<![CDATA[Decred - Medium]]> https://medium.com/decred?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/proxy/1*TGH72Nnw24QL3iV9IOm4VA.png Decred - Medium https://medium.com/decred?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 Medium Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:59:14 GMT <![CDATA[Decred Journal — December 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-december-2023-3dc0019e1869?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/3dc0019e1869 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 12:12:34 GMT 2024-03-16T12:12:34.419Z Decred Journal — December 2023
Image: December cover by @Exitus

Dear readers, sorry for taking so long to complete this December issue. In recent months, finding time to work on the Journal has been a big challenge. We are discussing an overhaul of DJ to optimize our efforts. I hope this issue still has unique and useful information for you. Happy reading! — @bee

Highlights of December:

  • Two proposals have been approved, for continuing the Bug Bounty program and Video Content creation in 2024.
  • Two new mining pools have launched, but data suggests mining is becoming more centralized again.
  • Wallet apps and Bison Relay are getting polished for their next releases, Cake integration is ongoing.

Contents:

· Development
· People
· Governance and Finances
· Network
· Ecosystem
· Outreach
· Media
· Markets
· Relevant External

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:

  • Updated the Docker image to build with Go 1.21.5.
  • Marked cfilter version 1 messages as deprecated in the wire package. This is just general cleanup, since V1 cfilter messages are already invalid. V2 cfilter messages have been the standard since DCP-5 activated in Jan 2020.

In progress:

dcrwallet

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

User-facing changes:

  • Only request block notifications after the wallet is fully synced. This solves a race issue where the wallet might try to look at blocks before the underlying dcrd instance was fully synced. This could happen when dcrwallet is started very quickly after dcrd (for example, from within Decrediton). The result would be missed transaction notifications and the wallet’s balance to be wrong, requiring a rescan to be fixed.
  • When the wallet is syncing in SPV mode, process header batches in parallel. This resulted in a 32% faster sync on average when tested in the real world.
  • When the wallet is in SPV mode and the initial sync has already finished, request headers from each newly connected peer. This speeds up re-syncing after initial sync when the local client has been offline for some time (for example, due to an intermittent network connection) by ensuring any and all new headers are requested immediately, instead of waiting until a new block is announced to begin the catchup process.
  • Fixed a bug where a restored wallet would miss discovering transactions if those transactions were in the tip block after restoring from seed. This was quite a rare bug, because having more blocks in the chain post-restoration (common case) would prevent the issue from being hit. The bug would’ve likely only impacted automated dev tests, although rescans would also have fixed the issue for any users who might’ve experienced the bug.

Internal and developer changes:

  • Modify the pruning procedure to prune partial sidechains instead of pruning entire trees. This does not have a functional change yet, but in the future will allow SPV clients to process chains asynchronously.
  • Use Go 1.19 atomic types wherever possible. These types prevent misuse by only allowing access through the provided methods and guarantee proper use even if the variables are reorganized in the struct layout.
  • If a peer gives the wallet a new block, ensure that block has a known ancestor either in the main chain or a side chain. If no known ancestor exists, this means the wallet missed some blocks and should resync headers. Previously, the wallet only looked for ancestors in the main chain, instead of all side chains too. This caused getHeaders to run unnecessarily often, especially for devs simulating large reorgs with side chains.
  • Fix the gRPC logger, which wasn’t correctly removing prefixes when logging message arguments. This error was caught by a friendly passerby who is writing a custom golang linter.

In progress:

vspd

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

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a Decred mining pool.

  • Display the connected miners’ IP and port on the pool account page. This makes it a little bit easier to distinguish clients from each other.
  • Allow dcrpool to gracefully handle errors if dcrd’s GetTxOut method can’t find an output for a given transaction.

Lightning Network

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

  • Added automatic closing of channels that have not been reestablished for some time. Normally peers keep their channels healthy by “reestablishing” them. If channel peer is seen online for some time but it is not sending a message to reestablish the channel, such channel is a good candidate for being force closed, because it is likely the remote peer has lost the ability to use the channel (for example, due to restoring the node after data loss without the use of an SCB backup file). By default, if channel’s remote counterparty is seen online for 72 hours without reestablishing the channel, it will be auto closed. This should be a reasonable compromise between not closing channels too fast on hubs (that are online 24/7) and ephemeral nodes (that may be online only for an hour or two a day). Integration test has been added to assert the correct behavior.

cspp

cspp is a server for coordinating coin mixes using the CoinShuffle++ protocol. It is non-custodial, i.e. never holds any funds. CSPP is part of StakeShuffle, Decred’s privacy system.

  • Updated C headers to support the third major version of the fast math library flint (released October 2023). Newer versions of flint may provide performance and other improvements to the CSPP server.

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:

  • Fixed a bug where a trade could get stuck after a server disconnect. The full list of affected markets is unknown, but it is known that the bug affected LTC/DCR market and did not affect the DCR/BTC market.

Market maker bots:

  • Implemented low-level CEX management functions: deposit, withdraw, and balance tracking. Automatic rebalancing has been added to the simple arbitrage strategy where the bot initiates deposits and withdrawals to/from the CEX to maintain the configured balances. Binance is the first CEX supported by this functionality.
  • Modified Binance code to track 1,000 order book entries instead of 20.

General client changes:

Other:

In progress highlights:

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.

Newly implemented UI elements:

Trading:

DEX trading:

Privacy:

  • Updated privacy pages. By default, mixing will be off, mixing-related accounts won’t be created, and sending from the default account will be allowed.

Mobile UI implementation, the following pages have been updated/fixed for mobile screens:

Fixes:

  • Fixed an error when visting Treasury page without creating a DCR wallet.
  • Fixed mobile UI elements showing in desktop mode.
  • Fixed crash when visiting Staking pages after restoring a Decred wallet.
  • Fixed request rate limit errors when querying instant exchange orders.
  • Other minor UI fixes.

Internal and developer changes:

In other news:

  • Test builds of Android and iOS apps have been submitted to Google Play Store and Apple TestFlight.
Image: Cryptopower will support trading via the privacy-friendly Trocador.app
Image: Cryptopower is adding a lightweight UI for trading on DCRDEX
Image: Cryptopower getting ready for mobile screens

Cake Wallet Integration

In progress:

  • Integrating libwallet into the build process of Cake Wallet.
  • Code branch with most other coins removed has been created to speed up the development process.
  • Discussing how to call Go code from Cake’s Dart code. The plan so far is to connect the layers using simple JSON strings.
  • Discussing which APIs should be provided by libwallet for Cake and Cryptopower.
  • First change adding initial Decred screens has been merged in the upstream integration branch. This branch is an intermediate location to test and polish Decred code before adding it to Cake Wallet’s main branch.

decred.org

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

Image: Four wallet choices reflect a lot of development going on but users need guidance to find what’s best for them

Bison Relay

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

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

Changes in both GUI and text apps:

Changes in the GUI app:

Text-based app (brclient):

  • Grouped various invite handling subcommands under the /invite meta-command.
  • Fixed client-side message filtering hiding client’s own messages.

Internal and developer changes:

  • Updated to latest dcrlnd and improved tracking of dcrlnd readiness during startup.

Other

People

Community stats as of Jan 14* (compared to Dec 3):

  • Twitter followers: 54,595 (+656)
  • Reddit subscribers: 12,768 (-5)
  • Matrix #general members: 842 (+9)
  • Discord members: 1,924 (+62), verified to post: 772 (+3)
  • Telegram members: 2,327 (+8)
  • YouTube subscribers: 4,670 (+10), views: 247.1K (+2.4K) **

* Due to the late snapshot taken on Jan 14 (Jan 9 for YouTube) the deltas represent ~1.5 months instead of the usual 1-month period.

