%).

Top 3 gainers are stakey.com (+408, +19%), ultravsp.uk (+295, +101%), and stakeminer.com (+127, +23%).

Nodes: Throughout June there were around 180 reachable nodes according to PD Analytics.

Node versions captured by Decred Mapper on Jul 1 (118 total, dcrd only): v1.7.1 - 41%, v1.7.2 - 26%, v1.7.0 - 12%, v1.7.0 dev builds - 8%, v1.8.0 dev builds - 3.4%, v1.6 series - 6.8%, v1.5 series - 0.9%, v1.4 series - 2.5%.

The share of mixed coins varied between 59.8-60.2%. Daily mixed amount varied between 160-455K DCR.

Decred’s Lightning Network has seen 44 nodes (-1), 72 channels (-6) with a total capacity of 36.7 DCR (-4.8), as of Jul 1 (compared to Jun 1).

Ecosystem

Guardarian has announced that buying and selling DCR for fiat is possible on their platform. Supported fiat currencies are EUR, USD, and GBP, and they can be sent over payment processors like MasterCard, Visa, SWIFT, SEPA, and Faster Payments. Fiat payouts go directly to the user’s bank account, while purchased coins go directly to the user’s wallet. There is a minimum amount to buy (EUR 30) and the service fee (EUR 2.49) is added to exchanges. Guardarian is licensed in Estonia.

Bitpanda announced that DCR is listed on their exchange and acknowledged its open governance and sustainable funding. Bitpanda is headquartered in Vienna, Austria.

BisonPool revealed that it will be a custodial staking service allowing users to stake with less than a full ticket (recently around 220 DCR). The reveal came after teasing on Twitter demonstrating a ticket purchased from 3 parts around 80 DCR each. The announcement received some criticism in the Matrix #media room for the service’s custodial nature. BisonPool came to respond and explain their vision and strategy.

JobsOnBlocks is a new job board for offering/requesting jobs to get paid in crypto. Site beta was launched in June and as of writing it supports 5 coins and has 3 jobs posted. The founder has dropped the announcement in our #trading chat, saying that DCR is supported since launch:

you can post a job and choose dcr as a payment coin, added it just for the bison crew 😉 [@Toussaint]

@jz posted a script for spinning up a Decred full node on popular systemd-based Linux distros with a simple curl -L node.dcr.pw | bash command. It is a good practice to not blindly run code from the Internet and read it before executing (the script is just 40 lines).

VSP users may find these two tables useful for deciding which provider to use: one summarizing how legacy VSPs have been shutdown, and another showing how the VSP operators have been upgrading their servers (sooner is better).

Luxor’s Decred mining pool shutdown was rumored on Reddit after one user received an email asking to withdraw all funds by Jun 10. Screenshot of the email had a notable factual error “DCR is going to PoS”. While Decred has reduced PoW miners’ block reward share from 60% to 10%, there is no intent or even a discussion to switch to pure PoS. As of Jul 9, there has been no official commentary from @LuxorTechTeam and their API still report the hashrate of 1.5 Ph/s (1.5% of network’s total 95 Ph/s) and 107 miners.

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 #ecosystem chat to follow Decred ecosystem updates.

Outreach

Monde PR’s achievements:

Secured the following news articles:

Events

Attended:

Upcoming:

Media

Decred Magazine has grown by 12 posts in June and continues serving as a mirror for Decred Journal and Politeia Digest with nice features like lightweight pages and working well without JavaScript. @phoenixgreen made 3 videos about Decred Magazine:

Authors wanted! Contact @phoenixgreen in Matrix #writers chat or @DecredSociety on Twitter.

Videos:

Art and fun:

Translations:

Discussions

Selected Reddit posts:

Selected Twitter discussions:

Markets

In June DCR was trading between USD 20.00-41.19 / BTC 0.00102-0.00141. The average daily rate was $28.06.

@Applesaucesome posted two biweekly market overviews with charts and commentary on crypto and the broader market.

If we turn on both indicators we can find that there is strong confluence between the two. If you pair the 2-year MA Multiplier’s buy zones along with price action within the bottom most Mayer Multiple band you’ll find that you could’ve just stocked up hard in those areas and then waited out the bear market. Will this be the same? Only time will tell. Also, don’t be irresponsible with your money.

Image: Combined 2Y MA Multiplier and Mayer Multiplier may signal buy zones. Or not. Trade wisely.

Image: DCRDEX monthly traded volume in DCR.

