Decred Journal – August 2023

Untitled by @Exitus

Image: Untitled by @Exitus

Highlights of August:

Contents:

New Consensus Rules Activated

Consensus changes Change PoW to BLAKE3 and ASERT and Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split To 1/89 have activated on Decred mainnet at block 794,368 on August 29. It took roughly 5 months since the Politeia proposal was submitted in March to implement these changes and activate them with a vote.

The chain was paused for almost 3 days until CPU miners found the first blocks and everything got running again. We will cover early CPU and GPU mining developments in the next issue. As of writing everything looks stable again and more upgrades are in the pipeline.

Old software will not follow the chain past the Aug 29 fork. To use Decred, make sure to upgrade to the latest core software release, standalone DCRDEX app, Cryptopower or any other wallet you’ve been using.

Congratulations to the Decred community for activating our 12th consensus change!

Cryptopower v1.0.0 Release

Cryptopower is a new self-custodial wallet for DCR, BTC and LTC. The first public mainnet release packages a year of development work and new features added since GoDCR was discontinued in August 2022. Highlights:

Download the app for your operating system here. Make sure to verify the files as explained in the release; the builds are signed by Cryptopower <release@cryptopower.dev> with key fingerprint 5C26BFEC6C2466A528D5551CD05AC74F68976E52.

Android APK builds are experimental and not yet recommended for real wallets but testers are welcome.

Bug reports and feedback are welcome using GitHub Issues or the #cryptopower Matrix chat.

Learn more:

Cryptopower wallet selection page in dark mode

Image: Cryptopower wallet selection page in dark mode

Cryptopower's send page

Image: Cryptopower’s send page

Cryptopower supports advanced Coin Selection for extra control

Image: Cryptopower supports advanced Coin Selection for extra control

Cryptopower lets you convert coins without touching the browser

Image: Cryptopower lets you convert coins without touching the browser

Bison Relay v0.1.8 Release

This is a big release with new features and UX improvements made over the last 4 months.

Major changes in both GUI and text apps:

GUI app highlights:

brclient text app highlights:

The initial e-commerce infrastructure called “simplestore” is designed for selling digital-only goods such as images, videos, audio, and files. Supported payment methods are DCR Lightning Network, on-chain DCR transfers, and custom/manual processing. Simplestore is only available in the text-based brclient app in this release.

GUI and text clients have different features now. Changes for each app are listed on the release page; please pay attention to the upgrade notice if migrating from v0.1.7 on Windows. For a complete list of changes with explanations see Decred Journal issues from April to July 2023. See the README file for instructions on verifying the files.

Bison Relay v0.1.8 helps you find new comments faster

Image: Bison Relay v0.1.8 helps you find new comments faster

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.

The majority of the work this month was developer-focused, and not necessarily user-focused. However, it’s always interesting when a new Go version is supported, because it unlocks potential new features and improvements from the coding language itself (check the dcrwallet updates from the July issue for examples of this).

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

The DCP-11 document specifying the change to BLAKE3 and ASERT has been reviewed and released. Here are some interesting facts we found:

Voting results have been added to all 12 DCP documents to record at which historical blocks the voting started as well as when consensus changes locked in and activated. Implementations of Decred consensus may use these block numbers to optimize their chain verification logic and avoid tallying historical votes.

The ASERT difficulty formula is rather simple. If our processors could just run this beautiful math directly...

Image: The ASERT difficulty formula is rather simple. If our processors could just run this beautiful math directly…

But come down to Earth and face the brutal reality of binary computers with limited precision. This adjusted formula is optimized to run fast on real hardware, with minimal error.

Image: But come down to Earth and face the brutal reality of binary computers with limited precision. This adjusted formula is optimized to run fast on real hardware, with minimal error.

dcrwallet

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

June-July changes backported for the next v1.8.x release:

New changes merged in master and backported for the next v1.8.x release:

User-facing changes merged in master towards future releases:

Developer and internal changes:

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).

Packaging contributions:

Other news:

vspd

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

Functional changes that VSP admins may notice:

Developer and internal changes:

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.

DCRDEX v0.6.2 is now available in Decred’s Umbrel app store.

August changes included in the v0.6.3 release (out in September):

The remaining changes below are merged in the master branch towards future releases.