** Decred’s YouTube channel has more than 300 videos now!

Governance and Finances

In December the new treasury received 7,467 DCR worth $119K at December’s average rate of $15.89. 8,427 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $134K at same rate.

A treasury spend tx was approved with 99.5% Yes votes and 58% turnout, and mined on Dec 19. It had 29 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 7.5 DCR to 2,182 DCR. Most of this DCR was likely paid for October and November work. Estimating the average billing exchange rate for the two months at $13.54, the billed amount in this TSpend represents around $114K USD equivalent.

As of Jan 1, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 870.9K DCR (15.7 million USD at $17.98).

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

Two proposals were submitted and approved in December:

  • Bug Bounty Program 2024 by @jholdstock requested a budget of $105,000, split between $100,000 for bounty payments and $5,000 for administrative costs. In practice, only a small fraction of the requested budget has been used in previous iterations. The proposal reported that the expenses for the last 18 months were $415 paid for bounties and $1,750 for the operations. Overall the program has spent around $11K since its launch in 2019. The proposal has been approved with 98% Yes and a very high 74% turnout.
  • Decred Video Content 2024 by @phoenixgreen requested a budget of $71,000 for the creation and dissemination of video content for 2024. This proposal has been approved with 85% Yes and 64% turnout.

One proposal author reported a problem with purchasing proposal credits but it was resolved within a few days. A November issue with the registration fee not getting detected persisted in December, and it is unknown if it affects just one unlucky new account or possibly others.

See Politeia Digest issue 65 for more details on the month’s proposals.

PD’s publishing workflow has been reworked to improve reach and engagement: the main release channel is now Cypherpunk Times (main link is posted on Twitter and other places), Medium release is now posted in Decred’s main publication (instead of the lesser known Politeia Digest publication), and companion Twitter threads are now being produced so that the highlights can be consumed without leaving Twitter.

Network

This section tracks key health metrics of the Decred infrastructure.

Mining

December’s hashrate opened at ~5.5 TH/s and closed ~10.2 TH/s, bottoming at 3.8 TH/s and peaking at 11.6 TH/s throughout the month.

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

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Jan 7: miningandco.com 26%, pooltronic.tech 21%, gopool.cash 2.7%, losmuchachos.digital 1.3%, and 49% of blocks were not identified by miningpoolstats.stream.

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

Staking

Ticket price varied between 234–243 DCR.

Image: Ticket price has been very stable in December

The locked amount was 9.74–9.82 million DCR, meaning that 62.0–62.6% of the circulating supply participated in proof of stake.

Image: DCR locked in tickets is staying near its ATH

VSP Staking

The 14 listed VSPs collectively managed ~5,750 (-100) live tickets, which was 14.0% of the ticket pool (-0.3%) as of Jan 1.

The biggest gainers of December were vote.dcr-swiss.ch (+290 tickets or +105%) and vsp.stakeminer.com (+67 tickets or +11%).

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs
Image: Solo voters continue to dominate, only 14% of tickets use VSPs
Image: VSPs are better at not missing tickets than solo voters

Nodes

Decred Mapper observed between 141 and 151 dcrd nodes throughout the month. Versions of 145 nodes seen on Jan 1: v1.8.0–65%, v1.8.1–27%, v1.9.0 dev builds — 3%, v1.7.x — 2%, other — 3.4%.

Image: Nodes are slowly 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 62.2–62.3%. Daily mix volume varied between 346–541K DCR.

Image: 62% of circulating supply opts in to protect privacy and fungibility

Lightning Network

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer saw 220 nodes (+0), 415 channels (-5) with a total capacity of 202 DCR (-4), as of Jan 8. Mind that these stats are different for each LN node.

Image: The Decred Lightning Network capacity remains around 200 DCR

Ecosystem

Mining Pools

  • losmuchachos.digital has been launched, it is a Germany based DCR mining pool supporting the PPLNS payment model with a pool fee of 3%.
  • dcr.gopool.cash has been spotted. MiningPoolStats reports that the Brazil based pool uses the PPLNS model with a fee of 1%. DCR is one of the 15 coins supported by the pool.
  • There are (at least) 5 public mining pools now, all running dcrpool software.

Exchanges

  • All trading activity on Bittrex Global has been terminated according to the shutdown plan published on November 20th. If our interpretation of chain activity is correct, the amount held at Bittrex when the trading stopped (December 4th) was ~17.5K DCR, and it looks like withdrawals have been working smoothly.
  • MEXC has been added to decred.org Exchanges list after DCR withdrawals were confirmed to work. The exchange works over VPNs and allows some trading without KYC. MEXC added spot DCR/USDT market back in June 2019 and 5x leveraged DCR/USDT pair in December 2020, but there was little community feedback to confirm it is working.
  • MEXC attracted some controversy after several users reported seizure of funds, account freezing, and withdrawals getting blocked. MEXC denied all claims in their response. Two common patterns in the reports were very profitable leveraged trading and large withdrawals, both getting flagged as “abnormal” activity by MEXC. We cannot verify if the reports are true, but it’s a good reminder to always do your own research and be very careful when dealing with custodial services.
  • DCR withdrawals on Poloniex and HTX continued to be suspended for a total of about 1.5 months and have not been fixed in December, based on the information published on their support sites and one user report in the #trading channel. All withdrawals, including DCR, were suspended in November in response to the two hacks on these exchanges.
  • Indian financial authorities announced the decision to block URLs of 9 offshore exchanges for not complying with local AML regulations. If the block will be implemented, accessing DCR markets on Binance, KuCoin, and other exchanges from India will become more difficult.

Wallets

  • Users of hardware wallet Ledger fell victim to a supply chain attack on December 14th. A compromised npmjs.com account of a former Ledger employee was used by an attacker to upload a malicious version of the Ledger Connect Kit library used by many DApps, which tricked EVM DApp users into signing transactions that drain their wallets. The vulnerability was patched quickly, but it took around ~5 hours for the fix to propagate. The exploit was limited to third party DApps which use the library, it did not affect the integrity of Ledger hardware or Ledger Live. Ledger tweeted that around $600K worth of assets has been affected and promised to make victims whole if they claim refunds (this process requires ID verification). To the best of our knowledge, no DCR wallets were affected by the exploit.
  • Guarda has been removed from the list of known-to-work wallets at decred.org after several users complained that DCR was not working for 3 months. Timing suggests Guarda’s DCR wallet stopped working around September 2023 because they failed to upgrade to Decred v1.8.0 (released June 13th, 2023) and missed the hardfork (completed September 1st, 2023). A person from Guarda confirmed that DCR is still considered a supported asset, but they’re working on “some issues post-Decred’s network upgrade”. Until that is fixed, Guarda users can export the private key and import it in another wallet like dcrwallet or Exodus.

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

Decred Vanguard

Vanguard ran two different DCR giveaways in an attempt to spread outreach: A Meme Contest and a New Year’s giveaway.

Other notable activities:

  • Reached out via Twitter/e-mail to Alchemy Pay for Decred integration, it is a service that performs crypto purchases with fiat payment cards.
  • Applied and reached out to Biconomy, a Canada based exchange with a US license.
  • Applied to Crypto.com for a listing.

The 2023 proposal concluded on December 31st. A new proposal for 2024 was developed that includes contributor tiers, funds for ads on X, increased discretionary funds for things like giveaways and other experimentation, while keeping things from the first proposal like DAO funded tools.

Cypherpunk Times

The content creation process at Cypherpunk Times is undergoing changes to become more open to the community. The public #writers chat is now being actively used to plan and review upcoming articles, or discuss the overall direction and operation of the site. The process of selecting and creating content is being standardized and documented to guide existing and future authors.

