Decred Journal – October 2023

Image: October cover by @Exitus

Highlights of October:

• Core software v1.8.1 has been released with fixes for VSP staking and DCRDEX.

• Cake Wallet integration budget has been approved and development has commenced.

• gominer and dcrpool have been upgraded to support BLAKE3 GPU pool mining.

• Three public mining pools have been launched.

• Ticket price has set a new record of 700 DCR.

Contents:

• Core Software v1.8.1 Release
• Development
• People
• Governance and Finances
• Network
• Ecosystem
• Outreach
• Media
• Markets
• Relevant External

Core Software v1.8.1 Release

This release includes fixes for users staking with VSPs (Voting Service Providers) as well as fixes for DCRDEX.

• dcrd: getblock and getblockheader commands now have an additional powhash field for the new BLAKE3 hash. getnetworkhashps -1 is updated to return the estimated hashrate for the last 120 blocks.

• dcrwallet: multiple reliability fixes for VSP staking.

• Decrediton: bundles all changes mentioned above, a fix for the “response buffer too short” error reported by many DEX users, and updated Arabic and Chinese translations.

• DCRDEX module in Decrediton is updated to v0.6.3: trade limits scale with bond level, and includes protections from unintended dangerous configuration changes, fixes for order processing, bonds, and BTC wallet rescans.

Full release notes and downloads are available here. It is recommended to verify the files have not been modified.

This release also contains the latest standalone DCRDEX app binaries that offer a number of advantages compared to the builds in dcrdex repo: files are signed with the Decred Release key, have more operating system and CPU architecture choices, and benefit from optimizations of the latest Go compiler. See dexc-xxx files at the end of the release page.

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.

User-facing changes:

• Added support for concurrent getdata requests. Currently, a node can process only one getdata request at a time, behavior inherited from very early network code that is no longer relevant. While the data for one getdata request is being served, other messages that would otherwise be fast to process, such as pings, can potentially be delayed for a long time. Moreover, it is theoretically possible for a pair of peers to get stuck waiting for each other. In practice, this situation basically never happens but this may change in the future when new messages are introduced, such as those for peer-to-peer mixing. To improve overall throughput and address the aforementioned concerns, getdata requests have been made asynchronous so other inbound messages can be processed concurrently. New limits have been introduced as well in order to block malicious behavior. This change to the wire protocol is planned for inclusion in the v1.9.0 release.
• Concurrent getdata requests also happen to reduce the initial chain sync time from ~81 to ~47 minutes (as measured on a developer’s benchmark system). Prior to this change, blocks would be served in batches and each request for the following batch would have to wait until the previous batch has been received. Due to the network latency involved, the “idle” time between batches of blocks could add up to ~5 seconds. Given there are 800K+ blocks, and they are typically served in batches of 2,000, a full initial sync would incur 400+ such delays, or ~33 minutes.
• Updated dcrutil package to obtain user’s home directory from the $HOME environment variable instead of parsing /etc/passwd. This is to make it compatible with packaging systems like Flatpak or Snap. These systems provide sandboxed environments for applications and don’t allow binaries to directly write to the home directory. Instead, they designate a separate directory per app and set $HOME accordingly. This change is needed for the packaging effort underway for the DCRDEX desktop app.

Developer and internal changes:

• Updated the Docker image to build with Go 1.21.3.
• Consolidated shutdown code to reduce the amount of long-running goroutines and make the use of WaitGroup’s more local, which is easier to reason about and less error prone.
• Improved handling of peer data in the sync manager to simplify the code and eliminate some hard to hit corner cases.

dcrdtest integration testing harness:

• Simplified API to make the package more broadly useful, not just in tests, but also in benchmarks and in generic code not tied specifically to tests.
• Ensure cleanup code always runs even if test setup failed. This also adds a flag to keep the data files intact to ease debugging test failures.

Image: Initial chain sync will be ~40% faster with concurrent getdata requests

dcrwallet

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

• Updated bbolt database to v1.3.8 to avoid using syscall(2) on OpenBSD because this API will be removed. The patch to bbolt has been contributed by Decred developers.
• Optimized initial chain sync time and memory use.

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).

