Decred Journal – December 2022

Image: Bison Relay artwork by @saender

December’s highlights:

Contents:

Bison Relay Launch

Bison Relay is a new peer to peer social media platform with strong protections against censorship, surveillance and advertising. Messages are end-to-end encrypted to ensure only the intended recipients can see the contents. There are no accounts and metadata is minimized so that server operators cannot see message contents, sender, receiver, or which chats user participates in. Built-in payments allow content monetization via paid content access or tipping.

Initial release comes with the following features (incomplete list):

Payments for sending and receiving messages serve as anti-spam protection but Bison Relay is cheap to use, 0.1 DCR could last months for regular chatting.

Most users will want to download the GUI app here, get the file named bisonrelay-xxx for your operating system. The downloads have no hashes or signatures yet but those will be added in the future.

Learn how to use Bison Relay:

Once set up, read the onboarding guide and contact @kozel on Matrix to get your initial invite(s).

Advanced users can also check the command-line brclient app, server source code, and technical docs.

To understand the motivation behind Bison Relay check the posts by @jy-p:

The inference is that Decred should attempt to grow its network without conventional marketing. The path forward is not through, but around. [What is wrong with Decred?]

DCRDEX v0.5.8 Release

This release fixes issues with requesting fiat rates from external sources, and adds options for advanced command-line and Go API users that allow skipping time consuming operations on startup and shutdown.

v0.5.8 is available as a standalone DEX app here.

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).

Image: TSpend voting in Decrediton.

Politeia

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

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.

DCRDEX

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

v0.5.8 release:

Changes below are merged in master towards future releases.

Ethereum:

Fidelity bonds (client):

Other client changes:

Image: First trade between USDC and DCR on testnet.

dcrdata

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

User-facing changes:

Developer and API changes:

Image: dcrdata, now it is easier to track TSpend voting progress.

Bison Relay

Bison Relay is a new peer-to-peer social media platform with strong protections against censorship, surveillance, and advertising, powered by Decred Lightning Network.

Bison Relay has been revealed after 2 years of initial development by Company 0. End-user details can be found in the announcement above, and here we will focus on the tech and recent changes in the source.

Bison Relay tech stack overview:

GUI app, changes released in v0.1.1:

GUI app, changes in master towards next release:

GUI app, improved onboarding:

GUI app, fixes:

CLI app:

bisonrelay.org website is a static site build with Hugo, Bootstrap, and SCSS. Site source code is also public.

Website December changes:

Future plans for Bison Relay have been announced on BR itself:

we’re designing the next set of features for br, which include the ability to have some sort of “pages”, for both content and as store front. The current iteration of this feature is that a client can provide “pages” that other key-exchanged clients can view and interact in some way. [@jy-p on 2022-12-18]

People

Welcome the new first-time contributors:

Community stats as of Jan 4 (compared to Dec 2):

Our main @decredproject account has been observed having 2 out of 4 bans activated: Ghost Ban and Reply Deboosting, according to Twitter Shadowban Check. Reportedly, not too long ago all 4 were active. This and other reports somewhat explain Twitter performance seen so far.

Governance

In December the new treasury received 8,712 DCR worth $172K at December’s average rate of $19.79. 3,907 DCR was spent to pay contractors (but the transaction was not approved/mined until January 3), worth $77K at December’s rate, or $86K at November’s billing rate of $21.92.

The treasury spend tx had 24 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 5 DCR to 1,270 DCR.

As of Jan 7, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 834,055 DCR (15.6 million USD at $18.70).

There were no new proposals published on Politeia in December.

Network

Hashrate: December’s hashrate opened at ~67 Ph/s and closed ~68 Ph/s, bottoming at 58 Ph/s and peaking at 91 Ph/s throughout the month.

Image: Decred hashrate.

Distribution of 75 Ph/s hashrate reported by the pools on Jan 1: Poolin 55%, F2Pool 38%, BTC.com 5%, AntPool 2.7%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Jan 4: Poolin 55%, F2Pool 36%, likely BTC.com 5%, likely AntPool 2.6%, CoinMine 0.4%, unknown 0.9%.

Image: Pool hashrate distribution.

Image: Historical pool hashrate distribution.

Staking: Ticket price varied between 234-244 DCR, with 30-day average at 234.8 DCR (+3.3).

The locked amount was 9.46-9.62 million DCR (new all-time high), meaning that 64.0-64.8% of the circulating supply participated in Proof of Stake.

