Decred Journal – June 2023

Image: Artwork by @Exitus

Highlights of June:

Contents:

Upgrade and Vote on New Consensus Changes!

Everyone is encouraged to upgrade to the latest core software version to be able to vote on the two new consensus changes and follow the chain after they activate, if approved. To stay synced with the network, it is important to upgrade even if you don’t intend to vote in favor of the agendas.

For a refresher on Decred governance, consensus changes, and hardforks that don’t split the network, check out the docs.

You can learn about the latest consensus changes in the following documents:

Additional details, code implementation, and code review and testing results can be found in GitHub pull requests #3115 and #3092 which implement the changes.

The voting has started on July 4 and will run until around August 1 (block 786,303).

Vote progress can be tracked at the Voting Dashboard or dcrdata’s Agendas page.

Core Software v1.8.0 Release

Highlights of the v1.8.0 release aka “The Forkening”:

dcrd: Two new consensus upgrades (which will hard fork the chain if approved), BLAKE3 CPU mining, low fee transaction rejection, numerous optimizations resulting in the reduction of initial sync time by about 20% and better runtime memory management, improved vote times, and many other updates.

dcrwallet: Support for the two new consensus changes (e.g. when validating blocks or creating votes), mixed ticket buying with trickling support for extra privacy, fetching of treasury spends in SPV mode (needed for TSpend voting in SPV mode), new gRPC methods for use by GUI apps, and multiple bug fixes.

Decrediton: Ability to vote on individual TSpend transactions, updated DCRDEX module, updated layouts and styling, numerous bug fixes and refinement across all pages/tabs.

Visit the GitHub release for the full list of changes and downloads. As always, we recommend to verify the files before running.

DCRDEX v0.6.2 Release

It is important to update to DEX v0.6.2 to stay on the chain after any possible hardforks in the coming months. If you don’t use the built-in (aka native) DCR wallet older DEX versions might work but updating is still recommended.

Highlights of the new release:

Check the updated client guide for step by step instructions.

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.

First let’s look at June changes included in the new 1.8.0 release.

The biggest user-facing changes are the incentives to upgrade full nodes:

Next are some major parts implementing the DCP-11 consensus upgrade, “Change PoW to BLAKE3 and ASERT”:

In addition to the BLAKE3 PoW hash change which will make current Decred ASIC miners useless, the new ASERT algorithm will adjust the difficulty with each new block instead of every 144 blocks (the current adjustment frequency). For reference, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is updated every 2,016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks. ASERT stands for Absolutely Scheduled Exponentially weighted Rising Targets.

The ASERT algorithm is also exponential, and can handle surging hashrate much better than the existing algorithm. This will greatly disincentivize “hit and run” miners who are only looking for a quick reward at a low difficulty. Large drops of hashrate which cause slow blocks and poor user experience as a result are also handled much better. The network is stronger when miners are consistently creating new blocks and maintain the target block time of 5 minutes. See also the relevant discussion on Matrix.

To illustrate the new difficulty adjustment speed, we asked @davecgh how the new algorithm would perform in a hypothetical scenario where the hashrate suddenly drops from 100 PH/s to 20 PH/s. The improvement is massive: restoring the target block time of 5 minutes would take ~75 hours (~3.1 days) under the old algorithm versus 20-30 mins under the new ASERT algorithm.

If DCP-11 is approved, after the 1-month upgrade period the difficulty will be reset to a hard-coded value which equates to an initial target hashrate of about 1.45 TH/s. This number does not matter much though because it will very quickly adjust due to the new difficulty algorithm.

Image: Simulation of the ASERT difficulty algorithm reacting to stable, rapidly increasing and rapidly decreasing hashrate.

For reference, the work for DCP-12 “Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split to 1/89” was completed and discussed in the April issue. The DCP itself has been reviewed and published in June, it is now available in the DCPs repository.

Like all previous consensus changes, the consensus code will remain dormant and only activate if the respective voting agendas pass.

Two hard-coded values have been updated as part of the release development cycle: AssumeValid block and MinKnownChainWork.

