Decred Journal – November 2023

November cover by @Exitus

Image: November cover by @Exitus

Time was a big challenge for me in December and we are releasing this very late. Sorry for the wait! [@bee]

Highlights of November:

Contents:

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.

Developer and internal changes:

In progress:

Decred was started as a fork of the btcsuite project. When asked how dcrd code has diverged over the years, @davecgh replied:

dcrd is significantly improved over btcd. It’s pretty night and day really. I don’t just mean in the ways that DCR improves over BTC either. I mean in pretty much every aspect. e.g. APBFs, much improved network code, the entire way the chain code allows for headers first semantics, how overall syncing is handled, support for block invalidation and reconsideration, the way peers with old chains are handled, way faster crypto, 50x (at least) improvement to sync time, essentially a full rewrite of the underlying script semantics (e.g. stdscript, stdaddr, proper versioning support, etc), and a bunch more. [@davecgh in chat]

dcrwallet

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

Many of the user-facing changes this month are focused on optimizing SPV mode, which is where the wallet can operate without having to download the full blockchain. This is a great choice for wallets with limited hardware performance, esp. mobile devices. Decred’s SPV mode uses advanced crypto tech to enable light clients with a high level of security and decentralization.

Optimizations of the initial SPV sync - part of SPV wallet’s startup routine when it catches up with the chain:

Other SPV mode optimizations:

Developer and internal changes:

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 for the next release:

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 included in November’s v1.3.2 release:

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a Decred mining pool.

User-facing changes:

Internal refactoring (changes that don’t add features or fix bugs, but that untangle the code, make bugs easier to find and fix, and make the code easier to change in the future):

Lightning Network

dcrlnd is Decred’s Lightning Network node software. LN enables instant low-cost transactions.

Note that while Anchor Outputs became the default channel type for Bitcoin in lnd v0.13, they are disabled on Decred LN mainnet for extra safety against attacks such as the replacement cycling vulnerability disclosed in October 2023.

DCRDEX

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

General client changes:

Desktop app:

Account trading tier, bonds, and reputation:

Market maker bots:

Decred:

Bitcoin:

Zcash:

Ethereum:

Internal and developer changes:

In progress:

Market Maker Settings UI in DCRDEX

Image: Market Maker Settings UI in DCRDEX

DCRDEX will better expose the bond math and trading limits

Image: DCRDEX will better expose the bond math and trading limits

Improved bond information in DCRDEX Settings

Image: Improved bond information in DCRDEX Settings

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.

Design implementation of the top-level Home subpages:

Design implementation of Wallets subpages:

Mobile adaptation:

Coin conversion:

Fixes:

Internal and developer changes:

Private testing of mobile app builds has been set up in Google Play Store and Apple Store (TestFlight). If you’d like to participate please ask in #cryptopower Matrix chat (see how to join Matrix).

Follow @cryptopowerWlt on Twitter to support the project and get more updates.

Overview tab in Cryptopower

Image: Overview tab in Cryptopower

Updated Settings in Cryptopower

Image: Updated Settings in Cryptopower

Updated wallet overview in Cryptopower

Image: Updated wallet overview in Cryptopower

Mobile layout in Cryptopower (work in progress)

Image: Mobile layout in Cryptopower (work in progress)

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.

Work listed below has been merged to master towards the next release.

Changes in both GUI and text apps:

User-facing changes in the GUI app:

GUI app adaptation to mobile devices:

Internal changes in the GUI app:

In progress:

Other news:

Cake Wallet Integration

Completed work merged in the intermediate integration tree:

In progress work for Cake Wallet:

Merged work for libwallet:

In progress work for libwallet:

libwallet is a multi-coin library implementing light (SPV) wallets for Decred, Bitcoin and Litecoin. It was originally created to integrate Decred in Cake Wallet, but it has potential to become a platform for building Decred and multi-coin software. The second app to use libwallet will likely be the Cryptopower wallet. This will be similar to how the now-discontinued dcrlibwallet was shared by GoDCR and Android/iOS Decred apps, but will support more assets than just Decred. C interop layer will be added soon which will allow libwallet to be used by any programming language that can call C code, facilitating Decred integrations in a wide array of existing and new crypto software (this was one of the goals of the TinyDecred v2 effort).

