Decred Journal – May 2023

Image: Cyberstorm by @Exitus

Highlights of May:

Contents:

DCRDEX v0.6.1 Release

This DEX release features:

Get the latest DEX client as a standalone app, or as part of Decrediton, or install it from Decred’s custom Umbrel App Store. As always, we recommend to verify the files before running.

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.

Changes merged in master towards future releases:

In progress:

dcrwallet

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

Backported changes ready for the next v1.7.x release:

Changes merged in master towards future releases:

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).

In progress:

Other:

vspd

vspd is server software used by Voting Service Providers. 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.

cspp

cspp is a server for coordinating coin mixes using the CoinShuffle++ protocol. It is non-custodial, i.e. never holds any funds. CSPP is part of StakeShuffle, Decreds privacy system.

DCRDEX

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

Changes included in v0.6.1 release:

All other changes below are merged in master towards future releases.

Client:

Bitcoin:

Ethereum:

Firo:

App packaging:

Developer and internal changes:

Image: DEX’es swap contract requires a one-time approval to swap your tokens.

Image: Solar setup running Umbrel with DEX market maker + arbitrage. By @busyLightz.

dcrdata

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

Bison Relay

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

All work reported below is merged to master towards the next release (likely v0.1.8).

GUI and CLI apps:

GUI app:

CLI app:

Stores progress:

Other:

People

Community stats as of Jun 2 (compared to May 3):

Governance

In May the new treasury received 8,088 DCR worth $139K at May’s average rate of $17.13. 3,591 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $62K at same rate.

A treasury spend tx was approved with 6,722 Yes votes and 52% turnout, and mined on May 20. It had 23 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 4 DCR to 1,464 DCR. Most of this DCR was likely paid for March work, at its billing exchange rate of $20.69 the TSpend is worth around $74K.

As of June 17, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 858,136 DCR (12.1 million USD at $14.08).

Proposals approved in May:

Proposals submitted in May:

See Politeia Digest issue 60 for more details on the month’s proposals.

Network

Hashrate: May’s hashrate opened at ~74 Ph/s and closed ~66 Ph/s, bottoming at 61 Ph/s and peaking at 88 Ph/s throughout the month.

Image: Decred hashrate

Distribution of 67 Ph/s hashrate reported by the pools on Jun 1: Poolin 40%, F2Pool 40%, AntPool 16%, BTC.com 5%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Jun 1: F2Pool 40%, Poolin 35%, AntPool 17%, BTC.com 8%.

Image: Historical pool hashrate distribution

Staking: Ticket price varied between 173-334 DCR.

Image: Ticket price made another swing

The locked amount was 9.38-9.90 million DCR, meaning that 61.7-65.1% of the circulating supply participated in Proof of Stake.

VSP: The 14 listed VSPs collectively managed ~6,650 (-310) live tickets, which was 16.8% of the ticket pool (0.3%) as of Jun 1.

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed 147 dcrd nodes on Jun 1 of the following versions: v1.7.7 - 25%, v1.7.1 - 21%, v1.7.5 - 18%, v1.7.2 - 10%, v1.8.0 dev builds - 9%, v1.7.0 - 7%, v1.7.4 - 3%, other - 8%.

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

The share of mixed coins varied between 61.8-61.9%. Daily mixed volume varied between 143-497K DCR.

Image: Monthly StakeShuffle volume in USD

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer has seen 211 nodes (+15), 423 channels (+24) with a total capacity of 176 DCR (+13), as of Jun 1. These stats are different for each node. For example, @karamble’s node reported 210 nodes (+17), 446 channels (+17) and 182 DCR (+9) capacity on same day Jun 1.

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network capacity

And a few new charts from @bochinchero:

Image: Average block time remains stable at 5 minutes

Image: Decred chain is adding ~180 MB per month

Image: The full Decred blockchain can fit in modern smartphone’s storage

Image: Monthly DCR issuance in USD - rewards shifted from miners to stakers and will shift more soon

Image: Total monthly fees - Decred is still cheap to use

There are more charts now than it is feasible to show in the Journal. The above and other charts can be found here - reuse on social media is highly encouraged!