Merged in master:

• Fixed Trezor build failure caused by a change in the trezor-connect library.

In progress:

• Decred developers have updated the patch for trezor-firmware required for staking DCR with Trezor but it remains unmerged. It is waiting since December 2022 and it is unclear when it could get merged. Help to push it forward is appreciated. It is technically possible to get Trezor staking working with Decrediton today by flashing the Trezor with custom firmware, but the device will show a scary red “UNSAFE, DO NOT USE!” warning, so this method is not suitable for most users.

dcrseeder

dcrseeder is a crawler that maintains a list of reliable Decred nodes and helps new nodes to discover their first peers.

• Updated to build and test with Go 1.21, simplified the build script, and added more linters (linters automatically check the code for issues).
• Improved handling of shutdown signals sent by the operating systems, and added logging so it is clear why the process is shutting down.
• Preparations for dual network support: reduced the use of global state, simplified initialization logic, and changed shutdown tasks to run via defer which is more error proof.
• Added support for a single instance of dcrseeder to crawl mainnet and testnet simultaneously. It will run two HTTP servers on two different ports.

gominer

gominer is a proof of work Decred BLAKE3 miner for solo and pool mining with OpenCL and CUDA devices.

gominer has been updated to support pool mining via the Stratum protocol. All changes below are included in the v2.0.0 release. It is a source-only release with no binaries, but the build process is well-documented.

• Reworked handling of nonces to allow for Stratum support. Mining devices need to find a hash of the block header that would satisfy the difficulty requirement. Decred block header is a 180-byte structure where most bytes store useful data and cannot change. To give miners a way to change the hash, the header contains a few special bytes called nonces. Miners continuously “roll” the nonces and recalculate the hash until a good hash is found. Stratum is a popular protocol to distribute this mining work to multiple devices, and it requires nonces to be used differently from solo mining.
• Corrected multiple issues with Stratum and pooled mining, mainly related to populating and using the data structures as required by the Stratum protocol.
• Use rpcclient package in solo mining code. This change removes duplicate code and switches to getting data from dcrd more efficiently through WebSocket notifications instead of polling.
• Added an initial call to getwork in solo mining mode to start mining immediately without waiting until a new block or transaction shows up.
• Reworked how program version is handled to be more reliable and match other Decred software. The output of gominer --version will now include the Git revision from which gominer was built.
• Updated README with instructions for running gominer with dcrpool and other Stratum-based pools.

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a Decred mining pool.

October’s changes focused on adding BLAKE3 and gominer support:

• Optimized how data is sent to miners. Some of the old ASICs incorrectly used the second “generation transaction” field. Decred’s block header is better designed for mining compared to Bitcoin’s and that field should not have been used for Decred. Given that the old ASICs no longer work with the network, this takes the opportunity to stop using the “gentx2” field by putting all the relevant information into “gentx1”, which is correct and more efficient.
• Modified the pool to work with BLAKE3 as now required by the Decred network.
• Added gominer v2.0.x as a supported mining client.
• Fixed a data race.
• Fixed a bug where the pool was not correctly tracking the blocks it mined. As a result, it never sent the coinbase from such blocks to the mining participants.

Internal and developer changes:

• Limit the maximum block generation time to the target block time for each network. This is needed for proper simnet support.
• Use regular expressions to identify clients. This allows supporting new versions of mining clients without requiring updates to the pool software.
• Reworked client identification logic to more easily support different miner versions.
• Multiple smaller internal changes: removed unused code, improved logging, improved test code, etc.

DCRDEX

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

Changes backported to the next v0.6.x release and next Decrediton release:

• Added a workaround for DCRDEX window not loading in Decrediton. Electron version used in Decrediton had to be upgraded to unlock Ledger support, but newer Electron version broke DCRDEX integration. A long and painful bug hunt revealed that Electron v21.3.0 introduced an odd non-existent locale “c”, and the workaround is to explicitly not use it for formatting numbers in DCRDEX.

Work listed below has been merged to master towards future releases.

Client:

• Added ability to reset a forgotten app password by using the app seed.
• Added browser and desktop notifications for events like order changes, bonds, or server connectivity issues. These notifications are shown even when the DEX window is not active.
• Updated user documentation to reflect the new DEX client account creation flow.
• Fixed handling of unsupported assets in the Markets view.
• Fixed a bug during adding of a new DEX server.