For reference, as of May 2022, AssumeValid has replaced the legacy “checkpoints” method to optimize initial blockchain downloads. With AssumeValid, very old blockchain forks are rejected, and some validation checks are skipped for blocks which are ancestors of the assumed valid block. This can significantly speed up initial blockchain downloads. The updates to AssumeValid and MinKnownChainWork are externally verified and hardcoded by the devs, and used by default without any action required by node admins. Note: It is possible to change this behavior using the flags --allowoldforks and --assumevalid as described in dcrd --help or in the code, but this is not recommended for typical node admins.

MinKnownChainWork has replaced the legacy checkpoints as a better way to determine if the blockchain is current. Unlike AssumeValid, it cannot be disabled and there is no reason to since this value cannot be invalidated by a chain reorganization. While a certain block may or may not become part of the main blockchain, minimum known chain work can never go down.

Finally, below are v1.8.0 changes relevant for developers:

Image: Optimized memory allocation in dcrd v1.8.0. Less allocation is better, it translates to lower CPU usage and faster sync times.

The following work has been merged in master towards future releases:

Developer and internal changes merged in master:

Changes merged in the dcrtest framework:

dcrwallet

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

Changes that were included in the new 1.8.0 release:

The following work has been merged in master towards future releases:

Work done to consolidate VSP code into the vspd repository:

The end goal of these changes is to extract the VSP client out of dcrwallet and into vspd so that it can be reused in DCRDEX, enabling DCRDEX to purchase tickets and register them with a VSP. VSP client will allow DCRDEX to provide Decred staking and voting features in light (SPV) mode without requiring full blockchain download. Other wallets written in Go can benefit from this as well.

dcrctl

dcrctl is a command-line client for dcrd and dcrwallet.

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).

Changes that were included in the new v1.8.0 release:

The following work has been merged in master towards future releases:

In progress:

Politeia

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

vspd

vspd is server software used by Voting Service Providers. A VSP votes on behalf of its users 24/7 and cannot steal funds.

Changes that were included in the v1.2.0 release:

Changes merged to master towards future releases:

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a mining pool.

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 the v0.6.2 release:

All changes reported below are towards the next release.

Client:

Bitcoin:

Polygon (MATIC):

App packaging:

Server:

Developer and internal changes:

Image: Improved intro to bonds in DCRDEX

Image: Wallet types supported by DCRDEX

dcrdata

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

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.

Documentation

dcrdocs is the source code for Decred user documentation.

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.

GUI and CLI apps:

GUI app:

CLI app:

Stores implementation:

Preparations for mobile app builds:

Developer and internal changes:

Other

People

Community stats as of ~Jul 2 (compared to Jun 2):

Governance

In June the new treasury received 7,760 DCR worth $111K at June’s average rate of $14.25. 4,604 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $66K at same rate.

A treasury spend tx was approved with 7,456 Yes votes and 52% turnout, and mined on Jun 13. It had 20 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 4 DCR to 1,308 DCR. Most of this DCR was likely paid for April work, at its billing exchange rate of $20.22 the TSpend is worth around $93K.

As of July 9, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 863,788 DCR (13.9 million USD at $16.06).

Image: Decred Treasury balance in DCR

Image: Decred Treasury balance in USD

There were 4 proposals published in June, and one from May which finished voting:

See Politeia Digest issue 61 and issue 62 for more details on the month’s proposals.

Network

Hashrate: June’s hashrate opened at ~66 PH/s and closed ~63 PH/s, bottoming at 46 PH/s and peaking at 69 PH/s throughout the month.

Image: Decred hashrate

Distribution of 64 PH/s hashrate reported by the pools on Jul 1: F2Pool 49%, Poolin 30%, AntPool 16%, BTC.com 5%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Jul 1: F2Pool 46%, Poolin 31%, AntPool 18%, BTC.com 5%.

Staking: Ticket price varied between 175-328 DCR.

Image: Ticket price making more swings

Image: Ticket price swings naturally correlate with volatile ticket purchasing activity

The locked amount was 9.34-9.77 million DCR, meaning that 61.2-63.8% of the circulating supply participated in proof of stake.