Engagement stats for December:

  • Total number of articles on CT: 606
  • Newsletter subscribers: 114
  • New CT posts and newsletters sent: 18
  • Social media followers across all platforms and accounts: 1,206
  • @decredsociety Twitter: followers — 1,007, posts — 48, tweet impressions — 47.9K, likes — 992, retweets — 136
  • @cypherpunktimes Twitter: followers — 199, posts — 47, tweet impressions — 13.5K, likes — 230, retweets — 53
  • Posts by project for December: Zcash — 1, Decred — 9, Other crypto news — 4

Media

Articles

Decred:

General crypto articles on Cypherpunk Times:

Videos

Live streams:

Audio

Non-English content

Random

Custodial wallets will require KYC/AML in the U.S. Full node wallets are not feasible for normal users for $BTC or $ETH. Others are questionable too. Decred DEX has struck a balance, using SPV technology to reduce 100s of GBs to < 4GB for BTC, with good privacy and sync times.
For $ETH, there’s a no-privacy culture based on infrastructure providers (infura etc.). We’ve improved upon this slightly by enabling multiple infrastructure providers simultaneously. Full information about wallet activity would require collaboration between providers.
Our $DCR, $LTC, and $BCH wallets are also SPV, so good privacy and sync times there too. #Polygon has a multi-provider wallet like $ETH. All other wallets are full node, which is fine, since they are not Bitcoin, though $ZEC full node is still challenging.
Financial self-sovereignty MUST be an option for everybody. Decred DEX is battling to keep it possible. We’ve still got work to do, but is any other project sticking to blockchain principles like Decred DEX?
Did I mention that our wallet has new privacy options? We’ve added #Decred mixing, fully integrated with trading so that swap redemptions are re-mixed, adding to the (already huge) anonymity set. #Zcash is going shielded-by-default too, unified addresses and all. [@blockchainbuck on Twitter]

Art and Fun

Markets

In December DCR was trading between USDT 14.12–26.50 and BTC 0.0032–0.00063 on Binance. Using the weighed daily close data from Coin Metrics the price ranges were USD 14.40–22.66 and BTC 0.00033–0.00052. The average daily rate as calculated for contractor payments was $15.89.

Image: Recent DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics
Image: Recent DCR/USD, data from Coin Metrics
Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD
Image: Market valuations (USD) based on @bochinchero’s Staked Realized Value model
Image: 3rd attempt to leave the perfect accumulation zone, by @saender

Relevant External

Ledger’s Connect Kit library, used heavily by DeFi applications like SushiSwap, Balancer and Zapper to allow users to interact with their wallets, was hacked when a staff member’s credentials were compromised and malicious code was introduced to the GitHub repository. This allowed the hacker to steal $484K from users who accessed their wallets during the critical 2-hour period before the red flag was raised and many of the DeFi protocols using the library paused operations amid a general panic about the safety of any Ethereum transaction made on the day of the attack.

As of Jan 1 2024 new regulations come into effect which treat digital assets as cash in the sense that receiving more than $10,000 “in one transaction (or a series of related transactions)” will mandate reporting the transaction event and the identity of the sender to the IRS on a Form 8300. This was a provision of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“Infrastructure Act”) that was passed in 2021, and it is widely seen as presenting a problematic increase in the level of admin work involved in receiving cryptocurrency as a business.

Tether has started freezing the assets held by wallet addresses sanctioned by OFAC, and has also blacklisted the contract address for Tornado Cash. Tether has also been happily “onboarding” the US Secret Service and FBI to their platform, while bragging about the 435 million USDT it has so far frozen at law enforcement’s behest.

Binance has been running half-day courses in France that introduce people to blockchain concepts and software like Metamask, and get them to sign up to Binance to receive their “NFT diploma”, and in some of the poorer regions which they have targeted attendees are being forced to sign up for this “education” as part of a state-sponsored retraining effort. This is one of the outcomes of French PM Macron’s relatively welcoming attitude towards the company which saw Binance pledge to invest 100 million euros in the country’s burgeoning crypto scene in 2021, as detailed in this article.

That’s all for December. Thank you for reading!

About

This is issue 66 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, kozel, phoenixgreen, richardred, zippycorners
  • title image: Exitus
  • funding: Decred stakeholders

Decred Journal — December 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Politeia Digest 66 — December 13 2023 — February 15 2024]]> https://medium.com/decred/politeia-digest-66-december-13-2023-february-15-2024-65e3d91f4097?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/65e3d91f4097 Fri, 16 Feb 2024 20:41:38 GMT 2024-02-16T20:41:38.356Z Politeia Digest 66 — December 13 2023 — February 15 2024
Image credit: @sænder

Treasury balance: 867,985 DCR (approx +6,864 DCR/month) — $15.2 million (+$120K/month) based on $17.48 DCR price

New Proposals

Cryptopower Phase 2: Golang Native Desktop & Mobile Wallet — Long Term Support

Published Jan 29 by dreacot | last edited Feb 6 | 25 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $70,000 (but estimates it will use $34,500) for one year of maintenance and bug fixing for the Cryptopower multi-coin (DCR, BTC, LTC) wallet which was funded in a previous proposal. Of the previous proposal’s budget of $61,600, 98% was spent, and progress was made with adding DCRDEX support (still beta), multi-recipient transactions, export options, UI improvements and a new instant exchange (Trocador), while the mobile apps (incorporating most desktop features but with some disabled due to usability constraints) were added to the Google and Apple stores.

The proposal will fund a year of improvements to the software and promises more frequent releases with patches every month addressing existing and new user feedback. The Gio framework will be updated to the latest version, DCRDEX will be made ready for mainnet use in the app, and the remaining time will be spent fixing bugs and making general improvements. For major additions to the app, specific proposals will be submitted requesting additional funding.

The proposal originally incorporated work on a number of new features, like virtual prepaid cards (budget $17,600), Trezor support (budget $8,800) and Ledger support (budget $8,800) — but was edited to remove these features and reduce the budget from $81,000, focusing on support of the software only, following community feedback.

Cryptopower is based in the Go language and uses Gio to produce a graphical interface natively in Go for desktop and mobile/touch displays. During the last proposal some upstream issues were encountered with Gio and the Cryptopower team began sponsoring the Gio team with $500/month to facilitate resolving these issues, an arrangement which was expected to last for 4 months. This sponsorship will continue but only in months when the Cryptopower team needs some prioritisation of issue resolution.

The Apple Store raised concerns about the DEX and CEX exchange options of the app and whether these required KYC duties to be performed, as a result the exchange options were removed from the iOS version of the app to speed up approval, and a resolution will be sought which allows the exchange features to be added back in.

Decred Content and Asset Translations 2024

Published Feb 4 by kozel | 19 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $37,000 to fund a year of translation work, the last year’s proposal had a budget of $33,000 and spent $18,955. The translation index maintained by @bee lists articles which have been translated and most of those listed for 2023 will have been funded by the previous proposal, along with work that doesn’t show up on a list like this, such as software product text translations, although the proposal states that this kind of work was relatively scant in 2023.

The most significant change for the new phase of this proposal is a change in policy towards translations which are contributed for languages that aren’t well read by any established team or community members. There has been an issue with contributed translations sitting unreviewed for extended periods, preventing the translator from becoming a contractor billing for their work — so the decision was taken to relax the review requirements and settle for AI-assisted checking when it is not possible to obtain a review from a knowledgeable community member.

Comments on the proposal question the value of translating content like Decred Journal and Cypherpunk Times articles to languages like Polish, because potential readers of such technical material are likely to also be comfortable with English, and may prefer it for technical subjects. The other side of this is questioning the lack of translations for content like docs.decred.org, certain pages of the decred.org website and parts of the Decrediton user interface.