Account reputation, bonds, trading limits:

• Reworked calculations of account tiers. The concept of “bonus tiers” has been removed, as it wasn’t doing anything useful but added complexity. Server will now send updates for score changes that the client was previously unaware of. These and other internal changes will help the client track its account score and tier more reliably and not miss bond renewals (which may result in account losing the ability to trade until the target tier is restored).
• Reworked trading limits to fix unreasonably low trading limits on some markets with low transaction fees. Lot size is the minimum amount of coins that can be traded; it protects successful trades from paying too high on-chain fees (relative to the amount traded). On the other hand, trading limit is the maximum amount the user can put in an order book; it protects from losing too much on fees in case the trade fails and gets refunded. Low-fee trading pairs (such as DCR/LTC) have smaller lots and allow smaller minimum trades, which is great for user experience. The problem with low-fee markets was that their trading limits were unreasonably low due to the formula used. That formula has been improved to allow more value to be traded at a time on such markets.
• Exposed more bond information on Settings UI such as current and target account tiers and amount locked in bonds.

Decred:

• Added a workaround for a dcrwallet bug where a transaction may never be marked as confirmed if the wallet is shut down at the wrong time.
• Implemented live UI updates for staking statistics and ticket price.
• Update balances of Decred SPV wallet when new unmined transactions are detected in the mempool.

Bitcoin:

• Added support for public chain data providers (aka RPC providers).

Ethereum:

• Added local storage of ETH wallet’s transaction history. This is needed because Ethereum data providers do not support querying the transactions an account has made. Additionally, having wallet’s transactions available locally allows consolidating and optimizing the code tracking unconfirmed transactions and reduces reliance on RPC providers.

Zclassic:

• Initial Zclassic support in the backend and the UI (no shielded wallets for now).

Developer and internal changes:

• Automated the tedious process of updating cache busters.
• Updated loadbot to start with market rate based on coins’ real market price. If this mode is enabled, the “whale” test program will try to push the test market to the real prices rather than random values. This is part of the market maker testing framework that will be used to evaluate how bots perform under different market conditions.
• Store completed candles in the database. Computing candles for the charts is an expensive operation and caching its results in the database fixes slow server startup.

Other news:

• Circle has launched a native Polygon USDC token as a more efficient alternative to the USDC “bridged” from Ethereum to Polygon (known as USDC.e). DEX developers are considering switching to this new token while Polygon is not in any stable DEX release to minimize disruption for end users.
• Wrapped Ethereum and Wrapped Bitcoin may land in the next minor release.

Image: Bond settings in DCRDEX (test amounts are shown)

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.

New Overview page:

• Added real wallet data to the mixer card.
• Implemented display of exchange rates from Binance and Bittrex.
• Added recent transactions and recent staking activity across all wallets.

Mobile adaptation:

• Added bottom navigation buttons which replace top-level tabs on mobile.
• Added mobile layout for the Overview page.

DEX integration:

• Added DEX onboarding Step 2 (server selection) and Step 3 (posting bonds).

Other:

• Added an indicator of total USD value of all assets combined.
• Optimized layout code to make the app more responsive.
• Added a reusable segmented selector widget.
• Implemented Send modal which can be quickly accessed from any page via the top bar Send button.
• Implemented app onboarding info pages.
• Moved Governance to a top-level tab.
• Implemented new layout for the wallet selector on the top-level Wallets tab.
• Added a reusable hidden balance widget.
• Allow creation of a new wallet from the Create Order page.
• Implemented new onboarding layout on the Trade tab (choosing between CEX and DEX trading).
• Replaced left sidebar on wallet’s main page with tabs at the top.

Fixes:

• Fixed wallet sync not starting on app launch.
• Fixed exchange rate estimation.
• Fixed inverse logic of the sync toggle.
• Fixed crash when navigating to wallet info page during a rescan.
• Fixed crash when opening the vote modal.
• Fixed inability to cancel seed backup step and password entry modal.
• Fixed crash when navigating to Create Order from the Settings page.
• Fixed crash when fetching exchange rates.
• Fixed 4 crashes related to watch-only wallets.
• Fixed a crash on Create Order page when an asset with no existing wallets is selected for trading.
• Fixed a bug where deleting a wallet would remove the top bar UI.