Wallet apps built on libwallet will have much better privacy compared to many existing apps on the market, where it is common to use central servers that can track users’ funds. Unfortunately, Cake’s Bitcoin wallet is one such case because it relies on their Electrum server which is not good for privacy. Under the hood libwallet uses dcrwallet for Decred and Neutrino for Bitcoin, which connect directly to full nodes and fetch data privately without revealing owned funds and transactions.

Other

People

Welcome the new first-time contributors:

Community stats as of Dec 3 (compared to Nov 2):

Governance and Finances

In November the new treasury received 7,060 DCR worth $101K at November’s average rate of $14.35. 8,471 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $122K at same rate.

A treasury spend tx was approved with 7,346 Yes votes and 57% turnout, and mined on Nov 21. It had 50 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 3 DCR to 1,411 DCR. Most of this DCR was likely paid for September and some October work. Using an estimated billing exchange rate for the mix of two months of $12.98, the billed amount in this TSpend is around $110K.

One of the considerations around the timing and structuring of treasury payments to contractors for these months is to stay within the limit of 150% of monthly inflows as dictated by DCP-7. The lower DCR/USD exchange rate and decline in block reward subsidy over time means that hitting the limit is a realistic concern for the first time, especially if there is a backlog of older invoices accumulating. In this case invoices that were already submitted for October were sent for payment at the same time as those for September rather than waiting another month, which would have been more usual.

As of Dec 1, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 871,828 DCR ($12.5 million USD at $14.39).

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

There were no Politeia proposals submitted, approved or rejected in November.

It has been reported on November 23rd that one user was unable to register and submit a proposal. Apparently Politeia did not detect the registration fee payment. As of December 1st this has not been resolved.

Network

This section tracks key health metrics of the fundamental infrastructure.

Mining

November’s hashrate opened at ~13.7 TH/s and closed ~5.5 TH/s, bottoming at 5.0 TH/s and peaking at 15.9 TH/s throughout the month.

Decred hashrate is seeking a new equilibrium after the initial influx of GPU miners

Image: Decred hashrate is seeking a new equilibrium after the initial influx of GPU miners

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Dec 3: miningandco.com 41%, losmuchachos.digital 8%, pooltronic.tech 3.6%, and 47% of blocks were not identified by miningpoolstats.stream.

The reduction of unique mining addresses suggests it is getting more centralized again

Image: The reduction of unique mining addresses suggests it is getting more centralized again

Staking

Ticket price varied between 224-324 DCR.

Ticket price has stabilized pretty quickly

Image: Ticket price has stabilized pretty quickly

The locked amount was 9.27-9.85 million DCR, meaning that 59.4-63.1% of the circulating supply participated in proof of stake.

DCR locked in tickets is staying near its ATH

Image: DCR locked in tickets is staying near its ATH

Among the other things, percentage of staked DCR indirectly shows how much of new emission is re-staked

Image: Among the other things, percentage of staked DCR indirectly shows how much of new emission is re-staked

VSP Staking

The 14 listed VSPs collectively managed ~5,850 (-1,350) live tickets, which was 14.3% of the ticket pool (-2.5%) as of Dec 1. Note: these figures exclude around 400 tickets managed by 123.dcr.rocks which was delisted due to closing.

The only gainer of November was 99split.com (+136 tickets or +32%), the other 13 saw outflows of tickets.

Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Missed votes are back to low numbers

Image: Missed votes are back to low numbers

Nodes

Decred Mapper observed between 150 and 158 dcrd nodes throughout the month. Versions of 147 nodes seen on Dec 1: v1.8.0 - 67%%, v1.8.1 - 23%, v1.9.0 dev builds - 3%, v1.7.x - 2%, v1.8.0 - 0.7%, other - 3%.

Nodes are upgrading to v1.8.1. The red area before Jan 2023 indicates incomplete data we had at that time.

Image: Nodes are upgrading to v1.8.1. The red area before Jan 2023 indicates incomplete data we had at that time.

StakeShuffle

The share of mixed coins varied between 62.1-62.3%. Daily mix volume varied between 0-1,032K DCR.

Second big dip and recovery of daily DCR mixing

Image: Second big dip and recovery of daily DCR mixing

More than 62% of circulating supply prefers privacy

Image: More than 62% of circulating supply prefers privacy

Lightning Network

Decred LN Explorer saw 220 nodes (+0), 420 channels (-28) with a total capacity of 206 DCR (+3), as of Dec 3 (compared to Nov 1).