Decred Status platform

Published Jan 29 by peter_zen | last edited Feb 5 | 11 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $3,320 to build out a status page for Decred that will show whether certain Decred related services are online or offline, and be able to flag issues like DCRDEX going out of sync with the network. A proof of concept page has been created at https://is.decred.online/ using Uptime Kuma, a platform made for this purpose running on a VPS operated independently from Decred infrastructure. The status page monitors services like the Decred website, Matrix server, block explorer, proposals site, mixer servers, network seeders, and more — allowing users to determine whether issues they perceive are a result of a problem with the service or on the user’s end.

The proposal would fund custom CSS to make the page follow Decred branding, configuration of probes that will allow for more detailed and useful reporting than the PoC site, and setting up notifications when outages are detected or certificates are about to expire. The deliverable is a GitHub repository with a Docker container that anyone can use to create their own instance of the status page, and the proposal also budgets $2,360 for running and maintaining an instance for a year. The work would be completed by @peter_zen and @jholdstock.

Comments on the proposal are all very positive.

Decred Website Refresh 2024

Published Feb 4 by exitus | 7 comments

This proposal seeks approval from Decred Stakeholders to deploy a refresh of the decred.org website, and $3,250 compensation for the design and implementation work which has already been put into the refreshed website — which can be previewed at https://dcrweb.jholdstock.uk/ . The motivation for changes was to make the site more outreach friendly, more suited to people who may have seen an ad for Decred and have little other context coming in. Changes include new intro text and features section with graphics, key stats pulled from dcrdata, a new background image and quotes from Placeholder and Ark.

Comments on the proposal are positive about the refreshed website.

Decred Vanguard 2024

Published Feb 4 by exitus | 10 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $78,640 for a second year of Decred Vanguard funding, reporting expenditure of $20,953 in phase 1 which was 45% of the requested budget of $46,784. Decred Vanguard is a way of rewarding and empowering community members who promote the project on social media. In the second year it will have 3 tiers of contributor with maximum monthly billing of $100 (7 slots), $400 (5 slots) or $1,500 (1 slot), for a total annual budget of $46,200 to pay contributors. The tier 3 member will be @exitus, who will also be responsible for running the new X Promoted Posts advertising campaign, a new addition to the Vanguard’s effort that has a budget of $11,000. The program will also continue to pay for X premium for members (budget $1,320) to improve their effectiveness, as well as $120 for a Midjourney AI subscription. The proposal incorporates $20,000 discretionary funds, which will be used to fund giveaways (focusing more on Decred software this time, moving away from meme creation) and new unplanned initiatives. All of the budget figures are maximums, and it is anticipated that only around half of the budget will be used.

All of the comments are positive, some asking for more detail about what was learned during phase 1 and others offering suggestions for new modes of outreach and ways of tracking performance.

Approved Proposals

Bug Bounty Program 2024

Published Dec 8 by jholdstock | 6 comments (+3)

Final voting figures: 98% Yes Votes, 74% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requested a budget of $105,000, split between $100,000 for bounty payments and $5,000 for administrative costs. In the last 18 months covered by the previous proposal there has been $415 paid out for bounties and operating costs of $1,750. The bug bounty program has been running for almost 5 years (since Jan 2019), and in that time 24 security vulnerabilities have been identified and fixed, and corresponding bounty payments worth $10,569 have been made to the people who found them. There is up to $30,000 available for vulnerabilities considered critical using the OWASP Risk Rating Methodology, so the requested budget is ample to keep the program going even if the rate and severity of bug reporting increases significantly.

Decred Video Content 2024

Published Dec 8 by phoenixgreen | 13 comments (+11)

Final voting figures: 85% Yes Votes, 64% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requested a budget of $71,000 for the creation and dissemination of video content for 2024, it comes from the same team who have delivered the previous video content proposals. The requested budget is increasing to $5,920/month from $3,800/month, for 2023 the proposal billed a total of $39,847 ($3,321/month). Although the number of views and viewing time continued to grow steadily in 2023, growth in new subscribers is acknowledged as disappointing, with a net of just 27 new subscribers gained. The proposal considers a number of possibilities for improving the growth in subscribers: coordinating with Vanguard group to promote the content, Twitter livestreams, additional Twitter spaces, promoted ads for featured content on Twitter and Youtube, incentivising influencers to participate in livestreams and try Decred software. The proposal is open for new contributors, current team members are @phoenixgreen, @exitus, @karamble and @tivra — @exitus was the proposal owner previously.

About this issue

Content for this edition was authored by @richardred with review from @bee.

Image credit: @sænder

Politeia Digest 66 — December 13 2023 — February 15 2024 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Decred Journal — November 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-november-2023-6cf92a09dbcb?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/6cf92a09dbcb Fri, 12 Jan 2024 02:27:03 GMT 2024-01-14T00:59:12.916Z Decred Journal — November 2023
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:

  • Proof of concept mesh network design has been proposed for DCRDEX.
  • Private testing of Android and iOS builds of Cryptopower has begun.
  • Decred’s Lightning Network received a massive update to the upstream lnd v0.13 codebase.
  • Poloniex and HTX got hacked and disabled DCR withdrawals for weeks. Bittrex announced that it is closing and urged users to withdraw.

Contents:

· Development
· People
· Governance and Finances
· Network
· Ecosystem
· Outreach
· Media
· Markets
· Relevant External

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:

  • Fixed a bug that was introduced in October with the new ability to handle concurrent messages from peers. dcrd would hang if a peer disconnected after having sent multiple messages. This bugfix allows dcrd to respond gracefully when peers disconnect.
  • Updated the Docker image to build with Go 1.21.4.
  • Peers should not be sending each other nil messages. In an effort to preemptively find and debug cases where this might happen, dcrd will now panic if a nil message is queued (“panic” means dcrd will terminate and alert the user of a problem). This change includes a handy error trace to help inform devs about which bit of code caused the panic.

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:

  • Eliminate having to calculate block hashes multiple times. This results in a faster sync time and reduced memory use. During SPV operation, the time spent calculating block hashes is reduced by ~72%.
  • When connected in SPV, disconnect from straggling peers. During initial sync, it might be useful to connect to a peer for earlier block ranges, but that peer may later get overtaken by the wallet due to the wallet discovering more up-to-date blocks from other peers. If a particular peer doesn’t send any headers after the wallet has received several newer headers, it probably means that the straggler peer has poor connectivity to the network and should be disconnected in favor of attempting to find a better peer.

Developer and internal changes:

  • If the user tries to spend a multisignature UTXO that contains one or more invalid signatures, indicate that the transaction is not ready to send, and return signing errors. This is a step towards improving the UX for advanced users and developers working with multisignatures, which are currently possible but are not widely used nor well-developed in Decred.
  • Added unit tests for the semantic versioning of the chain package.
  • Other code refactoring.

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:

  • Upgraded to Electron v26 to enable the new Ledger integration. This was made possible by hunting down a tiny breaking change in Electron v21.3.0 that broke DCRDEX window, and adding a workaround for it.
  • A newer version of Electron means Windows 7/8/8.1 will not be supported in the next Decrediton release. Cryptocurrency security enthusiasts don’t store their private keys on those insecure operating systems anyway, right?
  • Bumped a few Go and web dependencies.
  • Fixed wrong password error not being shown when attempting to purchase tickets using a wrong password.
  • Fixed the inability to remove peer host from the SPV Connect field in Settings.

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:

  • Added logic to retry broadcasting the ticket’s parent transaction if it failed due to referencing unknown outputs. There is a good chance that missing ancestor transactions will propagate through the network and show up in the local mempool after a few seconds.
  • Reverted to the previous VSP fee calculation algorithm that does not consider the activation of DCP-12. This resolves an issue where Decrediton sometimes fails to pay VSP fees because it calculated the fee differently from the server.