VSP: The 17 listed VSPs collectively managed ~7,120 (+190) live tickets, which was 17.2% of the ticket pool (+0.4%) as of Jan 1. These figures exclude vspd.stakey.com due to stale API data.

Biggest gainers in December are vspd.bass.cf (+371), big.decred.energy (+179) and vspd.99split.com (+178).

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs.

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed 79 dcrd nodes on Jan 1: v1.7.5 - 27%, v1.7.1 - 27%, v1.8.0 dev builds - 23%, v1.7.2 - 11%, v1.7.0 - 6%, v1.7.4 - 2.5%, other - 4%.

Image: Reachable dcrd node versions.

Image: Historical dcrd version distribution, data from nodes.jholdstock.uk.

The share of mixed coins varied between 61.1-61.4%, or 9.02-9.10 million DCR (new all-time high). Daily mixed amount varied between 291-479K DCR.

The launch of Bison Relay had a major impact on Decred LN. Comparing stats from @karamble’s node observed on Dec 1 and Dec 19: nodes 67 -> 120, channels 104 -> 212, capacity 40.6 -> 91.1.

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer is back up and has reported 130 nodes, 233 channels with a total capacity of 100.7 DCR, as of Jan 4. These stats vary depending on the LN node. For example, @karamble’s node reported 144 nodes, 312 channels and 154 DCR capacity on Jan 4.

Ecosystem

The VSP vspd.synergy-crypto.net has been removed from the API after voting its remaining live tickets. It had been serving since June 2021 and voted a total of 892 tickets. The shutdown was executed cleanly: it stopped accepting new tickets in August 2022 and over the next 4 months all live tickets have voted.

Poloniex has re-enabled the DCR/BTC market which was frozen since Sep 30 when the exchange tweeted that the DCR wallet is still on maintenance (since January 2022). The market was first re-enabled on Nov 28 but was quickly frozen again for another week until being fully restored on Dec 5.

Binance was rejecting DCR withdrawals for about 10 days. First reports of rejected withdrawals surfaced around Dec 12. Some went through on Dec 14 but next day more withdrawals got suspended. Binance shared conflicting information about the cause of the outage. Support Twitter called it “standard maintenance procedure”. In one support ticket they cited DCR network being “busy”, but later revealed having insufficient funds in the hot wallet. Wallet Maintenance Updates lists no posts about the issue as of writing. The issue was resolved around Dec 22. The blockchain was working as expected and no outages or issues were seen elsewhere in the network.

Join our #ecosystem chat to follow Decred ecosystem updates.

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:

Secured the following news articles:

Events

Attended:

Media

Selected articles:

Decred Magazine engagement stats as of December:

Videos:

Audio:

New Twitter Spaces recordings:

Art and fun:

Translations:

Non-English content:

Markets

In December DCR was trading between USDT $18.20-$24.80 and BTC 0.00110-0.00145. The average daily rate was $19.79.

The new DCR/USDT market on Poloniex has seen around 1,070 DCR daily average volume, much higher than 230 DCR/day on the old DCR/BTC pair. Interestingly, DCR/BTC market was frozen for the first week while DCR/USDT was active.

Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD.

Relevant External

In November, plans to outlaw privacy-enhancing crypto coins in the EU were leaked. The plans were put forward by the Czech officials who are currently chairing talks. Crypto-asset service providers and other institutions would be banned from holding or touching privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency under the proposal.

In Brazil, Congress has passed a bill to regulate crypto payments, it will allow banks to offer services around crypto assets, and also covers things like airline points.

Avraham Eisenberg, the front man who took public credit for the “highly profitable trading strategy” which drained Mango Markets of $110 million, has been arrested and charged with market manipulation offences.

SBF was charged with a number of offences and agreed to be extradited to the US, where he was granted bail on a $250 million bond on the condition that he stay at his parents’ house. The names of some wealthy associates who covered part of the bond have been kept secret, unusually. The trial is scheduled to start in October 2023.

Popular crypto news and research providers The Block were revealed to be secretly bankrolled by SBF through Alameda, it looks like three loans were made to Block CEO McCaffrey, one of which was used buy an apartment in the Bahamas. It appears that none of the Block’s editorial staff were aware of the arrangement between SBF and McCaffrey, who has now resigned.

