Decred Journal – October 2023

October cover by @Exitus

Image: October cover by @Exitus

Highlights of October:

Contents:

Core Software v1.8.1 Release

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

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:

Developer and internal changes:

dcrdtest integration testing harness:

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

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.

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:

In progress:

dcrseeder

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

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.

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a Decred mining pool.

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

Internal and developer changes:

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:

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

Client:

Account reputation, bonds, trading limits:

Decred:

Bitcoin:

Ethereum:

Zclassic:

Developer and internal changes:

Other news:

Bond settings in DCRDEX (test amounts are shown)

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:

Mobile adaptation:

DEX integration:

Other:

Fixes:

DEX onboarding views in Cryptopower

Image: DEX onboarding views in Cryptopower

Cryptopower can convert coins using centralized services

Image: Cryptopower can convert coins using centralized services

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

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

Mobile design of the Overview 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:

Android:

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:

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:

People

Welcome the new first-time contributors:

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

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).

Treasury inflows and outflows in DCR

Image: Treasury inflows and outflows in DCR

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

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

Three proposals finished voting in October:

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.

Decred hashrate is now dominated by GPUs and measured in terahashes

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.

A relatively small uptick in ticket buying in the first week of October...

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

...triggered the biggest ticket price swing ever seen...

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

...although for the total staked DCR chart it was just a correction

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

A rare spike in missed tickets occurred on October 4th

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%).

Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

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

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%.

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

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.

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

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

Monthly mixed DCR has set a new record

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.

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

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:

Voting Service Providers:

Wallets:

Other news:

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?

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:

Other

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:

Videos

Q&A Sessions by @phoenixgreen:

Live streams:

Shorts:

Audio

Translations

Non-English content

Discussions

Art and fun

My parents vs me in 20s by @Andrewke

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

Decred Onyl portfolio by @void

Image: Decred Onyl portfolio by @void

Bison, Lightning work and to the moon by @real_sussey

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.

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

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

Market valuations (USD) based on @bochinchero's Staked Realized Value model

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

Recent DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics

Image: Recent DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics

Recent DCR/USD, data from Coin Metrics

Image: Recent DCR/USD, data from Coin Metrics

DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

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):