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a Decred mining pool.

User-facing changes:

  • Fixed several bugs in payment fee calculation that caused paying extremely large fees in some cases. The associated tests have been reworked and extended to test more cases.

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.

  • dcrlnd codebase has been synced with changes made in upstream lnd between v0.12.1 and v0.13.4 (released Nov 2021). Around 140 out of 170 upstream pull requests have been ported, bringing 451 new commits, including about a dozen of Decred-specific commits to adapt upstream changes and simplify future porting efforts. Full list of ported and skipped pull requests can be found here. All notable changes are documented in lnd release notes: v0.13.0, v0.13.1, v0.13.3, and v0.13.4. dcrlnd has been tested with these changes applied in production on a few mainnet hubs.
  • Updated several Go libraries.

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:

  • Disable the Place order button on various conditions, such as insufficient balance.
  • Moved the Sign Out button to the end of the hamburger menu.
  • Tuned colors: added some variation in element background colors in both light and dark modes, added slight background transparency behind active modals, and tuned down background color in light mode to use a softer white color.
  • Removed the font weight change effect on mouse hover because it didn’t look consistent on various browsers and font settings.
  • Changed the login flow to not force users to register on the server. After the local login, the user will be redirected to the Wallets page instead.
  • Fixed the staking panel not updating after wallet creation.
  • Fixed the prompt to create missing wallets on the Markets view.

Desktop app:

  • Fixed the opening of external links; they will trigger the operating system’s default URL handler (which may launch a default browser or show a dialog).
  • Fixed dark mode preference not saving on Linux. The fix is to save it in WebView’s local storage instead of a cookie, because cookies are not persistent between app launches in the Linux version of the WebView component.

Account trading tier, bonds, and reputation:

  • Exposed more bond and reputation data in the registration and settings views. When the user enters a tier number, a new preview form will show the amount that will actually be locked for bonds, trading limits, and their USD equivalents. The trading form on the Markets view will show how many lots can be used for the current trading tier. Multiple help strings have been added to explain bonds, trading tiers, and penalties for bad behavior.

Market maker bots:

  • Updated the Market Maker Settings UI to have a more responsive layout and explain bot strategies (there are 5 strategies currently).
  • Added a bot strategy combining market maker and simple arbitrage. Based on a CEX order book, it places orders on the DEX order book, and when there is a match on the DEX, the opposite order on the CEX is immediately executed for a profit.

Decred:

  • Added general infrastructure for mixing funds and implemented the low-level bits for DCR (no GUI yet).

Bitcoin:

  • Store transaction history for Bitcoin SPV wallets. Although the underlying SPV wallet implementation (Neutrino) stores transaction data already, using that storage leads to unreliable and confusing code. Storing transactions in a separate database fixes this and also unlocks more accuracy, such as differentiating regular sends and swap transactions.

Zcash:

  • Extracted Zcash code into its own wallet implementation. This is needed to untangle it from Bitcoin code, because the Zcash wallet is very different from Bitcoin’s. The change allows Zcash wallets to be shielded by default and resolves some internal issues.

Ethereum:

Internal and developer changes:

  • Updated the client’s web dependencies, which fixes one critical vulnerability in the Babel compiler.

In progress:

  • A proof of concept toy mesh network implementation called Tatanka has been submitted for discussion. This is work towards the DCRDEX mesh proposal approved in June 2023. Readers are advised to watch a short video to understand what Tatanka really is (try Invidious if the video is restricted in your location).
  • An implementation of private atomic swaps with Schnorr adaptor signatures has been submitted for review to the atomicswap repository. The atomic swap method currently used by DCRDEX leaves the same unique value on both chains, allowing anyone to link buyer’s and seller’s transactions. Adaptor signatures allow users to fix this privacy vulnerability at the cost of some additional off-chain communication required between the parties. However, there is some criticism of this approach due to its dependency on Taproot (which introduces non-trivial issues) and elliptic-curve cryptography (so this code would break should Decred upgrade to post-quantum cryptography). Note that atomicswap is a command-line tool separate from the DCRDEX project, but the code pioneered in it could be applied to DCRDEX as well.
Image: Market Maker Settings UI in DCRDEX
Image: DCRDEX will better expose the bond math and trading limits
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:

  • Added new cards to wallet Info page to show mixer status, recent transactions, and recent staking activity.
  • Implemented new layout on wallet Settings page.
  • Updated layout of wallet Staking page sections: general Staking Info, Statistics, and Tickets.

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.

Image: Overview tab in Cryptopower
Image: Updated Settings in Cryptopower
Image: Updated wallet overview in Cryptopower
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:

  • Filter unwanted content when reading saved chat history. Previously content filtering handled newly received messages only.
  • Replaced Bittrex with MEXC as a source of exchange rates.

User-facing changes in the GUI app:

GUI app adaptation to mobile devices:

  • Various mobile fixes and UX refinements, including: replace Menu button with Back button in some pages, font size tweaks, onboarding tweaks, overflow fixes, and Android build fixes.
  • Increased spacing in chats based on user feedback.

Internal changes in the GUI app:

  • Consolidated font size declarations and usages for consistency and greater control of fonts based on which OS or platform the app is running.

In progress:

  • Users reported various LN channel issues when interacting with the Oprah bot. The root cause of some of them was found in dcrlnd and is being worked on.

Other news:

  • Decred Journal archives are now published on Bison Relay. Contact @karamble for usage instructions.

Cake Wallet Integration

Completed work merged in the intermediate integration tree:

  • Added a stub for libwallet to move forward with higher-level code while the real libwallet is being written. Also, removed a lot of unnecessary code left from earlier experiments.
  • Continued investigation of the best ways to call Decred’s code written in Go from Cake’s high-level code written in Dart/Flutter.
  • Three developers configured build environments and got working builds of Cake Wallet showing dummy Decred views on iOS, Android, and macOS. Just getting a working build is a notable milestone considering how complex and confusing the build process is.

In progress work for Cake Wallet:

  • First change adding initial Decred screens has been submitted to the upstream repository’s integration branch called decred_main. Working Decred code will be tested and polished in that branch before being added to Cake Wallet’s main branch.
  • Integrating libwallet built as a C library, including any necessary glue code in Kotlin and Swift, and build code for various OSes and CPU architectures.
  • Scripts and how-to guide for building Cake Wallet on macOS. This documents the missing knowledge of the complex build process that was quite hard to discover.

Merged work for libwallet:

In progress work for libwallet:

  • A wrapper layer for building libwallet as a C library that could be called from Cake Wallet’s high-level app code.
  • A package for managing wallet sync and reporting sync progress for DCR, BTC and LTC wallets.

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):

  • Twitter followers: 53,939 (+464)
  • Reddit subscribers: 12,773 (+11)
  • Matrix #general members: 833 (+7)
  • Discord members: 1,862 (+24), verified to post: 769 (+7)
  • Telegram members: 2,319 (+22)
  • YouTube subscribers: 4,660 (+20), views: 244.7K (+2.3K)

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).

Image: Treasury inflows and outflows in DCR
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.

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.

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

Staking

Ticket price varied between 224–324 DCR.

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.

Image: DCR locked in tickets is staying near its ATH
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.

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs
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%.

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.

Image: Second big dip and recovery of daily DCR mixing
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).

Image: Some LN channels got closed
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

  • vspd v1.3.2 release came out with fixes that should resolve issues with ticket status errors and VSP fee payment failures. 9 out of 14 VSPs have deployed these fixes as of December 1st.
  • The VSP list page has been updated to show all-time Missed ticket stats. As of the December 1st snapshot, the 14 active VSPs between 6 months and 3 years old reported a total of 1,108 revoked tickets, of which 1,101 expired normally and only 7 missed their votes. The low missed count shows that vspd deployments are much more reliable compared to the old dcrstakepool which had higher miss rates. Note: bass.cf has been excluded from these numbers because it has not yet upgraded to report missed tickets.