Image: Percentage of coins locked in proof of stake is a good indicator of holder conviction

VSP: The 14 listed VSPs collectively managed ~6,630 (-20) live tickets, which was 16.5% of the ticket pool (-0.3%) as of Jul 1.

Biggest gainers of June are dcrhive.com (+652 tickets or +58%), stakey.net (+182 tickets or +59%), and ultravsp.uk (+131 tickets or +37%).

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed between 144 and 172 dcrd nodes throughout the month. Versions of 170 nodes seen on Jul 1: v1.8.0 - 77%, v1.7.x - 14%, v1.8.0 dev builds - 3.5%, other - 6%.

The network has been quick to deploy v1.8.0 and start mining new blocks as shown on the next two charts.

Image: Node operators have been quick to upgrade to v1.8.0. The red area before Jan 2023 indicates incomplete data we had at that time.

Image: Block version 10 quickly took over to unlock consensus voting

The share of mixed coins varied between 61.8-62.1%. Daily mixed volume varied between 298-699K DCR.

Image: Spikes in daily StakeShuffle volume

Image: Biggest monthly StakeShuffle volume so far

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer has seen 212 nodes (+1), 427 channels (+4) with a total capacity of 191 DCR (+15), as of Jul 1. These stats are different for each node. Compare this to Litecoin LN stats reported on same date: 95 nodes, 170 channels and a total capacity of 35 LTC. In USD terms the capacity was $3,010 for DCR and $3,710 for LTC.

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network node count growth has stopped

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network capacity crawling up

Ecosystem

Voting Service Providers:

Wallets:

Exchanges:

Communication systems:

Other news:

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

BTC-ECHO has shared drafts of the 2 articles secured by their approved proposal. German speakers are welcome to help improve the articles before they are published.

Monde PR’s achievements:

Below is an update from Decred Vanguard team.

The Vanguard strides forward, brainstorming new ideas, creating art, and looking for opportunities to push the Decred Protocol.

@Tivra has been experimenting with recruiting new members from Reddit. These individuals give us interesting perspectives on how outsiders, new to Decred, view Decred’s value proposition and overall tech stack. They are eager to learn, and some have already done a commendable job promoting DCR on their own.

We have been discussing the best ways to handle the monthly prizes, which total $400, and we think doing some giveaways with prize money will be an interesting way to help promote DCR.

$100 prize winners for June:

We then decided to spend the remaining prize money on contests:

Decred Vanguard is recruiting! Participants get a flat stipend of $100/month and their Twitter Blue paid for by the Decred DAO. See the proposal for more details and contact @Tivra or @Exitus about joining.

Events

Attended:

Media

Selected articles:

Decred Magazine engagement stats for June 2023:

Videos:

Live stream:

Audio:

Art and fun:

Translations:

Discussions:

Selected non-Decred articles posted on Cypherpunk Times:

Image: Leading the DAO pack by @OfficialCryptos

Markets

In June DCR was trading between USDT 12.01-17.84 and BTC 0.00046-0.00067. The average daily rate was $14.25.

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

Image: DCR/USD accumulation zones analysis by @saender

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

Image: Decred-specific SASRV/RV Ratio metric by @bochinchero provides a lagging indicator of the direction that the market is trending

And one new chart from @bochinchero:

another interesting one I had been tinkering with before, estimating what the realized value would be without tickets/votes (e.g. RV-SRV), it looks a lot like the BTC RV does… and seems to indicate local bottoms pretty well

obviously given the manipulated markets a lot of this can be taken as a grain of salt, trying to read rigged tea leaves

Image: Realized Value minus Staked Realized Value by @bochinchero

Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

Relevant External

Bittrex US was allowed to re-open customer withdrawals, these would usually be frozen during liquidation but Bittrex argued to allow customers to withdraw their funds and a judge agreed, although stating that this did not make a determination that the customers (still) owned the assets and there may be clawbacks as the liquidation process continues.