Image: DEX onboarding views in Cryptopower

Image: Cryptopower can convert coins using centralized services

Image: Updated design of the Governance tab in Cryptopower (final implementation may differ)

Image: Mobile design of the Overview tab in Cryptopower (final implementation may differ)

Bison Relay

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

GUI app changes merged in master:

• Fixed scroll position jumping to the beginning of the day when new chat messages are posted.

Android:

• First test messages have been sent from Android. Syncing took about 10 minutes and used 10-15% of the battery. A fresh BR install on Android was reported to take around 1 gigabyte.

Cake Wallet Integration

Cake Wallet is an open source, self-custodial multi-asset wallet for XMR, BTC, LTC, and other coins, running on Android, iOS, macOS and Linux.

Here’s the Decred integration story so far:

• @Tivra connected Decred with Cake Wallet, which resulted in a collaborative video livestream with Vik Sharma and Justin Ehrenhofer in August 2023.
• Chat room has been created to discuss the integration and experiment with code. Cake Wallet is built from a complex mix of Dart+Flutter (main app language), C++ (Monero), Go (Ethereum), and Kotlin and Swift (for native integration bits for Android and iOS). The process of setting up a working build environment is best characterized as “build hell” since it is not fully documented and getting it to build for just one platform is quite a challenge, while there are four targets in total (Linux, macOS, Android, iOS).
• A few Decred screens were added as a proof of concept and a working Android build was achieved.
• A proposal to fund the Decred integration was submitted. It didn’t reach quorum due to Decred hardfork issues and was resubmitted in September. Second proposal was approved in October.
• Developers evaluated integration strategies and settled on creating a Decred library based on the code from DCRDEX and Cryptopower’s libwallet, and compiling it as a C library that could be called from Dart code. The second option was to build the library with gomobile, write platform-specific glue code (Kotlin and Swift), and use Dart’s “platform channels” to call the native code. This approach was discarded as more difficult.
• Cake Wallet’s code repository was forked into a staging repository to have a place for quick iteration until something is ready to be submitted upstream.
• Initial libwallet version was submitted for code review, it is a simple library for building SPV wallet apps for DCR, BTC and LTC. The plan is to use this library from Cake Wallet, Cryptopower and possibly other software.
• Initial Decred screens were merged in the staging fork to create a shared baseline to start developing.

Other

VSP list API now exposes Missed and Expired ticket counts separately, which allows for more accurate evaluation of a VSP’s reliability. Low missed count is better, while expired tickets are normal and don’t indicate a problem with a VSP.

@Exitus organized a Decred developer “Ask Me Anyting” (AMA) Reddit thread which collected 77 comments, some highlights:

• Next big things in core network development are decentralizing the mixing process and creating the building blocks for supporting things like NFTs in a truly decentralized way.
• @davecgh hinted at pivoting to making app development easier.
• dcrd’s package for optimized secp256k1 elliptic curve operations is being used by Ethereum’s INFURA, Nostr, the Cosmos SDK, Blockwatch’s TzGo (Tezos Go SDK), Ethereum Optimism, and many more.
• DCRDEX rebrand will be timed for a v1 release and market maker bots getting ready. Developers recognize that high fees on Bitcoin and Ethereum suppress trading activity and are working on solutions. Recent work in that direction included support for WBTC and WETH on Polygon and making low-lot-size markets feasible.
• See more insightful answers in the thread.

People

Welcome the new first-time contributors:

• @CPunch (developer, Cryptopower)
• @upright39 (developer, Cryptopower)
• @ZecHub (writer, Cypherpunk Times)

Community stats as of Nov 2 (compared to Oct 2):

• Twitter followers: 53,475 (+68)
• Reddit subscribers: 12,762 (+5)
• Matrix #general members: 826 (+7)
• Discord members: 1,838 (+43), verified to post: 762 (+18)
• Telegram members: 2,297 (-24)
• YouTube subscribers: 4,640 (+0), views: 242.4K (+2.4K)

Governance and Finances

In October the new treasury received 7,628 DCR worth $97K at October’s average rate of $12.73. 8,412 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $107K at same rate.