Mining Pools

Staking Services

  • BisonPool reported that with the activation of DCP-10 earnings rose from ~2.8%/year to ~7.8%/year, and now with DCP-12 up to ~8.6%/year. Current returns are shown on their home page, note that it is not fixed and depends on ticket prices. BisonPool was launched in July 2022 by two IT security enthusiasts who were anonymously participating in Decred since 2018. The service allows staking and earning rewards with less than a full ticket. Bear in mind that it is a custodial service that takes full control of users’ funds.

Exchanges

  • Poloniex was hacked on November 10th for an estimated loss of $118 million in Ethereum assets, Tron assets, and BTC. As DCR was not mentioned by Poloniex, Justin Sun, or the Lookonchain tweet about the stolen assets, it is unknown if any DCR was stolen during the hack. In any case, DCR users were affected by the suspension of all withdrawals. On-chain researchers of the #trading club noticed a transaction sending around ~60K DCR from a Poloniex address to Binance around 12 hours after the hack became public and ~7 hours after Poloniex was said to be “restored”. The speculation has been that it could be either Poloniex saving the remaining funds or the hacker liquidating them on Binance.
  • Poloniex was slow at recovering from the hack. Trading was resumed on the next day, but no withdrawals have been enabled by Nov 30 and their support Twitter has been silent. At the same time there was no shortage of promotion, hype, or even coin listing tweets. As a consequence of withdrawals and cross-exchange arbitrage not functioning, DCR price went down significantly compared to the other markets.
  • HTX exchange (formerly Huobi) and its HECO Chain Bridge lost around $117 million worth of assets to a hot wallet compromise according to the official support article and PeckShield. Justin Sun and HTX promised to fully compensate users for the losses. DCR was not mentioned as a stolen asset and was likely never integrated in the HECO Chain Bridge. However, DCR users were hit by the suspension of all withdrawals.
  • HTX has been recovering faster compared to Poloniex. By Nov 30 withdrawals for BTC, ETH, TRX and about a hundred other assets have been restored (including USDT and USDC), but based on official updates and DCR/USDT slippage on HTX, DCR was not so lucky.
  • Bittrex Global announced that they are winding down operations. All trading activity will end by December 4th, and from there customers will only be able to withdraw. Any remaining USD will be auto-converted to USDT. It’s been a bad year for Bittrex: $29 million in fines in October 2022, having to wind down U.S. operations in March 2023 due to unwelcoming regulatory and economic environment, charges by U.S. SEC in April for securities violations, and a bankruptcy filing in May.
  • DCR withdrawals from Bittrex have been suspended for 9 days (judging by this address), as a result the price of DCR went down and some smart traders picked it up for as low as $5. Withdrawals resumed on November 29th however, and one user reported it worked for DCR with no issues.
  • KuCoin announced that DCR/USDT trading pair will launch on November 24th while DCR/ETH pair will be closed. The same change was made for 8 other coins.
  • Bitvavo.com may be staking customers’ DCR according to on-chain findings of #trading researchers. Bitvavo’s support has confirmed that the exchange can collect rewards generated from holding the assets on behalf of its users, according to their User Agreement. DCR is currently missing from the “reward-eligible” assets, so there is no way for the users to opt-in to receive DCR staking rewards. Staking DCR without sharing the rewards with customers received mixed feedback from the community, ranging from it being highly unethical, to it being more secure (against theft or misuse by the exchange itself), or even being a “selling point” to get DCR listed on more exchanges.
  • Changelly has been removed from decred.org Exchanges page because DCR doesn’t work since September.
  • MEXC.com and XT.com have been tested: DCR trading works over VPN and without KYC. DCR withdrawals are working at MEXC, help is needed to test withdrawals at XT.
  • Trocador launched new prepaid virtual cards that can be purchased with crypto and used as normal credit cards. A test run for DCR has uncovered some issues: a backend error (devs fixed it), automatic email with card details didn’t work (support request resolved it), it worked with Google Pay but not with contactless NFC payments, and there was roughly an 8% markup to use the service. Despite those issues, it works and allows sending DCR and getting a prepaid VISA card that can be used to buy real world things.

Other News

  • Decred Vanguard became active in testing and pursuing new integrations for Decred, check their report below.
  • Anyone can help to improve Decred’s presence in the crypto ecosystem. Even little things like emailing or tweeting to an exchange/wallet/service/influencer can make a difference.

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:

  • Ran a Meme Contest with $100 in DCR as rewards.
  • Attempted contacts with cryptocurrency exchanges Kraken, CEX.IO, and M2 for listing guidance.
  • Filed a listing application for TradeOgre.com.
  • Tested out altcoin exchanges MEXC.com and XT.com to ensure deposits and withdrawals work.
  • Tested out Trocador prepaid cards bought with $DCR.
  • Spoke to Trocador about possible partnerships. This led to Cryptopower integrating Trocador’s swap service into their wallet, qualifying them as a partner and thus listed on Trocador’s main website.
  • Spoke to BTCPay Server devs and confirmed that they are open to merging an altcoin integration if it’s done correctly.
  • Reached out to thought leader Justin Bons to have a conversation.
  • Spoke on Cake Wallet Twitter space about working in the Decred DAO.
  • Ran a poll on what marketing effort the community would like most. Influencer collaboration was most popular at 46%. 106 votes were cast.
  • Completed a $100 Decred giveaway with easy effort entry. Giveaways with low barriers always get more likes, views, and retweets.

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

Engagement stats for November:

  • Total number of articles on CT: 588
  • Newsletter subscribers: 112
  • New CT posts and newsletters sent: 23
  • Social media followers across all platforms and accounts: 1,181
  • @decredsociety Twitter: followers — 985, posts — 16, tweet impressions — 17.1K, likes — 350, retweets — 51, comments — 51
  • @cypherpunktimes Twitter: followers — 196, posts — 154, tweet impressions — 19.3K, likes — 439, retweets — 107, comments — 88
  • Posts by project for November: Firo — 5, Decred — 7, Other crypto projects / news — 11

Events

Attended:

Media

Articles

Decred:

General crypto:

Videos

Live streams:

Shorts:

Audio

  • @Exitus gave an overview of the Decred DAO/Treasury and how contractors contribute early on in the space in Cake Wallet’s Twitter Space dedicated to working in crypto.
  • Check the Cypherpunk Times podcast on Spotify for the audio versions of Decred videos.

Non-English content

  • A video about Timestamply by @arij
  • Decred Journal September got a total of 3 new translations to Arabic (@arij), Chinese (@Dominic) and Polish (@kozel). Thank you friends!

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

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

Image: Recent DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics
Image: All-time DCR/BTC, data from Coin Metrics
Image: Recent DCR/USD, data from Coin Metrics
Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD
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):

  • writing, editing, publishing: bee, bochinchero, Exitus, jz, karamble, kozel, phoenixgreen, richardred, zippycorners
  • title image: Exitus
  • funding: Decred stakeholders

Decred Journal — November 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Politeia Digest 65 — September 27 — December 12 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/politeia-digest-65-september-27-december-12-2023-984c12c31091?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/984c12c31091 Thu, 14 Dec 2023 23:36:44 GMT 2023-12-14T23:36:44.328Z Politeia Digest 65 — September 27 — December 12 2023

Treasury balance: 874,704 DCR (approx +7,072 DCR/month) — $13.1 million (+$106K/month) based on $14.98 DCR price

New Proposals

Bug Bounty Program 2024

Published Dec 8 by jholdstock | 3 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $105,000, split between $100,000 for bounty payments and $5,000 for administrative costs. In the last 18 months covered by the previous proposal there has been $415 paid out for bounties and operating costs of $1,750. The bug bounty program has been running for almost 5 years (since Jan 2019), and in that time 24 security vulnerabilities have been identified and fixed, and corresponding bounty payments worth $10,569 have been made to the people who found them.

