Decred Journal – January 2023

Image: Decred Owl by @OfficialCryptos

Highlights for January:

Contents:

Bison Relay v0.1.3

New v0.1.3 release has brought many bug fixes and quality of life improvements discovered during early community testing. AppImage builds are now available for Linux users.

Get the latest release at the new download selector or directly from GitHub.

Head to the Bison Relay section for a detailed list of changes in v0.1.3 and beyond.

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.

Politeia

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

All changes below are towards the GUI remake on the new plugin architecture.

Re-implemented pages:

Other changes:

Image: User account page in the Politeia GUI remake.

cspp

cspp is a server for coordinating coin mixes using the CoinShuffle++ protocol. It is non-custodial, i.e. does not hold any funds.

DCRDEX

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

Client changes:

Client fixes:

Server fixes:

Ethereum:

Other changes:

In progress:

Image: Improved fee estimation for tokens in DCRDEX.

Documentation

dcrdocs is the source code for Decred user documentation.

decred.org

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

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.

GUI changes in the v0.1.3 release:

GUI fixes in v0.1.3:

Command-line app changes in v0.1.3:

Command-line app fixes in v0.1.3:

Server changes in v0.1.3:

GUI app changes merged in master towards next release:

Command-line app changes in master:

bisonrelay.org website:

Other stuff:

Timestamply

Timestamply is a free service for timestamping files powered by Decred blockchain. A timestamp proves that a certain file has existed at a certain moment of time. This has a range of applications in protecting data integrity.

dcrtimegui was rebranded as Timestamply and the app received a full redesign. Some of the new features include:

Timestamply redesign arrived soon after the app has received some attention from Brazilian politicians who timestamped PDF files with their governance plans, to combat misinformation spreading via fake versions of the files.

The proposal to fund the new version has been approved and it is awaiting deployment to timestamp.decred.org. Until then users can try the upcoming version on the test website. Be aware that the test website uses a different database and may not find hashes timestamped by the current version of the app.

Image: Timestamply’s new design.

Other

People

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

Governance

In January the new treasury received 8,564 DCR worth $189K at January’s average rate of $22.05.

The treasury spend tx mined on Jan 3 had 24 outputs and was reported last month as making payments to contractors for (mostly) the November invoices, ranging from 5 DCR to 1,270 DCR. It was approved by 6,967 votes (all Yes) with voter turnout of 54%, out of the 12,909 tickets that had a chance to participate during the shortened 9-day vote. In total it spent 3,907 DCR worth approx. $86K at November’s billing rate of $21.92.

All spend transactions from the new treasury can be found here.

As of Jan 30, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 840K DCR ($19.4 million USD at $23.03).

Image: Decred Treasury monthly inflows and outflows.

There were 8 proposals published on Politeia in January.

See Politeia Digest issue 55 and issue 56 for more details on the month’s proposals.

Network

Hashrate: January’s hashrate opened at ~80 Ph/s and closed ~76 Ph/s, bottoming at 64 Ph/s and peaking at 93 Ph/s throughout the month.

Image: Decred hashrate.

Distribution of 81 Ph/s hashrate reported by the pools on Feb 1: Poolin 64%, F2Pool 30%, BTC.com 4%, AntPool 2%, CoinMine 0.4%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Feb 1: Poolin 61%, F2Pool 31%, AntPool 4%, BTC.com 3%, CoinMine 0.4%.

Image: Historical pool hashrate distribution.

Staking: Ticket price varied between 140-298 DCR, with 30-day average at 212.5 DCR (-22.3).

Image: Ticket price went wild.

The locked amount was 8.93-9.71 million DCR, meaning that 59.9-65.2% of the circulating supply participated in Proof of Stake.

Image: Drop and recovery of DCR locked in PoS.

A sharp drop in ticket buying volume has sent the ticket price down to 140 DCR, this level was last observed in October 2022 during a similar drop. The amount of DCR locked in tickets reduced by ~780K DCR to 8.93 million DCR.

Such a low ticket price has triggered very high ticket buying which has sent the ticket price on the wildest price swing we have seen so far. 48,624 tickets have been bought in January - the highest monthly since the very first month of Decred, February 2016.

VSP: The 16 listed VSPs collectively managed ~8,390 (+1,270) live tickets, which was 18.8% of the ticket pool (+1.6%) as of Feb 1. At the time of the snapshot the ticked pool had ~44,670 tickets, a whopping 9% above the target 40,960.

Biggest gainers in January are vspd.99split.com (+419), dcrhive.com (+328) and vsp.stakeminer.com (+319).

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs.

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed 187 dcrd nodes on Feb 1: v1.7.5 - 33%, v1.7.1 - 21%, v1.8.0 dev builds - 13%, v1.7.2 - 13%, v1.7.0 - 9%, v1.7.4 - 3%, other - 8%.