Some LN channels got closed

Image: Some LN channels got closed

LN node count stayed the same while the capacity increased a bit

Image: LN node count stayed the same while the capacity increased a bit

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

Voting Service Providers

Mining Pools

Staking Services

Exchanges

Other News

Join more than 100 members of our #ecosystem chat to get detailed news about Decred services. Volunteers who can help with testing withdrawals are welcome in the #ecochat work group as well.

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

Updates:

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

Engagement stats for November:

Events

Attended:

Media

Articles

Decred:

General crypto:

Videos

Live streams:

Shorts:

Audio

Non-English content

Random

I never planned to use the #DCRDEX, because I didn’t need to, but over time I realized it added value. It wasn’t until the only exchange (@BittrexExchange) I use to buy #Decred stopped operating in the US…. thats when it really hit me! It wasn’t a want, it was a need! [@longtermdaily]

Art and Fun

Trapped Bitcoin users looking at the cure, by @yourkingroyal

Images: Trapped Bitcoin users looking at the cure, by @yourkingroyal

An old Decred Moon Fuel art on @wumudidi's cup

Image: An old Decred Moon Fuel art on @wumudidi’s cup

Markets

In November DCR was trading between USDT 12.33-16.50 and BTC 0.00036-0.00046 on Binance. Using the weighed daily close data from Coin Metrics the price ranges were USD 13.11-15.50 and BTC 0.00037-0.00043. The average daily rate as calculated for contractor payments was $14.35.

Brian Beamish of The Rational Investor made a technical analysis of DCR (jump to 1:15:10).

Recent DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics

Image: Recent DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics

All-time DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics

Image: All-time 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

"A better long-term chart than a lot of people realize" by @cburniske

Image: “A better long-term chart than a lot of people realize” by @cburniske

Relevant External

Bitcoin mining pool f2pool has admitted to censoring transactions from OFAC-sanctioned addresses. This behaviour was discovered by Bitcoin developer 0xB10C by analyzing transactions which should have been included by f2pool but weren’t. Initially f2pool denied the behavior, but they subsequently admitted it and said they would pause it until community consensus could be established - but they have deleted the various posts about it since.

Monero chain sleuths Moonstone Research have analyzed the transactions made by the attacker who drained the Community Crowdfunding System (CCS) wallet and discovered some transactions they are fairly sure represent the attacker sending funds to an exchange or counterparty. This caused some controversy in the community because Monero is known for its privacy, but this is a “worst case scenario” for privacy where the wallet’s private keys and metadata have been shared with the investigators, and the attacker appears to have made an unusual transaction (using the Monerujo’s “PocketChange” feature) and some other missteps (sweeping the wallet) which have made the job of the investigators easier.

There are various proposals for a new Monero CCS system design which avoids the pitfall of having a large sum of XMR under the control of some core member(s) who can be targeted. One of these is a “cypherpunk proposal” which would remove the custodian role by having people donate directly to the wallets of the project owners once they are greenlit for funding - so removing the centralized oversight and release of funds.

Fluffypony has proposed disbanding the “Monero Core Team” in favour of 6 workgroups whose membership is determined by community consensus, with a cutover date of Jan 1 2024. The proposal is partly driven by recent issues with the CCS funds, but the Core team is also seen as having too much control in general, and some of the roles, like those dealing with service providers, require “individuals in those particular roles to not be abrasive, and to be warm and understanding and friendly with the individuals they deal with at those service providers”. The workgroups he proposes relate to the General Donation Fund, the Community Crowdfunding System, Intellectual Property holding, Servers and CDN hosting, Git maintenance, and Community Channels moderation. The proposal calls for a straw poll consensus mechanism to be decided to select members of the workgroups, but stipulates that only participants with several years of contributions should be considered for membership of a workgroup.

Jae Kwon, the Cosmos founder, has called for a chain splitting hard fork after a proposal to decrease ATOM issuance was approved by the community against his wishes. The proposal to drop the issuance rate from 14% annually to 10% was passed with 41.1% yes votes and 31.9% no votes from the voting power that participated - the rationale for the change was that Cosmos Hub was paying too much for security. Kwon’s chain split proposal would form a new chain that has its own token but would also allow the original ATOM token to be used in some way. This may also resolve some tension in the community around a vetoed plan for “Cosmos 2.0” which had significant levels of support but was deemed too risky by the leadership.