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust has been puzzling and spooking some investors, as its “discount to NAV” (price of a share of the trust vs the value of the amount of Bitcoin one share represents) increased to a whopping 45%. In Summer 2022 Grayscale’s application to convert the fund to an ETF was denied, so it is presently stuck in a position where investors cannot claim the BTC their shares entitle them to, although this decision is under appeal. Grayscale is owned by the Digital Currency Group, which also owns troubled crypto lender Genesis, which had to suspend its operations in the wake of FTX’s collapse, and in January cut 30% of its workforce. The Digital Currency Group owns many companies in the crypto space, and there has been some speculation about which of these they might sell to bail out the struggling ones. Their holdings include CoinDesk, which broke the story about FTX which triggered the present difficulties for DCG. The cryptocurrency holdings of DCG have been the subject of some controversy, as Grayscale’s refusal to participate in providing “Proof of Reserves” was one of the factors which caused suspicion initially - although Coinbase has stepped up to vouch for their assets being safely held.

It has been a tough year for Bitcoin miners, and in particular the Northern American industry which grew rapidly fuelled by cheap credit in 2021 and lured in by the gap left when China banned PoW mining. As the price of BTC declined by 63% in 2022 the industry was becoming more competitive, leading to a 70% drop in mining profitability. As the problems became clear the value of top mining machines declined 85% and the value of shares for the mining companies fell from between 80-98%. In December Core Scientific, one of the largest US crypto miners, has filed for bankruptcy.

The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to unleash “FedNow” in May-July 2023, a version of the digital dollar for depository institutions which their clients will be able to access and use directly for instant processing and settlement 24/7 hours a day 365 days a year. This is distinct from any retail-facing CBDC, which is so far not being actively planned in the US but some experiments have taken place.

The Bank of England actively seeking applications from companies to build a prototype mobile wallet app, merchant website and back-end server for the core ledger - and offering a budget of £200,000 for the winning entry.

ConsenSys faced a backlash over an update to its privacy policy in November, with users objecting to the collection of IP address information through RPC provider Infura and linking this to addresses and account balances. A response from ConsenSys in December clarified that they only collect data for “write” events (like making a transaction) and not when the user merely checks their balances, and that they have been doing this since 2018. They pledged to no longer store the IP data alongside the account access data, and to make it easier for users to change RPC provider through the interface.

Sia launched a community grants program in September, and provided an update in November. There is a small panel which reviews proposals and so far they have approved two proposals - Lume Web aims to “use Skynet to enable Sia to act as the internet”, is getting $80K, and Sia Satellite, which will allow people to pay to use Sia storage with a credit card, $26K. In December another update reported that Fabstir’s proposal had been approved for $40K, and plans to collaborate with Lume Web on other aspects of the “web3 platform”, like social media for the creator economy with sales and tipping. The other two proposals have been rejected, but with an option to edit and re-submit.

The Osmosis DAO (Osmosis is a major DeFi platform on Cosmos) looked back on 2022. There were 278 proposals, of which 26 were rejected, so 90% of proposals passed. One of the highlights appears to have been “superfluid staking” (otherwise known as “reverse liquid staking)”, which allows liquidity providers to bond the tokens they get such that the underlying OSMO can be staked to contribute to securing the blockchain. Initially voting rights were delegated along with stake to the staker’s choice of validator, but a successful governance proposal subsequently allowed LP stakers to override the votes of their chosen validator. Osmosis voters also approved a community grants proposal with a budget of 1.5M OSMO for 6 months and the entity running the program receiving $70K/month on top of an initial $100K - the program was renewed in November.

The Balancer DAO community agreed to a peace treaty with the veBAL (Balancer’s governance token) whale who came to be known as Humpy. Humpy is the largest BAL holder and liquidity provider, and used their voting power to dominate Balancer’s governance and increase the yield rates for the liquidity pools they were personally using. Balancer developers and the community mobilised to mitigate Humpy’s self-dealing but Humpy was still able to extract significant profit by pointing BAL rewards to pools they created with high fee levels. The peace treaty was approved almost unanimously by the veBAL community in a token vote, Humpy agreed to not increase their BAL position any further and to unwind much of it, with assistance from community members to organise OTC trades.

DFINITY Foundation announced the launch of a Bitcoin integration with the Internet Computer (IC), with IC serving as a layer 2 for Bitcoin without a centralised bridge.

Donald Trump launched his own NFT collection, selling 45,000 “trading card” images showing him dressed in various costumes for $99 each. The NFTs were all minted within 24 hours and it was a popular NFT collection to trade initially, the floor price on the secondary increased to over $200. The NFTs would entitle holders to access certain Trump-related activities, and these passes are in Jan being airdropped to holders, but are not proving as lucrative to trade, with tokenized tickets to access group Zoom calls with the Donald changing hands for less than $25 a piece.

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

About

This is issue 54 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):