Client:

Server:

Decred:

Bitcoin:

Dash:

Firo:

Market maker and arbitrage bots progress:

Documentation:

Developer and internal changes:

Other:

Footgun protection will prevent accidental changes that might break the wallet when using DEX inside Decrediton

Image: Footgun protection will prevent accidental changes that might break the wallet when using DEX inside Decrediton

Simulated sideways market for testing market maker bots' performance

Image: Simulated sideways market for testing market maker bots’ performance

Cryptopower

Cryptopower is a multi-coin desktop GUI wallet for DCR, BTC, and LTC. It runs in a privacy-preserving light SPV mode without needing full blockchains, supports Decred staking, mixing, voting, and other unique features.

Last time we wrote dev logs for this project was in August 2022, when it was called GoDCR. Here’s a quick recap of project’s history so far:

This August was relatively quiet in terms of development while the team was focused on shipping the initial v1.0.0 release and working on the proposal to get this project funded.

Changes merged in master towards the next release:

instantswap library:

The plan from here is to fix bugs found in the initial release, and build out the features outlined in the proposal while reusing as much as possible from DCRDEX and other Decred projects.

Developers and testers interested to contribute can join the #cryptopower and #cryptopower-dev chat rooms. See this guide for how to join our Matrix chats.

Cryptopower's LTC wallet

Image: Cryptopower’s LTC wallet

Cryptopower's wallet creation UI on Android, design is work in progress

Image: Cryptopower’s wallet creation UI on Android, design is work in progress

Experimental Cryptopower Android build tested on a real device

Image: Experimental Cryptopower Android build tested on a real device

Documentation

dcrdocs is the source code for Decred user documentation.

Taking into account the initial block reward splits for the first 794,367 blocks and the modified split starting with block 794,368, the effective final split of the total mined coins is:

decred.org

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

Bison Relay

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

August changes included in v0.1.8 release for both the GUI app and text-based brclient:

GUI app changes included in v0.1.8 release:

brclient changes included in v0.1.8 release:

Changes listed below have been merged in master towards a future release, likely v0.1.9.

Common changes in both GUI and text apps:

GUI app changes:

brclient changes:

Internal and developer changes:

Other

People

Welcome the new first-time contributors:

Community stats as of Sep 2 (compared to Aug 1):

Governance

In August the new treasury received 7,155 DCR worth $99K at August’s average rate of $13.89. 5,961 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $83K at same rate.

A treasury spend tx was approved with 7,163 Yes votes and 56% turnout, and mined on Aug 28. It had 26 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 7 DCR to 2,036 DCR. Most of this DCR was likely paid for June work, at its billing exchange rate of $14.25 the TSpend is worth around $85K.

As of Sep 2, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 865,779 DCR (11.1 million USD at $12.81).

Treasury inflows and outflows in DCR

Image: Treasury inflows and outflows in DCR

Treasury balance in USD

Image: Treasury balance in USD

There were 3 new proposals submitted:

See Politeia Digest issue 63 for more details on the month’s proposals.

Network

Hashrate: August’s hashrate opened at ~59 PH/s and closed ~0 PH/s, bottoming at 0 PH/s and peaking at 65 PH/s throughout the month. The drop to almost zero hashrate is due to the activation of DCP-11 which removed all existing hashrate from the network and caused ~3 days without new blocks being mined. Eventually the difficulty adjusted and normal operation was restored, we will cover this in greater detail in the next issue.

Decred hashrate

Image: Decred hashrate

Distribution of 54 PH/s hashrate reported by the pools on Aug 29 (last valid data from the pools): Poolin 46%, F2Pool 44%, BTC.com 7%, AntPool 3%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Aug 29: Poolin 44%, F2Pool 40%, BTC.com 6%, AntPool 3%, unknown 7%.

Historical pool hashrate distribution

Image: Historical pool hashrate distribution

Staking: Ticket price varied between 236-244 DCR.

Ticket price has been unusually stable in August

Image: Ticket price has been unusually stable in August

The locked amount was 9.76-9.81 million DCR, meaning that 63.2-63.7% of the circulating supply participated in proof of stake.

VSP: The 14 listed VSPs collectively managed ~5,900 (-250) live tickets, which was 14.5% of the ticket pool (-0.6%) as of Sep 1.