Image: Historical dcrd version distribution, data from nodes.jholdstock.uk. NOTE: Data until Jan 2023 was incomplete.

We have discovered that the node counts we have been reporting since June 2022 were incomplete. A possible cause for this is that Decred Mapper was relying on the GetAddr request, and many nodes stopped responding to that request for some reason. GetAddr is part of the network gossip protocol, it is how nodes discover other nodes. Responding to it is optional, so getting no response is not a bug. Node counts reported by Decred Mapper were correct on Jan 26.

The share of mixed coins varied between 59.9-61.6%. Daily mixed amount varied between 140-611K DCR.

Image: Mixed and unspent DCR has dropped slightly.

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer has seen 147 nodes (+17), 261 channels (+28) with a total capacity of 106.1 DCR (+5.4), as of Feb 1. These stats vary depending on the LN node. For example, @karamble’s node reported 163 nodes (+19), 347 channels (+35) and 159.7 DCR (+5.7) capacity on same Feb 1.

Ecosystem

VSP list API now reports block height and estimated network proportion. Block height provides more certainty about the VSP being stalled or fully synced with the blockchain. Historical snapshots of API data are available here.

VSP stakey.com was delisted from the VSP list due to the problems with fixing its API. Voting wallets should not have been affected.

GoDCR SPV wallet was removed from the Wallets page. Download links are no longer working and this wallet is no longer supported/updated as result of the GoDCR proposal failing to pass. Source code is still available.

New Lightning Network node was launched by @kozel at ln.dcrhive.com (standard port 9735). To celebrate the launch his VSP offered a reduced fee of only 0.1% until Feb 8. In the future @kozel plans to add an LN Liquidity Provider instance, so anyone who wishes to receive inbound LN capacity to their node will be able to request it.

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 media placements:

Events

Attended:

Media

Selected articles:

Decred Magazine engagement stats as of January 2023:

Please note that Decred Magazine generates much more content than @decredproject can retweet (a nice problem to have!), so follow it directly to not miss a story. There are many ways to follow DM: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, RSS feed, or just directly check decredmagazine.com or a specific category, News or Politeia Digest.

Videos:

Audio:

Tivra aka @WasPraxis organized 5 new Twitter Spaces:

Art and fun:

Image: “Time for a Decred hot chocolate” by @maitreludo

Other:

Translations:

Discussions:

Markets

In January DCR was trading between USDT $18.30-$24.90 and BTC 0.00097-0.00116. The average daily rate was $22.05.

While not on Decred Magazine recently, @Applesaucesome continues to post $DCR technical analysis and predictions on Twitter.

Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD.

Relevant External

The Ordinals protocol, for “inscribing” data on satoshis like a Bitcoin version of an NFT, debuted this month and received a mixed reaction from the Bitcoin community. Reactions were split between those who viewed it as an additional fun use case for Bitcoin, and those who saw it as spam invading the Bitcoin chain which should be discouraged or even censored. Adam Back was among those who immediately started thinking of ways that mining pools could mobilise to censor and prevent this use of Bitcoin, although later deleted and retracted the tweet.

In early Feb the largest ever Bitcoin transaction was mined and it was a “Taproot Wizard” Ordinal inscription, filling an entire block almost to the 4 megabyte limit. The transaction was mined by Luxor pool and paid for in a private arrangement with Udi Wertheimer, one of the Taproot Wizards. Ordinals rely on Taproot and also SegWit to work in their specific form on the Bitcoin chain, and they have some structural differences to how NFTs work on Ethereum and other chains.

Taproot itself has been billed as a privacy upgrade for Bitcoin, because it allows complex transactions, like those requiring multi-signature authorization or using time locks, to appear similar to normal transactions, in a way which does not reveal their nature. Taproot also allows some of these operations to be completed more efficiently, which means paying less for block space. Although Taproot has been live since a soft fork activated in November 2021, its usage remained low until recently, with only 0.37% of transactions using it in April 2022.

Polkadot is planning to transform its governance, aiming to improve the level of decentralization and community participation. Presently a Council is elected by token holders and appoints a Technical Committee of protocol experts, these bodies serve pivotal roles in Polkadot’s governance. The new system will dissolve the Council and Committee roles. Some of their functions will be performed by community members directly, proposals will be submitted to different tracks depending on what they do, and the tracks will have their own approval thresholds and time frames, with an automated process to determine when voting starts and stops and which proposals are activated first. A “Substrate Fellowship” will take on the responsibility for assuring code quality for upgrades, but at 100+ members this will be a much larger group than the Technical Committee. The new governance system will also enable more flexible delegation of voting power, on a per proposal type basis.

Polkadot’s Web3 Foundation has tweeted out its argument for why the DOT token is no longer a security, explaining the efforts they have taken to comply with US securities laws and announcing in Nov 2022 that DOT was able to morph into something which was no longer a security.