Ecosystem

New services:

Services lost:

Other news:

New services discovered but not tested by the community yet:

Join our #ecosystem chat to get more news about Decred services.

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

Decred Vanguard has been approved and started its outreach operations. Vanguard has its own Discord server where members coordinate, develop best approaches and evaluate results. Members make use of Midjourney AI to generate advanced art to help get Decred’s message across. Several members acquired Twitter Blue and it seems to be working quite well. Key challenge at this point is recruiting members who are active and productive, this is why the initial monthly stipend is set low at $100. Another challenge is marketing in the bear market. In May no prizes for big/notable engagements have been allocated.

Anyone interested in joining Decred Vanguard should contact @Tivra or @Exitus. If you are new to Decred it’s OKAY - you just need to be willing to learn and help out where you can.

Vanguard really feels like something we needed for years. [@Exitus]

Image: Vanguard’s War Room

Monde PR’s achievements:

Secured the following media placements:

Events

Attended:

Media

Selected articles:

Decred Magazine engagement stats for May 2023:

Videos:

Livestream:

Audio:

Art and fun:

Image: Decred shedding the ballast. By @OfficialCryptos.

Translations:

Markets

In May DCR was trading between USDT 15.19-20.59 and BTC 0.00056-0.00075. The average daily rate was $17.13.

Community’s DCR price analysis posted in the #trading chat:

Image: Odd price wicks on DCR/USD seem to happen during low correlation with BTC/USD price action. Analysis by @saender.

Image: Market Valuations (USD) based on Decred-specific Staked Realised Value metric from @bochinchero

Image: DCR/USD accumulation zones analysis by @saender

Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

Relevant External

Ethereum’s Beacon chain has been experiencing some issues with finality, two episodes where validators mostly stopped proposing attestations for about an hour and nobody is sure why. Transactions on the Ethereum network have been able to continue and so users may have noticed no issues, but behind the scenes the beacon chain which finalizes everything was not working so these transactions were more susceptible to reversion than would have ordinarily been the case. Ethereum core developers released patches for the two clients affected by the issue (Go-based Prysm from Prysmatic Labs and Java-based Teku from ConsenSys), which had been caused by exceptionally high load on the nodes running these clients.

The Dash network and chain stalled on May 22 for 16 hours, due to a glitch caused by the upgrading the BLS threshold cryptography to an industry standard in v19. The core team produced a quick patch (v19.1) to halt deployment of v19 and this allowed the network to resume after 16 hours of downtime. A fix for the issue and another attempt to deploy the changes will be included in v19.2.

Halborn has documented several issues discovered while auditing the Dogecoin codebase, but which also apply to a number of forks of the same Bitcoin lineage, including Litecoin and Zcash. They refer to these as “The Rab13s Vulnerabilities”, and the most exploitable ones would allow attackers to take nodes offline, with others allowing remote code execution but only with valid credentials, making exploiting the issue more difficult.

The new BRC-20 token standard for Bitcoin inscriptions (NFTs) which was launched in March has reached a combined (notional) market valuation of $1 billion. This milestone was reached after ORDI, the first BRC-20 token, was listed on some major exchanges.

Bitcoin has set a new record in daily transactions. The trend of minting fungible tokens with the BRC-20 standard is spreading to Litecoin and Dogecoin chains, similarly raising their transaction activity levels.

There has been some criticism of the inefficiency of storage of the BRC-20 data on-chain, suggestions that not spending the time to encode data as binary is costing 4x as much in transaction fees. The choice was apparently made due to a desire to have the on chain data be human-readable, but there are suggestions that using a lot more block space may have been deliberate on the part of the designers.