The Aragon Association has announced that it intends to disband, returning 95% of the assets held by the organization to ANT token holders and retaining 5% to settle obligations. ANT holders will be able to redeem ANT for ETH at a rate of 0.0025376 ETH per ANT until Nov 2 2024, at which point any unclaimed funds will revert to the newly formed “Aragon Shield”, where they will be put towards some loosely defined continuation of product development. Although Aragon’s software tools were used by successful DAOs such as Lido and Curve, the team decided that it was not possible to derive any value for ANT holders from this kind of usage, and they have acknowledged that ventures like “Aragon Court” were not viable.

Some of the ANT token holders are not happy with the Aragon Association plan, specifically the retention of $11 million plus all unclaimed funds after a year for Aragon Shield, and they have backed a proposal to go after Aragon Association for more money via a “highly conditional grant” to Patagon Management LLC, a trading company specializing in this kind of legal action to recover funds.

A fake “Ledger Live” app made it into the Microsoft app store and as a result whoever released it was sent 38 transactions worth $588K as it stole the BTC of people who thought they were using the proper Ledger Live software to access their hardware wallet.

KyberSwap was subjected to a hack and urged users to withdraw their funds if able, but the attacker was able to get hold of around $55 million of users’ funds by performing a sophisticated sequence of actions that allowed them to exploit a vulnerability to manipulate prices. The KyberSwap team offered a 10% bounty for return of the funds and the attacker replied in an on chain message that negations would begin in a few hours when they were rested. Front running bots were able to join in the exploit and get $5.7M of user funds before the attacker, the operators of the bots are returning funds for a 10% bounty.

There have been four major hacks in two months targeting exchanges and a bridge operated by Justin Sun. HTX exchange (formerly Huobi) suffered two hacks for $8M and $30M, while Poloniex was hit for $100M, reportedly due to a private key compromise. HTX’s HECO Chain bridge, used to move funds between the exchange and various chains, was the other casualty, with $87M making its way to suspicious addresses.

LBRY Inc. is winding down after the SEC sued it into bankruptcy, all of its assets will be sold off to pay creditors. Odysee will continue using the LBRY network to provide its video sharing service, by some measures one of the most highly used Web3 platforms with 5.3 million unique monthly users.

The SEC sued Kraken with operating a securities exchange illegally because they failed to register, similar to the cases brought against Coinbase and Binance in June.

SafeMoon’s CEO and CTO have been arrested by the US Department of Justice in a fraud investigation, with a complaint that they misled investors by spending $200M on luxury goods while telling them it was locked in a liquidity pool. The SEC piled on with charges of securities violations related to the SFM token being unregistered and the price being manipulated, the token tanked in the aftermath of the charges being published.

The SBF trial concluded with guilty verdicts on seven charges and sentencing to come in 2024 and SBF facing a maximum 115 years in prison. The question of whether to pursue the political donations element was to be made at a later date - spoiler alert, they decided not to expose the extent of that crime and all of the politicians who were involved to media scrutiny, in December.

The FTX Bankruptcy advisors have been providing FBI offices with access to customer trading data.

Chinese courts have affirmed legal protection of NFTs as property, with a commentary that clarifies some previous contradictions. NFTs are seen as having both use value and exchange value, their scarcity means they conform to the characteristics of online virtual property. Recognizing property rights for NFTs means that people can be prosecuted for stealing them.

The US Federal Reserve is coming after Bitcoin Magazine for making fun of their FedNow service in a way which they allege infringes on their copyright and trademarks. Bitcoin Magazine has published an open reply declining to comply by removing the offending t-shirt, which contains the Fed’s trademark, from their store.

Bittrex Global has finally wound down its operations and ceased trading. Since they announced the closing date there were intermittent issues with withdrawing DCR and the DCR pairs started behaving unusually with low liquidity and some concern about whether people would be able to withdraw any DCR they bought there.

Attendees at the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s annual ApeFest were subjected to UV light exposure, with over 20 people who were located too near a UV light reporting severe pain and burning sensations in their eyes, likely caused by photokeratitis or sunburn of the cornea.

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

About

This is issue 65 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):