It looks like Ooki DAO is set to lose its case with the CFTC in a default judgment because nobody stepped up to represent the DAO by the deadline of Jan 11. So far CFTC has established that it can serve a DAO papers by posting it on their forum/Discord as long as they identify and serve at least one tokenholder as well, and has indicated that it considers anyone who participates in the DAO in any way to be jointly liable for its actions as an unincorporated partnership.

The SEC has piled on to Avi Eisenberg adding its own Mango market manipulation charges to those brought by the DoJ and CFTC already. As of early Feb Eisenberg was trying to negotiate bail, having been in custody since Dec 26.

The infamous 3AC co-founders are attempting a rebirth from the ashes of FTX, seeking funding to set up a company for trading the claims that crypto traders have on bankrupt exchange liquidations.

DeFi platform Moonwell on the Moonbeam chain has been figuring out how to compensate its users after a voter-approved parameter change caused all the collateral on the platform to lose 99.9% of its borrowing power and everyone got liquidated, paying 10% of their position size in penalties. 30% of the liquidation penalties went to a community fund and a proposal will be made to reimburse that portion directly, the other 70% will be covered by Gauntlet, a risk management partner of Moonwell.

Reddit has launched some new use cases for MOONs, the /r/cryptocurrency karmic rewards token. Moonplace is a series of 10,000 NFTs which each grant their holder control of a 10x10 array of pixels in a 2d public space. After 4 days all the NFTs had been minted, burning 1 million MOONs (worth ~$130,000) and causing a temporary spike in the price of MOONs. The Moonplace NFTs are on the Arbitrum Nova network, an L2 rollup scaling solution for Ethereum.

The first /r/cryptocurrency banner ad was also sold for MOONs (worth $3,350), to the 1inch decentralized exchange.

The largest ETH staking pools have been considering whether they should limit their further growth to avoid issues of centralization. Rocket Pool is on course to approve a proposal (RPIP-17) which would enshrine the objective for Rocket Pool to promote “healthy staking”, with a couple of mechanisms to limit the growth in its share of pooled ETH staking, of which Rocket Pool currently controls 1.66%. Lido, which controls a much greater share of ETH staking (29%), overwhelmingly rejected a similar kind of proposal in July 2022.

Vitalik Buterin has published a blog post about stealth addresses, describing privacy as one of the largest remaining challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem. Stealth addresses would be generated by the sender from a recipient’s meta-address, which only the recipient could control but which would not be associated with their on chain identity. In other words it would give the same kind of privacy as generating a new address for each receipt of assets, but without the hassle of having to generate the new addresses.

Uniswap’s governance has turned into a clash of VCs as a16z and Jump are both backing their own book in a choice of which bridge to integrate for Binance Smart Chain. Jump is supporting Wormhole, and a16z’s horse is LayerZero, but the twist is that a16z are technically unable to participate in the “temperature check” vote to decide which integration is coded up, but have asked that their 15M tokens be counted off the books as voting for LayerZero. Wormhole won the temperature check by 11M votes, so a16z’s votes would be enough to change the outcome. Failing that, a16z could attempt to block the deployment of the Wormhole bridge by voting against it in an on chain vote (presuming they will be technically able to).

Silvergate Capital is the bank which many crypto exchanges use, and its stock has plunged by 46% after it reported outflows of $8.1 billion in crypto assets in Q2 2022, and laid off 40% of its staff (about 200 employees) to cut costs. Silvergate was viewed as a possible casualty from the FTX/Genesis contagion, spurring the run of withdrawals. Silvergate also announced that it was writing off all $196 million of its investment in Diem (formerly Facebook Libra/Zuck Bucks), having apparently realised that open source code and a tarnished brand wasn’t worth much.

Aptos, which is led by former Diem developers but didn’t pay Meta/Silvergate anything for their assets and instead took $200M funding from a16z and other VCs, saw a surge in its price in January which took its market cap to $2.4B, as it became the “hot new coin” for a period.

Well known Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr was hacked and lost a considerable proportion of his BTC stack, over 200 BTC. It appears that hackers were able to compromise the Linux system being used, which granted access to Luke’s PGP encryption keys as well as his BTC. The PGP keys were used to sign Bitcoin Core and Knots releases, so these should be distrusted by users until the situation is resolved and Luke Dashjr presumably publishes a new PGP key.

YouTube personality Logan Paul’s role in the CryptoZoo NFT project was documented by Coffeezilla, with the conclusion that he was chief among scammers for a project which over-hyped a game that they were not realistically going to deliver. Paul threatened to sue CoffeeZilla but then withdrew those threats and apologized. Logan Paul is now the subject of a class action lawsuit over his role in CryptoZoo.

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

About

This is issue 55 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):