The biggest gainers of August are dcr.farm (+220 tickets or +193%) and bass.cf (+183 tickets or +25%).

Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed between 157 and 167 dcrd nodes throughout the month. Versions of 157 nodes seen on Sep 1: v1.8.0 - 88%, v1.7.x - 5%, v1.8.0 dev builds - 2%, v1.9.0 dev builds - 1.3%, other - 4%.

The majority of nodes are running dcrd v1.8.0. The red area before Jan 2023 indicates incomplete data we had at that time.

Image: The majority of nodes are running dcrd v1.8.0. The red area before Jan 2023 indicates incomplete data we had at that time.

The share of mixed coins varied between 62.45-62.50%. Daily mixed volume varied between 0-497K DCR. The low of 0 is due to no blocks being mined in the last 2 days of the month.

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer has seen 213 nodes (-6), 431 channels (-14) with a total capacity of 186 DCR (-3), as of Sep 1. These stats are different for each node. For example, @karamble’s node reported 217 nodes (-3), 453 channels (-11) and 192 DCR (+1) capacity on same day Sep 1.

Decred's Lightning Network node count has stabilized

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network node count has stabilized

Ecosystem

Vendor readiness for Decred’s August 29 hardfork:

Communication systems:

Other news:

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

Monde PR

Monde PR’s achievements in August:

Secured the following media placements:

In a discussion about recent marketing proposals @l1ndseymm commented on the differences between marketing and PR:

It is beneficial to have both a PR and marketing strategy, as they can complement each other and amplify results overall. And marketing is by nature more expensive than PR. Businesses tend to spend about 10% of their revenue on marketing.

I gave feedback on the Cointelegraph proposal that the ideal situation would be to have a marketing person who has managed ad spend before. There are so many options out there - we could sponsor/advertise on newsletters, podcasts, billboards, social media, in addition to paid content opportunities like these. This person could suggest a budget and then advise on which platforms and mediums will garner the best results based on our audience/goals. They could then track results and tweak the strategy as we go. They often have access to special rates and know what’s fair in terms of pricing. [@l1ndseymm]

Decred Vanguard

We’ve been testing several engagement tactics in a small scale, like the recent DCR giveaway ($100 prize pool, 15 participants, 2 winners) which required entrants to prove a real wallet install.

Other than that we’ve slowed down as we try to think about the best ways to navigate through a bear market where interest and volume are considerably lower than normal. While the Vanguard marketing method focuses around trying to talk about Decred a lot, at this time, we’d prefer to be realistic and remain grounded as we configure new strategies.

Decred Vanguard is always looking for new, eager members to help us promote Decred. The benefits are straightforward - $100 a month in Decred for participation and your Twitter Blue account paid for! Organization is done in a Discord server. If you have any unique ideas for promoting Decred, like making memes, art, or just want to be a contributing member, please contact @Exitus or @Tivra.

Cypherpunk Times

Engagement stats for August:

Other

When I compete in a triathlon, I become a billboard for #decred

Image: “When I compete in a triathlon, I become a billboard for #decred” [@wanbihou]

Media

Selected articles:

NOTE: Here in Decred Journal we only list selected articles about Decred but Cypherpunk Times has more quality content about other coins, finance, and social media. Check it out!

Videos:

Live streams:

Translations:

Non-English content:

Art and fun:

"How do you identify?" - "I'm so upper-right quadrant that it's off your chart"

Image: “How do you identify?” - “I’m so upper-right quadrant that it’s off your chart” by @Tivra

"Was looking to re-up my supplement stack and came across this. Now it's a must buy, don't you think?"

Image: “Was looking to re-up my supplement stack and came across this. Now it’s a must buy, don’t you think?” by @kozel

Proof-of-Shoe

Image: Proof-of-Shoe

Markets

In August DCR was trading between USDT 12.42-15.73 and BTC 0.00040-0.00058. The average daily rate was $13.89.

DCR is at a "long time" low vs XMR

Image: DCR is at a “long time” low vs XMR

DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

Relevant External

Coinbase’s new Ethereum layer 2 network using the Optimism stack launched, it is called Base. This is the first time a publicly traded company has launched its own blockchain, and Coinbase hopes to earn revenue from transaction fees and dapps in the future.