Relevant External

The crypto markets saw a significant decline in June, and although this paralleled non-crypto market sell-offs more broadly the crypto space saw its own particular issues around the insolvency of centralized entities and fears of contagious bad debt which could wipe out influential players in the crypto markets. One of the major threads to this unwinding concerned Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a hedge fund which was heavily exposed to the collapse of LUNA and then began struggling to meet margin calls as the prices for crypto assets tanked - partially instigated by the selling of Terra Foundation’s BTC reserve to try and support the collapsing price of TerraUSD. The opacity of dealings between these centralized entities was highlighted by the behavior of 3AC’s founders, formerly very active social media users who reportedly ghosted everyone their fund owed money to for an extended period. Over the course of June it has been slowly revealed that many large industry players had placed money with 3AC (which in turn placed significant sums in Anchor protocol for 20% yield on TerraUSD) and now won’t expect to see much of this back. It is striking that such significant events for the crypto markets were mostly known about for some time through the on-chain investigations of interested parties sharing their findings on Twitter - and that the on-chain entities these parties were transacting with held up relatively well through market turbulence, behaving as expected and forecast by observers.

On-chain investigations have also revealed things that market participants would have rather kept confidential, like the price at which their leveraged positions would be liquidated. It was seemingly forced selling of assets to meet margin calls on DeFi platforms which alerted the observers to 3AC’s issues. For the Solana chain lending service Solend, one particular whale’s liquidation price and the scale of their position (>95% of the pool’s deposits) was concerning enough that a vote was held to determine whether Solend Labs should be granted “emergency powers” to take control over this whale’s funds and liquidate their position OTC in a way which would not cause chaos for Solend users generally.

Some DAO on DAO conflict occurred in the “play to earn” space, with Merit Circle previously voting to “refund” the investment of Yield Guild Games (YGG) in their tokens - at a price much lower than the current market price. This raised many questions about whether a DAO’s members could unilaterally vote to change the terms of a deal the DAO had entered into - complicated significantly by the confidentiality of the contract between the firms/DAOs. It seems that some members of the “DAOs” have hashed out a deal to bring this to a conclusion without a potentially complex and expensive legal intervention.

For some months now concern has been growing in the Ethereum community about the level of ETH 2.0 staking which Lido Finance is responsible for (30% in April) - and the level of control over this mechanism which holders of the LDO token can exercise. In June a new governance proposal was introduced for LDO which would give stETH holders veto powers over some aspects of decision-making about the protocol.

To use Lido one deposits ETH and receives stETH, which will be redeemable for ETH on the new chain some months after “the merge” occurs - so the staked ETH is illiquid, but one can sell the stETH. Loss of parity between ETH and stETH was a particular stressor for Celsius, which was reliant on parity between ETH/stETH for its products to work as intended. Celsius was one of the firms that has been implicated in the contagious bad debt situation, owing significant sums to depositors and freezing withdrawals due to inability to meet demand.

The European Union has moved closer to finalizing its regulatory treatment of many aspects of crypto transactions. Many aspects of the regulation have been known for some time, but last minute negotiation was needed to determine thresholds for when a transfer between a CASP’s (Crypto Asset Service Providers) wallet and an “unhosted” wallet would need to verify the recipient’s identity. For transfers between CASPs they must verify each others’ control of addresses. When a customer requests withdrawal to an unhosted address they must state the identity, and when it is to their own wallet they must verify control of the address when the value of the transfer exceeds 1,000 Euros. Peer to peer transactions have no reporting requirements. Long established aspects of the regulation will see significant barriers to the issuance of stablecoins, including “algorithmic” stablecoins.

The founder of Maker DAO (MKR), Rune, returned to the governance forum this month, bringing with him some radical plans to shake up Maker’s governance in the form of an “Endgame Plan”. Rune had been absent from the scene since the Foundation was dissolved, and he has returned just as the people who were filling the voids he left in Maker’s governance in various ways were bringing their own proposals for how things should work to the Maker stakeholders. Three proposals which had been under discussion for some time met resistance in their formal votes as participation rates for MKR voting set a new all time high, with a maximum of 33% voting in the LOVE-001 proposal - a proposal which would have introduced an “oversight Core Unit”, and was defeated with 60% No votes. The three big proposals to change how Maker DAO functions were all defeated, with significant late stage redelegation of votes and the reappearance of another co-founder who had fallen out with the project long ago but retained a large voting stake and came back to vote No on everything, dropping an expletive-filled tirade against the community’s decision to turn off the buy-back and burn mechanism.

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

About

This is issue 48 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):