Treasury spend tx mined in early October has been covered in the previous issue.

As of Nov 1, the combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 873K DCR (11.4 million USD at $13.08).

Image: Treasury inflows and outflows in DCR

Image: Treasury monthly balance in USD; note that it heavily depends on the exchange rate

Three proposals finished voting in October:

• Cake Wallet Integration Again by @JoeGruff requesting $80,000 to integrate basic DCR functionality in Cake Wallet was approved with 88% Yes and 59% ticket turnout.

• Decred PR Proposal Phase Five by @l1ndseymm requesting $48,000 for another year of public relations work as a team of 5 people was rejected with 53% Yes (missing the 60% approval threshold) and 55% ticket turnout.

• Odaily Content Proposal by @conniej requesting $15,000 for publishing 2 sponsored articles over 6 months and the corresponding social media exposure was rejected with 30% Yes and 28% turnout. The proposal was authorized for voting after ~2 months of inactivity.

The above proposals had no major updates since they were covered in Politeia Digest 64.

Voting for Cake Wallet Integration and Decred PR Phase 5 proposals could not be started normally on September 28th due to a server error. The problem with Cake Wallet proposal was resolved in ~4 days. Decred PR proposal took one extra day to fix due to bad data in the database that had to be located and manually removed.

Network

Hashrate: October’s hashrate opened at ~8.8 TH/s and closed ~12.3 TH/s, bottoming at 7.1 TH/s and peaking at 13.3 TH/s throughout the month.

Image: Decred hashrate is now dominated by GPUs and measured in terahashes

Distribution of 1,000 blocks mined by Nov 1: miningandco.com 20%, pooltronic.tech 9%, blake3dcr.com 3%, and 68% of blocks were not identified by miningpoolstats.stream.

Staking: Ticket price varied between 157-701 DCR and set a new all-time high.

The locked amount was 8.38-9.87 million DCR, meaning that 53.9-63.5% of the circulating supply participated in proof of stake.

There was speculation that a single entity temporarily stopped buying tickets and later bought 1.4M DCR worth of tickets in a short amount of time.

Image: A relatively small uptick in ticket buying in the first week of October…

Image: …triggered the biggest ticket price swing ever seen…

Image: …although for the total staked DCR chart it was just a correction

Image: A rare spike in missed tickets occurred on October 4th

VSP: The 15 listed VSPs collectively managed ~7,200 (-350) live tickets, which was 16.8% of the ticket pool (-1.2%) as of Nov 1.

The biggest gainers of October are 123.dcr.rocks (+395 tickets or +118%), dcr.farm (+107 tickets or +63%), and ultravsp.uk (+87 tickets or +35%).

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Image: 83% of all tickets are held by hardcore solo voters who don’t need a VSP

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed between 145 and 153 dcrd nodes throughout the month. Versions of 155 nodes seen on Nov 1: v1.8.0 - 77%, v1.8.1 - 15%, v1.7.x - 2%, v1.8.0 dev builds - 0.6%, other - 5.8%.

Image: 15% of nodes have upgraded to v1.8.1. The red area before Jan 2023 indicates incomplete data we had at that time.

The share of mixed coins varied between 62.0-62.6%. Daily mix volume varied between 271-1,036K DCR - a new all-time high.

Image: Unlike the staked DCR chart there was no dip in the mixed and unspent supply

Image: Monthly mixed DCR has set a new record

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer saw 220 nodes (+9), 448 channels (+19) with a total capacity of 203 DCR (+13), as of Nov 1. These stats are different for each node.

Image: An important psychological level of 200 DCR locked in Lightning Network has been broken

Thanks to @bochinchero for providing and improving these charts. About 40 other charts not used in this Decred Journal issue are available in the dcrsnapshots repository; everyone is welcome to share them on social media.