There is up to $30,000 available for vulnerabilities considered critical using the OWASP Risk Rating Methodology, so the requested budget is ample to keep the program going even if the rate and severity of bug reporting increases significantly.

Decred Video Content 2024

Published Dec 8 by phoenixgreen | 2 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $71,000 for the creation and dissemination of video content for 2024, it comes from the same team who have delivered the previous video content proposals. The requested budget is increasing to $5,920/month from $3,800/month, for 2023 the proposal billed a total of $39,847 ($3,321/month). Although the number of views and viewing time continued to grow steadily in 2023, growth in new subscribers is acknowledged as disappointing, with a net of just 27 new subscribers gained.

The proposal considers a number of possibilities for improving the growth in subscribers: coordinating with Vanguard group to promote the content, Twitter livestreams, additional Twitter spaces, promoted ads for featured content on Twitter and Youtube, incentivising influencers to participate in livestreams and try Decred software. The proposal is open for new contributors, current team members are @phoenixgreen, @exitus, @karamble and @tivra — @exitus was the proposal owner previously.

Approved Proposals

Cake Wallet Integration Again

Published Sep 12 by joegruff | last edited Sep 13 | 6 comments

Final voting figures: 88% Yes votes, 59% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requested a budget of $80,000 to add Decred support to Cake Wallet, the work would be completed by approved Decred developers and there would be no charge from Cake Wallet to integrate the support in their releases. There is a relevant video where @tivra and @phoenixgreen discuss the prospects for the relationship with a Cake Wallet representative. Cake Wallet is a popular multi asset wallet with a built in exchange function, it was mobile only until Feb 2023 and since then has desktop versions for Linux and MacOS. The Decred integration would be using SPV mode to process blocks directly on the device so no privacy-compromising third party is required, and the team have expressed a willingness to support other advanced features in future. The original version of the proposal failed to reach a quorum because of problems with the voting system caused by the activation of consensus rule changes. See previous issue for more details

Rejected Proposals

Decred PR Proposal Phase Five

Published Sep 15 by lindseymmc | last edited Sep 28 | 51 comments (+24)

Final voting figures: 53% Yes votes, 55% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requested $48,000 for another year of Public Relations provision at $4,000/month. @l1ndseymm has been providing these services to Decred for four years, and her last proposal was approved with 66% support at a budget of $48,000. The proposal originally requested $60,000 because @l1ndseymm’s team has been expanded to 5 to include “two crypto media relations experts and two support-level PRs” — the edit reduced the budget to the same as previous year and also introduced the new team members, likely in response to comments on the proposal. The transition from solo outfit to structured team is expected to bring increased efficiency and result in better number and quality of media placements.

Odaily Content Proposal

Published Aug 10 by conniej | last edited Oct 16 | 12 comments

Final voting figures: 30% Yes votes, 28% turnout of eligible tickets.

The proposal’s dates were edited before authorizing the vote, as the proposal had been sitting inactive for some time the original time window was already well underway.

Recap: This proposal requests $15,000 for the writing and publication of two articles about Decred over the span of a six month period during which the editors will be contactable. Odaily is a Chinese language crypto news site that claims 1.5 million unique monthly users. The content of the articles would be approved by a Decred representative, @Dominic, and metrics like number of pageviews would be shared after 2 weeks.

About this issue

Content for this edition was authored by @richardred with review from @bee.

Image credit: @sænder

Politeia Digest 65 — September 27 — December 12 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Decred Journal — October 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-october-2023-54391cb69afa?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/54391cb69afa Sat, 02 Dec 2023 21:40:37 GMT 2023-12-02T22:22:17.336Z 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

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:

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:

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:

Mobile adaptation:

DEX integration:

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

Other:

Fixes:

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:

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:

Videos

Q&A Sessions by @phoenixgreen:

Live streams:

Shorts:

Audio

Translations

Non-English content

Discussions

Art and fun

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

Decred Journal — October 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Decred Journal — September 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-september-2023-21685a3a71f2?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/21685a3a71f2 Thu, 09 Nov 2023 21:49:39 GMT 2023-11-09T21:49:39.220Z Decred Journal — September 2023
Image: Circuit by @Exitus

Highlights of September:

  • Decred network has switched to BLAKE3 proof of work and 89% proof of stake reward, but it took 3 days to start mining new blocks.
  • Decred GPU mining support has been added to gominer and BzMiner, leading to an explosion in hashrate.
  • Bison Relay v0.1.9 came out with numerous fixes and initial mobile design.
  • DCRDEX v0.6.3 has been released with fixes for BTC wallet and bond maintenance. Development of the Polygon integration, trading bots, and other features is marching forward.

Contents:

Network Upgrade and Service Outage

On August 29, consensus changes Change PoW to BLAKE3 and ASERT and Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split To 1/89 activated on Decred mainnet at block 794,368. The initial difficulty value was reset to target 1.45 TH/s with the expectation that GPU hashrate would start mining on the fork day. This assumption had basis in history, as at the launch of Decred in February 2016, GPU mining started without any announcement. Also, the upcoming switch to BLAKE3 was publicly known for around 5 months since April 2023. GPU mining did not start as expected, however, and the network was left with a difficulty that was extremely high for CPUs. As a result, the chain stopped producing blocks for a couple of days.

Any services depending on the chain getting new blocks got suspended, for example:

  • Deposits and withdrawals at centralized exchanges were temporarily disabled
  • DCR swaps at DCRDEX could not start or complete
  • Timestamping services were suspended
  • Politeia could not start or stop proposal voting
  • Politeia voting software was not operating normally (casting votes required hacks and tricks)
  • LN channels could not be opened or closed
  • Bison Relay functionality was restricted (could not deposit or withdraw to/from wallets, could not open/close LN channels)

After 24 hours of no blocks, miners faced an issue where dcrd would refuse to mine on top of old blocks. The workaround for the issue was to set back the system clock and regenerate certificates if necessary.

Block 794,369 was eventually mined on September 1st and the chain got moving again. Some dcrd nodes had to be restarted due to hitting a path where they weren’t trying to fetch new blocks. After that last issue was resolved, the new ASERT algorithm adjusted the difficulty and restored normal block production speed within hours.

This 2.9 day outage has set a new record, beating the previous outage in April 2017 when it took 9.6 hours to mine block 127,072.

Decred GPU Mining Software

GPU mining kicked in one week after the hardfork and quickly displaced CPU mining. Two software options for GPU mining Decred were publicly released in September:

  • gominer supports Decred mining on OpenCL and CUDA devices, including AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Binaries are currently not available, but the build and setup process is well-documented.
  • BzMiner supports mining Decred on AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPUs since version 17.0.0. The source code is not public, but BzMiner has a long list of features and can achieve higher hashrates compared to gominer. The binaries are available on GitHub and bzminer.com.

For any help, join the #pow-mining chat on Matrix or Discord.

Image: BzMiner GUI running on HiveOS

Bison Relay v0.1.9 Release

This release improves posts UX, key exchange maintenance, and fixes bugs reported in v0.1.8.

Notable changes in both GUI and text apps:

  • Automatic handshakes with users idle for 21 days to keep the contacts alive
  • Automatic unsubscribing and kicking from group chats of users idle for 60 days
  • Exclude list to prevent automatic unsubscriptions for certain users, such as well-known bots

GUI app highlights:

  • Improved listing of user’s posts
  • A button to reset all old key exchanges
  • First round of mobile UI design implementation (can be tested by reducing the window width below 500 px)
  • Fixed: getting stuck on the setting up flow, opening of URL links, and incorrect visibility of unread indicators

There is a short video demonstrating what’s new in the GUI app.