The SEC has sued Binance and CZ in a long-anticipated move which declares a number of the assets Binance lists as securities and alleges that they were allowing US citizens to trade on the platform, even encouraging the whales. The SEC’s complaint lists 10 crypto tokens with a page or more of explanation about its origins and why the SEC considers it a security. The tokens listed as securities are: SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS, and COTI.

In the day or so following the suit being brought by SEC, both Binance ($1.43 billion) and Coinbase ($1.18 billion) saw significant net outflows of assets, with customers withdrawing much more than they were depositing, in response to the news.

Some of the consequences of the SEC pursuit are transfer of control of assets to staff of Binance US, such that staff of Binance Holdings no longer have any access to crypto assets or internal systems. This was part of a deal reached to avoid a freezing of all Binance assets in the US, which threatened Binance US’s ability to process dollar transactions.

There was more bad news for Binance, with the loss of its EUR banking partner after pulling out of Netherlands after failing to acquire a license, giving up on licenses in UK and Cyprus and being ordered to stop offering crypto services in Belgium.

Binance has reversed its decision to delist several privacy-oriented crypto-assets for users from some European countries to comply with the new MiCA regulations. After listening to user feedback and from the communities for those projects, they decided they could continue to support them as they have transparent public ledgers.

Binance is also working to integrate Bitcoin Lightning Network for deposits and withdrawals.

The SEC’s long running suit against Ripple has brought to light behind the scenes feedback to Bill Hinman’s (in)famous speech in which he said that Ether did not look like a security and declared that networks which are “sufficiently decentralized” didn’t have to worry about securities law, going on to list some things the SEC would look at in making such a determination. The emails surrounding the speech reveal that Bill ignored concerns from colleagues about some aspects of it, including the freedom with which he was adding new factors and using Ether as a named example, which they cautioned would make it difficult to pursue ETH related securities violations in future.

The SEC also sued Coinbase for operating as an unregistered securities exchange, to which Coinbase has responded arguing that the SEC has no jurisdiction over the assets on its platform, because Coinbase only hosts secondary markets and does not offer any cryptos for sale directly from their issuer.

While the SEC has been going after many established crypto exchanges for alleged securities violations, a new player has emerged, Prometheum, which appears to be on a fast track to getting the sorts of approval that the likes of Coinbase have been trying to obtain for years. The Prometheum co-CEO turned up on Capitol Hill to testify before Congress and what he said was widely seen as parroting the SEC’s position, raising questions about where this new unknown entrant was coming from and why they were getting along so well with the SEC. The company claims to have been working on its regulatory approvals for years but has remained largely unknown because its “crawl-walk-run-approach” means it doesn’t actually offer any BTC or ETH trading yet. It has been suggested that hiring insiders from FINRA and the SEC is the key to why Prometheum got approved and then started showing up to hearings with pro-SEC talking points.

One of the two Chinese entities with links to and an ownership stake in Prometheum is Wanxiang, an organisation which lists Vitalik Buterin as one of its co-founders. Vitalik’s relationship to Wanxiang dates back to Ethereum’s early days in 2015 when then-CEO made an investment of $500,000 in ETH, which helped to cover some developers’ salaries.

The “Electric Coin Company” (ECC) has announced (in May) that it is restructuring to serve Zcash in different ways, with a much smaller team (13 staff, 50% are being made redundant) and focused on core specialisms like the transition to proof of stake consensus. Many of the functions of the ECC will be transferred to other entities within the ZEC community.

MakerDAO has voted to remove the USDP stablecoin provided by Paxos from its reserves, these currently include $500 million of USDP and that is half of the token’s supply.

Payment processor Mastercard has set up a testbed dubbed the “Multi-Token Network” (MTN) for tokenizing bank deposits, turning them into digital tokens on blockchains which are programmable like crypto tokens. A beta version of MTN will be available to industry partners in the UK from summer 2023 and they are setting up an innovation spring where selected teams will be given access to MTN so they can develop use cases. Mastercard plans to experiment with stablecoins and CBDCs on MTN also.

Watchers of CRV noted on Twitter that over 30% of its circulating supply had been deposited as collatoral for loans in the AAVE protocol by one user, the founder, prompting concern that if the position were liquidated the market would be flooded with CRV and the Aave protocol would end up with a lot of bad debt. The CRV price did decline further but the borrower in question repaid some of the debt and decreased the liquidation risk.