An early success/hype story for Base came in the form of friend.tech, a social app where users can buy “shares” (soon renamed to “keys”) in other users, and owning such keys allows one to send messages to them. When the hype kicked in friend.tech quickly hit 126K transactions and 4,400 ETH volume, more than the entire NFT ecosystem for that period. friend.tech is a rebranding of “stealcam”, and from someone best known for “Tweet DAO eggs”, NFTs that allowed holders to tweet from a certain account, until the account was suspended and the website taken down. By the end of the month activity was already substantially down on all metrics, with transactions and fee revenue dropping by 80% from the initial peak.

In a bid to capitalize on the hype around friends.tech, a new meme token was launched on Ethereum - FrensTech. It was rugged by its founder when the price started to explode, AzFlin withdrew all his tokens from the liquidity pool and cashed them in, cratering the price. After a Twitter sleuth exposed the identity of the rug-puller as a Uniswap employee, he got fired.

The Horizen blockchain announced the intention to remove the on-chain “shielded pools” privacy feature of ZEN at the consensus level via hard fork. The reasoning for the decision is to avoid regulatory backlash against “privacy coins” by no longer qualifying for that category. Horizen’s privacy pools were based on Zcash’s “Sprout” technology, which Zcash has long since replaced, and so this is being taken as an opportunity to replace outdated tech with something based on sidechains or another method that will allow ZEN to get back to being listed on exchanges. The change is included in a new Horizen update which should activate in September for the mainchain.

Gitcoin announced a controversial partner for the latest round of quadratic matched funding, the Shell (oil) company sponsoring a climate solutions matching pool. There was a significant backlash from Gitcoin supporters on Twitter, who were disappointed to see the brand tarnished (in their view) by the association with Shell, who were exploiting the public relationship with Gitcoin as cost effective greenwashing. The backlash led someone who was involved in the decision making to post an apologetic tweet explaining how the decision had been arrived at and acknowledging the problems with such a relationship. One of the main criticisms, from founder Owocki, was that not only was the brand being sold for greenwashing, the amount Shell were paying in as grant funding was just $500K, so they were getting a very good deal for such a large and well resourced corporation. Gitcoin approved this partnership because the relevant council members had faith in the quadratic matching concept to steer the funds to worthy recipients regardless of where the money was coming from, in a sense that they were above the suspicion that would commonly surround outcomes from a “climate solutions” call sponsored by one of the big oil companies.

The SEC lost a court decision about the Grayscale ETF currently under review, with the court agreeing with Grayscale’s case that it was being treated unfairly because two substantially similar futures funds had been approved. This decision sparked a rally in the BTC market as the prospect of an approved ETF was seen as more likely, but by the time the SEC announced it was delaying decisions on all Bitcoin ETFs the retrace was complete.

Republicans on the SEC oversight committee in US Congress have demanded that Gary Gensler explain what is going on with Prometheum getting approval as a special crypto broker suddenly when all of the more well known crypto exchanges that actually have working products have found this to be a long and painful process that goes nowhere. 23 members of the committee signed a letter outlining their suspicion, which is that Prometheum’s sudden appearance in Washington and unheralded approval of their license to operate came at a very convenient time for Gensler - because the total lack of approved crypto broker dealers to that point was weakening his argument that the regulations are fine the way they are written (and he is enforcing them). The letter also references Prometheum’s connections to Wanxiang and the CCP as cause for concern.

The SEC went after its first NFT project for securities violations, the Impact Theory project had raised around $30 million from the sale of NFTs which was described as funding the company’s operations. Impact Theory made the SEC’s job easier by issuing statements saying they “will make sure that we do something that, by any reasonable standard, people got a crushing, hilarious amount of value” and describing the tokens as “the mechanism by which communities will be able to capture economic value from the growth of the company they support”. The company agreed to buy back and destroy the tokens, eliminate the royalty sharing feature, and find a way to return the rest of the money they raised through the sale. There is speculation that this could be the first of many enforcement actions targeting NFTs, as “funding a roadmap” was a common purpose given for the minting events.

Binance’s SEC woes have been added to by a sealed court filing, where the contents of 35 exhibits are not being publicly disclosed for some unknown reason, possibly having to do with a concurrent criminal investigation by DoJ, but in any case highly unusual.