Ecosystem

Mining pools:

• Decred developers released an open source mining pool back in 2019 hoping to lower the barrier for launching new mining pools and decentralize Decred’s proof of work mining. Unfortunately, no public pools showed up despite dcrpool having been actively developed for 2 years. The recent hardfork to BLAKE3 has rebooted Decred mining and brought new life to dcrpool. In September gominer was updated to unlock GPU mining for everyone, and in October both gominer and dcrpool were updated to support pooled BLAKE3 mining. Soon after that three public mining pools were launched.

• blake3dcr.com was the first mining pool to be announced after the hardfork. As of writing, the payment method is PPLNS and pool fee is 0.8%. Contact @dezryth on Twitter or Matrix for any questions.

• decred.miningandco.com was launched by @sebit27. As of writing, the payment method is PPS and pool fee is 1.0%.

• decred.pooltronic.tech was announced by @makertronic, who also made French video tutorials for GPU mining on Linux and Windows, HiveOS, and BzMiner on Windows. As of writing, the payment method is PPLNS and pool fee is 1.0%.

Voting Service Providers:

• vsp.coinmine.pl was renamed to decred.stake.fun in the VSP page and other places that use VSP API such as Decrediton or Cryptopower. The old domain still works for compatibility. Stake.Fun is a crypto staking portal for Decred and Radix coming as a replacement for CoinMine.pl, which was a multi-coin mining pool launched back in 2013. The service is operated by @feeleep (see an interview from 2018). As of writing the VSP boasts ~29,200 voted tickets, second only to stakey.net with ~30,000 voted.

• 123.dcr.rocks announced that it is closing. New tickets are no longer accepted and the servers will shut down in a few months once all live tickets have been voted. As of writing, there are 280 live tickets or 0.7% of the ticket pool. The VSP worked for 2.5 years since its launch in May 2021 and voted ~23,260 tickets, with 175 or 0.75% tickets revoked. We can’t see the exact missed count since it has not upgraded to vspd v1.3.0, but it should be very small and most of “revoked” are likely expired tickets because ~0.5% of all tickets expire by design. Thanks to Frank Braun for running the service!

• As of November 1st, 9 VSPs have upgraded to vspd v1.3.1, 4 VSPs run v1.3.0, and 2 VSPs are on v1.2.0 (of which 1 is closing).

Wallets:

• Cryptopower was added to decred.org Wallets, the page now lists 4 first party and 6 third party wallet options. For support and general discussion please join the #cryptopower Matrix chat.

Other news:

• The #ecosystem chat (where the above updates are posted first) has been restricted to posting news only while discussion and research has moved to the new #ecochat room. Subscribers can now read the news faster without having to skip casual chat, and enable louder notifications to not miss any posts. This should scale better too now that the room is also available on Discord.

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

Decred Vanguard is a community-based marketing effort with the goal of increasing Decred’s outreach and social media presence.

Are you a meme creator, artist, strategist, or just someone passionate about the Decred Project? We’re expanding our community-driven marketing program, and we want YOU!

What’s in it for you?

• Earn $100 in DCR every month just for participating.
• We’ll cover the cost of your X Premium.
• No strict rules on participation. Contribute in your own unique way, whenever you can.
• Win potential prizes for contributions.

We are always testing out new giveaways and running meme contests with prizes!

Interested? Contact @Exitus on Twitter/Matrix/Discord.

Cypherpunk Times

Cypherpunk Times has onboarded ZecHub from the Zcash community, and their first article Social media data collection, does it matter? is now available.

Engagement stats for October 2023:

• Total number of articles on CT: 565
• Newsletter subscribers: 110
• New CT posts and newsletters sent: 26
• Active social media campaigns: 89
• Completed social media campaigns: 31
• Social media posts: 220
• Social media followers across all platforms and accounts: 1,675
• @decredsociety Twitter: followers - 985, tweet impressions - 8.4K, likes - 157, retweets - 37
• @decredmagazine Twitter: followers - 498, tweet impressions - 16.5K, likes - 413, retweets - 112
• @cypherpunktimes Twitter: followers - 192, tweet impressions - 24.0K, likes - 271, retweets - 84
• Posts by project for October: ZCash - 1, Firo - 9, Decred - 8, other crypto projects - 3

Other

• Decred’s logo on CoinMarketCap has been updated to be more visible, especially when the icon is shown in small size.
• DCR was removed from CoinMarketCap’s list of Privacy Tokens. A request has been made to add it back.
• Decred was added to CoinGecko’s Layer 1 list via an email request.
• A request has been made to add Decred to Privacy Guide’s Cryptocurrency category.
• DCR was pitched to AgoraDesk exchange.
• @Tivra made a Twitter poll asking if Decred should be renamed/rebranded. Results from 229 votes: 25% “Yes, find a better name”, 42% “No, too late for that”, 32% “Indifferent”.