Taproot Assets v0.2 was released, adding a set of tools that developers can use on testnet to issue, transfer and discover assets on the Taproot Assets Protocol (formerly Taro). Taproot Assets Protocol is aiming to provide a more scalable way to handle assets on the bitcoin chain by handling most transactions off-chain, as opposed to Ordinal inscriptions which use block space in an inefficient manner and cause a material increase in fees for all users of the network. Version 0.2 adds support for “virtual Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions” (vPSBTs), which will allow developers to more easily handle Taproot Assets. Lightning network support for assets and stablecoins is one of the big targets for a future release, geared towards use in emerging markets.

Richard Heart’s Pulsechain (an Ethereum fork), which is a long anticipated part of the HEX ecosystem, launched, along with “PulseX” decentralized exchange (a Uniswap fork). These launches have been much anticipated by the HEX community, since years before they pivoted to become forks of Ethereum software. However the aim of lowering fees for HEX users does not seem to have been met, because of the lengthy sequence of transactions required to bridge assets to and from Pulsechain. Furthermore, significant liquidity issues made it difficult for users to obtain PLS that they could use to pay gas fees, resulting in many users being stuck without the right kind of tokens to use the network at all and these only being available at extortionate mark-ups. The prices for all the related tokens have been in a steep decline.

DeFi lending protocol AAVE approved and deployed a change to its smart contracts on Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche networks, the change was intended to adjust interest rate calculations but, due to a function formatting error, broke the protocol on the Polygon chain. User funds worth around $120M were unavailable while a proposal to fix the error worked its way through the governance process, taking around a week to resolve the issue.

The DAO for development of OFAC-sanctioned ETH mixing service Tornado Cash was taken over by a hacker who granted themselves 1.2 million TORN tokens and used these to approve spends from the DAO’s Treasury fund. The code to allow the hack was recently passed within a legitimate-looking proposal which was approved by the usual Tornado DAO governance process. The hack did not affect the Tornado Cash mixer itself, but rather the smart contracts associated with the DAO. After a few days the attacker made a proposal to reset the changes they had made and return the unspent tokens they had granted themselves, returning control to the DAO after pocketing around $900,000 of ETH mixed through Tornado Cash.

Binance has been compiling lists of “no-progress projects” which it has listed for trade, and has started adding them to the “Innovation Zone”, on a pathway to delisting if they don’t start demonstrating some progress. CZ has already realized that this may necessitate a re-naming of the “Innovation Zone”.

Bittrex filed for bankruptcy in Delaware but with a plan to reimburse all customer asset deposits, with the global Bittrex entity seemingly unaffected.

Silvergate Capital has been delisted from NYSE and gone into liquidation. It is the parent company of Silvergate Bank, once the largest crypto banking partner. Silvergate bank was wound down in March after a rush of customer withdrawals following the collapse of FTX meant they made a loss of $1 billion in the last quarter of 2022.

Ledger hardware wallet has been recovering from a PR fail of the messaging around a new seed backup feature, Ledger Recover. The ex-CEO added fuel to the fire when he addressed concerns about seeds being exported by the new firmware by stating that users were already trusting Ledger to not deploy this kind of backdoor seed-exporting firmware, so he couldn’t see the big deal.

The finance ministers of the EU’s Council have signed off on the Markets in Crypto Assets regulation (MiCA), meaning that its provisions will come into force in June or July 2024. MiCA will require crypto firms to seek licenses to operate in the EU, and sets requirements like reserve holdings for stablecoins. Alongside MiCA some new measures were agreed to mandate sharing of information about crypto holdings of EU citizens with tax authorities.

A supply chain attack from 2022 with a tampered Trezor device has been documented. The user bought the device from an online marketplace and their crypto disappeared about a month after they started using it. Upon inspection some dodgy firmware had been installed which would cycle between 20 pre-set seeds rather than generating a random seed, and would only use the first character of any password set - so that the device could only generate 1,280 different private keys, a manageable number for the attackers to watch.

Ishan Wahi, the Coinbase manager accused of insider trading to profit from new listings was sentenced to 2 years in prison after pleading guilty. Wahi provided the information to his brother and another man, who made over $1 million trading on the information. Wahi’s brother pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

That’s all for May. Suggest news for the next issue in our #journal chat room.

About

This is issue 59 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):