Coingecko has added a category of “tokens the SEC considers to be securities”, which is a handy way to list all of the various altcoins that have or had enforcement actions against them by the SEC.

The US Treasury Department has released proposed rules which would introduce a new tax reporting obligation for crypto asset brokers, and would define these very broadly in a way which includes decentralized exchanges and operators of websites that communicate with wallets. A new form would be created (1099-DA) which brokers must complete and send to both the IRS and the individual users, calculating how much they likely owe in taxes. The rule is planned to be effective for brokers in 2025 for the 2026 tax filing season.

In the US the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) has released a clarification on how staking rewards (from PoS blockchains) are to be taxed. The recipient of staking rewards should declare them as income at the point when they gain “dominion” over the tokens (can sell them), based on the fair market exchange value of the tokens at that time.

The Drug Enforcement Agency has fallen victim to an address dusting attack and sent $50,000 of seized crypto to a scammer by mistake. DEA staff seized some USDT by transferring to their own Trezor hardware wallet, and in preparation to transfer this to the US Marshals they sent a small test transaction, a scammer spotted this transaction and then sent an airdrop to the DEA account so that it looked like the test transaction was successful, but swapping in their own very similar address. When the DEA staff came to make the real transfer they copied the (scammer’s) address from a block explorer erroneously, possibly checked that the first and last few characters matched what they expected as the Marshals’ address, and hit send.

An early victim of a Bitcoin “clipboard hijack” hack through the Electrum Atom wallet in 2018, Andrew Schrober, began an investigation and has been pursuing the alleged attackers in the courts since 2021. The hacked software would monitor the user’s clipboard and when it detected something like a Bitcoin address it would generate a replacement address which looked similar but actually was controlled by the attacker’s wallet, and then the user would mistakenly send their BTC to the substituted address. Some of the filings in the case provide a detailed account of how the BTC was moved and sent to Bitfinex, where they connected a used IP address to a residential UK address where one of their suspects lived. The account also details Monero transactions which are thought to be linked because of specific amounts going in/out with implausible decoy ring members, and the use of vanity addresses for ShapeShift transactions.

Lastpass has been identified as the most likely compromise vector for the mysterious crypto thefts that have been documented since April by community developer/sleuths but apparently ongoing since Dec 2022. The thefts are distinctive because they happen in certain time windows and have commonalities like exchanging tokens for ETH within the wallet before sending out, or sometimes sending tokens to another victim’s address until the ETH amount is large enough that they transfer to their own address. These funds are moved to centralized swapping services where they are exchanged to BTC, victims are often losing other assets like LTC, XRP, XMR, and they all go to the same places to be changed to BTC which then gets mixed. @tayvano_ on Twitter now seems convinced that the common detail reported by almost all victims is that they stored their private key on Lastpass, often for many years under the protection of a secure encryption password. Lastpass was hacked in mid-2022 but the scope is unclear and the hackers should not have been able to access data that users had stored with strong encryption passwords, but that is seemingly what is occurring to result in these thefts from many “Crypto OGs”.

CoinDesk has retracted two articles, a rare occurrence according to them. The first concerned Chainalysis, reporting that the head of investigations was “unaware” of any scientific evidence for the accuracy of its Reactor software, while being questioned as part of a court hearing which seeks to use the outputs of this tool as evidence. The article was retracted in July but the author was not informed and did not discover this until August, when they complained about CoinDesk’s ethics and suggested that the retraction was due to CoinDesk’s parent company DCG owning a stake in Chainalysis. The second retracted article concerned Justin Sun, comparing him to SBF and Do Kwon and then speculating about the scale of collateral damage if Sun’s empire collapses. CoinDesk used the same rationale to explain both retractions, that they should not have been published because they are written by pseudonymous authors and attack specific individuals in a defamatory way.

Tether has announced that it will stop supporting USDT on the Bitcoin Omni layer, the first transport layer used by Tether since 2014 - support will also be cut for Kusama and Bitcoin Cash networks. While USDT started on Omni much of the volume has migrated to smart contract chains, of $82 billion USDT outstanding only $240 million are circulating on Omni, and considerably less on the other two networks to lose support. Redemptions will continue to be available for 12 months from Aug 17.

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

About

This is issue 62 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):