These efforts demonstrate that everyone can contribute something to facilitate an integration, update various websites to present accurate information about the project, create educational content, run surveys, or just tell the world about Decred. Every little bit helps!

Media

Selected articles

General crypto & some Decred:

• The psychology of crypto investing: Understanding market sentiment by @tallamericano
• Crypto wallets: Keeping your digital coins safe and secure Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 by @tallamericano
• Brazilian congress launches a blockchain parliamentary front by @Joao
• SocialFi and security by @BlockchainJew
• What is going on with Ethereum? by @Joao
• Social media data collection, does it matter? by @ZecHub - addresses the “I have nothing to hide” mindset
• U.S. government holds a lot of Bitcoin! Is this a problem? by @Joao
• Decred vs Siacoin by @Joao

Videos

• Bison Relay upgrades to version 0.19 by @phoenixgreen - also as a text post
• Decred News - Blockchain evolved, BLAKE3 & ASERT, dev updates & DEX road map! by @Exitus

Q&A Sessions by @phoenixgreen:

• The best cryptocurrencies to hold when exchanging for Decred - also on Spotify and as a text post
• What utility does Decred have? - also on Spotify and as a text post
• What’s the best way to hold Decred - also on Spotify and as a text post

Live streams:

• Decred is coming back to mobile - State of the Market by @phoenixgreen and @Exitus feat. @dreacot (Spotify)

Shorts:

• Decred - Switch from ASIC to GPU mining! by @DajanaDcr and @Exitus - also on TikTok
• Decred is evolving money. Security, governance, privacy, and a never-ending roadmap by @DajanaDcr and @Exitus - also on TikTok

Audio

• “Decred: Navigating the future of blockchain, privacy, and decentralized governance.” An insightful conversation with Jake Yocom-Piatt CTO & Project lead for Decred by Blockchain DXB feat. @jy-p - secured by @l1ndseymm, also on Apple Podcasts

Translations

• SocialFi and security - in Chinese by @Dominic
• The psychology of crypto investing: understanding market sentiment - in Chinese @Dominic
• Decred Journal July-August got a total of 3 new translations to Arabic (@arij) and Polish (@kozel). Thank you for your work!

Non-English content

• Decred solo mining with BzMiner on Windows tutorial by @makertronic (French)
• Decred BLAKE3 GPU mining article (Russian)

Discussions

• Decred developer “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) feat. dev lead Dave Collins

Art and fun

• Bison, Lightning work and to the moon - acrylic painting by @real_sussey (meme contest winner)
• Bison Relay v0.1.9 release animation by @karamble
• Decred hodlers waiting for the inevitable supply shock by @Exitus
• Blast from the past by @OfficialCryptos
• @Exitus’ meme contest collected so many entries that the amount of winners was increased from 3 to 6 and the prize pool was doubled to $200. The most bizarre entries are no longer available for good.

Image: My parents vs me in 20s by @Andrewke

Image: Decred Onyl portfolio by @void

Image: Bison, Lightning work and to the moon by @real_sussey

Markets

In October DCR was trading between USDT 11.38-14.08 and BTC 0.00036-0.00051. The average daily rate was $12.73.

Image: Price performance of DCR, DASH, and ZEC vs USD by @saender

Image: Market valuations (USD) based on @bochinchero’s Staked Realized Value model

Image: Recent DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics

Image: Recent DCR/USD, data from Coin Metrics

Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

Relevant External

The Monero Community Crowdfunding System (CCS) wallet was drained of the entire balance of 2,675 XMR (~ $450,000 USD) by an unknown attacker. The XMR in the wallet had been donated by community members to fund approved projects being completed by other community members, and was administered by developers luigi and fluffypony. As of writing, it is not known how the attacker was able to access the funds. Funds were stolen on Sep 1, but the fact was not discovered until late September.