Many users of Atomic Wallet had their assets stolen in an apparent hack on June 3, with early estimates of $35 million and later $100 million of the losses incurred by users. However, it remains unclear what the cause of the hack was, and a blog post from the wallet’s developers on June 22 left a lot of unanswered questions - they offered four possibilities for how users funds were stolen but weren’t sure which one was the real cause. They suggested that all of the thefts occurred on June 3, but they are just going from user testimony and reports the same as the community researchers who have been looking into it and giving more timely updates.

Users of the web 3 betting platform Polymarket have drawn attention for gambling on the outcome of the lost Titan submersible, with several hundred thousand dollars worth of cryptocurrency being wagered, making it the site’s most active market at the time. The Polymarket event betting on whether the Titan submersible would be found by June 23 went to dispute resolution after resolving to “Yes” when pieces of the submarine were indeed found, but several stories about the event reference people making money from “betting that the Titan submersible would not be found”. It has not been possible to locate the dispute resolution outcome on Polymarket itself.

There is a long-running court battle between ConsenSys, the Ethereum development organisation led by Joe Lubin, and employees of its original Swiss entity (ConsenSys AG). The dispute is about a transfer of assets (ConsenSys owns several major Ethereum infrastructure providers like Infura) in 2020 to a new US based entity which JP Morgan invested in - the employees of ConsenSys AG held equity in the company, and claim that the assets were given an absurdly low valuation ($47 million) so that they would receive very little of the money coming from JP Morgan (indirectly) for those assets. This month, ConsenSys held a shareholder vote to retroactively approve the transfer - something they were instructed to do by a Swiss court, which will allow the employees to proceed with the next step of their multi-year legal proceedings.

The IMF has decided that banning crypto “may not be effective in the long run”, after previously suggesting this as an option all the way back in Feb 2023. They now suggest addressing demand for digital payments in other ways to decrease demand for crypto, but not to ban it because that stops the country from gaining any benefits.

The SEC has reduced the financial penalty imposed on LBRY from $44 million to $111,000 - but rather than a change of heart this reflects acknowledgement that the entity is now defunct and being wound down, not capable of paying millions of dollars in fines. The marathon case against LBRY by the SEC dragged on for years until it was resolved in November 2022 with a loss for LBRY and the judge establishing precedents that cast a wide net in terms of securities violations. LBRY sold tokens before their network was operational, and so the courts decided that any sale of LBRY tokens by the organisation would constitute an illegal securities offering, even for a $5 transaction to tip some video creators - a primary intended purpose of LBRY tokens.

The Israeli government has seized $1.7 million in crypto from wallets linked to the Iranian military and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon. Chainalysis assisted in tracking the USDT on the Tron network to 40 different addresses, which were frozen on the authority of the Defence Minister. In May Israel reported the freezing of 190 Binance accounts associated with Hamas and Daesh since 2021.

The European Commission has published its legislative plans to underpin a digital Euro, identifying some advantages like facilitating transactions between people at higher data protection standards than banks, and making free access to payments available everywhere including remote locations. While the Commission wants a privacy-preserving digital Euro it is down to the European Central Bank to issue one, and there remains much opposition to the idea within banking circles. The proposals have been criticised as being significantly more prone to surveillance than cash.

A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has revealed that the federal government is buying data about Americans in bulk, secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, was informed about this a year ago after commissioning a panel of experts, but the report has been kept secret until now.

A new crypto exchange has emerged, backed by major financial markets players Citadel Securities, Fidelity and Charles Schwab. The exchange is unusual in that it is noncustodial, the marketplace allows traders to agree on trades but then the firms move crypto and cash between them directly to settle the trade - although EDX plans to launch a clearinghouse later in the year to facilitate this process (though still without touching the assets directly, using other service providers for this). As such, EDX will not serve individual investors directly, but retail brokerages may send orders to its marketplace for fulfillment.

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

About

This is issue 60 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):