A long term Bitcoin Core developer has announced he is stepping away from Lightning Network work after a recent class of “replacement cycling” attacks has been discovered to allow theft of funds from payment channels, with no apparent fix that does not require changes to Bitcoin at the level of the consensus rules. For Antoine Riard this was the final straw, when it became clear that Lightning Network is not on a trajectory to become usable in the way it was originally intended.

THORswap, a decentralized exchange on the THORchain platform, put its front end into maintenance mode as a response to funds from the $475M FTX hack being exchanged from ETH to BTC on the platform. Around $120M was exchanged before THORswap went into maintenance mode, but the hacker still managed to bridge funds to THORchain using other venues. Around one week later THORswap resumed front end services with a change to the terms of use forbidding users from countries sanctioned by the US, UK or European Union - and an unnamed chain surveillance partner to assist with identifying addresses associated with these jurisdictions.

Thor Technologies (unrelated to THOR chain or swap) and founder David Chin lost their case with the SEC in a default judgment. The charges were brought in December 2022 for raising $2.6 million in an unregistered securities offering for the THOR token, which was supposed to have had something to do with the gig economy. Thor Technologies already shut down in April 2019 blaming “regulatory issues”.

The New York Attorney General has brought a case against Gemini, Genesis and Digital Currency Group (DCG), accusing them of defrauding investors of more than $1 billion. The case centers on the “Gemini Earn” program which allowed customers to lend assets to the companies for a fixed rate of return, and it was promoted as a low-risk investment even though internal investigations from the time found that the financial position of the firms was precarious. The collapse of the program and losses suffered by investors are one of the points of friction in the ongoing dispute between the Winklevoss twins who operate Gemini, and Barry Silbert, the CEO of DCG.

Reddit announced the end of its experiment with Community Points (MOON and BRICK tokens for the /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite subreddits), and the prices for the tokens promptly plunged. The reason given for the decision is difficulty and resource costs associated with scaling the system to the rest of the platform’s communities. The 3-year experiment started with tokens tradeable on Ethereum, then to reduce costs it was moved to Arbitrum Nova, an Ethereum Layer 2 - but Reddit has decided to abandon the decentralized ledger aspect of any future Community Points alternative.

It was noted that 3 of the moderators of /r/cryptocurrency who had early warning of the news used this opportunity to dump their MOONs, causing a 22% drop in price just before the news came out and the price declined 90%. These moderators were removed by the rest of the mod team, who stated an intent to keep the MOONs token going in some form on the subreddit.

Huobi exchange was hacked for 5,000 ETH (~$8M) but the hacker took Justin Sun’s offer of a 5% bounty and a job as a security consultant for returning the funds.

The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles about Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad which stated that the organizations were successfully raising millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, which was apparently based on a mis-reading of the on chain data. Chainalysis and Elliptic have indicated that their reading of the data is very different, with many of the entities caught up in the higher amounts being intermediaries with no direct links to terror funding. Nic Carter has been leading the criticism of the articles, including with a bounty program for open source analyses funded with $10,500 initially then increased with further contributions by other funders and supplemented with other bounty programs. The WSJ have since rolled back some of the claims in the original article, but it is not clear if that has diminished the enthusiasm of the 104 Congressional representatives who signed a letter calling for enquiries into crypto fundraising by Hamas on the strength of the original article.

Su Zhu, of Three Arrows Capital infamy, was arrested while trying to leave Singapore and sentenced to 4 months in prison as a consequence of failing to cooperate with the 3AC bankruptcy process.

NiceHash is ending its service for UK residents, according to emails it sent to existing users in late September. Services to block UK users include the hashpower marketplace, mining pools and exchange - the organization cited “recent regulation changes” as the motivating factor but did not give more specific information.

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

About

This is issue 64 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):

• writing, editing, publishing: bee, bochinchero, Exitus, jz, karamble, kozel, phoenixgreen, richardred
• reviews and feedback: davecgh
• title image: Exitus
• funding: Decred stakeholders