Text app highlights:

  • Fixed various issues with Simplestore
  • Fixed browsing of local pages
  • Fixed UI bugs with chat

Full release notes and downloads can be found on the release page. It is recommended to verify the files as described in the README.

Image: Improved notifications in Bison Relay v0.1.9

DCRDEX v0.6.3 Release

This release contains several important fixes and improvements. All users are advised to update. Highlights for the standalone app:

  • Trade limits scale with bond level
  • Fixed a common error that arose when rescanning the built-in BTC wallet
  • Fixed a scenario where bonds could fully expire before being replaced

Read the full release notes here.

Note: As of writing, dexc binaries are also available as part of the core v1.8.1 release. These binaries offer a number of advantages: they are signed with Decred Release key, support more operating system and CPU architectures, and are built with a newer and more optimized Go toolchain.

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.

Changes backported to the v1.8.1 release:

  • Added the new proof of work hash to the verbose outputs of getblock and getblockheader.
  • Changed the getnetworkhashps to treat -1 as a default value (120 blocks back). Previous meaning of -1 “the number of blocks since last difficulty change” no longer makes sense given that the difficulty is now calculated every block as opposed to every 144 blocks with the old difficulty algorithm.

Changes merged in master towards future releases:

  • Updated Docker image to Go 1.21.1.
  • Improved internal error handling in rpcserver to make the code cleaner and harder to misuse.
  • Changed sampleconfig package to use Go’s embed functionality. It allows to have sample configs as separate files that are easier to work with, while retaining convenient access to their contents from code.
  • Added functions to access the R and S values of signatures in the secp256k1/ecdsa package, these values can be useful in some computations.
  • Added a couple of new tests to push test coverage to 99.6%.

dcrwallet

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

Changes backported to the v1.8.1 release:

Changes merged in master towards future releases:

  • Updated VSP fee calculation for the new block reward split in DCP-12 (proof of stake reward increased from 80% to 89%). This piece of code is only used by vspd servers so this didn’t need to be backported.

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).

All changes below have been included in the v1.8.1 release (published in October).

Progress towards Ledger integration:

  • Added backend functions for interacting with Ledger. This is using WebUSB API which allows Electron-based apps to access USB devices.
  • Added Ledger UI for testnet.
  • Enabled Ledger on mainnet. This has been tested on Linux, Windows and macOS on Nano X and Nano S Plus devices.
  • Rolled back Electron to v21.2.3 because the newer version caused issues with the DEX window. This will need to be investigated and fixed in a future release, because Electron v23 is needed for WebUSB support, which powers Ledger integration in Decrediton.

Other:

  • Updated the DCRDEX module to v0.6.3 and enabled its new “extension mode” to protect Decrediton’s wallet from being misconfigured in the DEX window.
  • Updated the Chinese translation.
  • ~8 changes updating web dependencies and fixing small bugs.

vspd

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

September’s vspd work has made incremental quality of life improvements for users, admins and developers.

All changes listed below have been included in v1.3.0 and v1.3.1 releases, which came out in September.

User-facing changes:

  • Added separate expired and missed ticket counts on the VSP home page and in the /vspinfo response. The “revoked tickets” reported previously was a sum of expired and missed tickets; having missed tickets listed separately is a better metric for evaluating VSP’s reliability, because expired tickets are not the VSP’s fault.
  • Updated VSP fee calculations to consider the new block reward split specified in DCP-12.
  • A new yellow top banner will appear if the VSP is running on testnet or simnet. Debug banner has been changed to the color red, because debug mode should not be used in production.

Changes for VSP admins:

Internal and developer changes:

  • Restored the ability to run vspd on simnet, which is needed by DCRDEX to test new staking features.
  • Small performance optimizations by making better use of dcrd.
  • Unexported some code and moved it to internal packages since it is not suitable for consumption by third parties. Small public API surface makes development and maintenance easier.
  • Reworked how components are created, started, and stopped to decouple and simplify code.
  • Fixed database backup running only once instead of running periodically (unreleased bug).
  • ~20 commits with smaller improvements and code cleanup.
Image: Missed tickets in vspd admin panel

gominer

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

The main goal of September’s gominer development was to quickly react to the first GPU miners who did not share their code publicly and thus began to dominate the hashrate. The updates to gominer allow anyone to mine with their GPUs. Besides adding BLAKE3 GPU mining support, an effort has been made to automate or document the setup process to address multiple pain points reported by the miners.

BLAKE3 GPU mining:

  • Added support for BLAKE3 GPU mining via OpenCL. It includes a custom optimized BLAKE3 OpenCL kernel based on midstates for supporting GPUs that work with OpenCL and OpenCL with ADL. “Kernel” is a program written in a specialized OpenCL kernel language that runs on the GPU. This change also improves discovery of CL devices, randomizes nonces to ensure each device is doing different work, and improves hashrate values display.
  • Added support for BLAKE3 GPU mining with CUDA on Linux. CUDA is a platform for high-performance computing on GPUs. The OpenCL kernel has been adjusted to compile with the CUDA toolkit. Unlike OpenCL, CUDA is proprietary, closed-source, and only works on Nvidia cards. However, CUDA allows control of overclocks and fan speeds to potentially significantly increase efficiency (gigahashes per watt). Given the cost of electricity is a huge factor in profitability, such tradeoffs often make sense.
  • Added a script and instructions for building the CUDA-enabled version of gominer on Windows. Building a Go program with CUDA support is more complicated on Windows than on Linux, but the new builder goes to great lengths to automate the process as much as possible. If a missing dependency or environment configuration is detected, the builder will print human-readable directions on how to resolve the issue. Manual instructions have been added as a fallback in case the automatic builder does not work. This change also removes a dependency on GNU Make.
  • Added support for CUDA versions older than 10. This enables building gominer on more configurations, although performance will be significantly degraded with older CUDA versions. Installed CUDA toolkit version and GPU architecture will be detected automatically during build to use the best possible GPU features, specifically the fast funnel shift intrinsic.
  • Fixed an issue where autocalibration could not release the device and make the actual mining loop fail.

GPU programming is not something the Decred developers do every day, but this OpenCL kernel has shown to be quite fast. For example, it achieves 10–12 GH/s on an RTX 3070, which is close to 12 GH/s reported by WhatToMine for IronFish, another mining algorithm based on BLAKE3. A better comparison would need to consider the details (size of the hashed data, number of hashing rounds, etc.), but the hashrates reported so far suggest that gominer is good enough to make GPU mining fairer and accessible to more people.

README updates:

Other changes:

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a Decred mining pool.

Similar to gominer, dcrpool development has been reactivated after a period of low activity since summer 2021 when release v1.2.0 came out. The developers upgraded the codebase to the latest Go features, fixed multiple concurrency and shutdown edge cases, and paid off some technical debt, all in preparation for adding pooled GPU mining support.

Upgrades and changes:

  • Added BLAKE3 support to the internal CPU miner, which is used for testing.
  • Improved accuracy when calculating the number of possible iterations.
  • Improved log messages to trace clients that time out.
  • Improved signal handling to shut down more cleanly on more variants of Unix, as well as on Windows, in response to events such as the user logging off, the terminal being closed, or the system shutting down.
  • Updated build code to use Go 1.21 and PostgreSQL 16.0.
  • Removed all bbolt database upgrades and reset the database version to 1. This allows removing a significant amount of code which no longer needs to be maintained, gives developers flexibility to change the database format before the next release, and may avoid potential bugs and support issues caused by inconsistent data. This change assumes there have been no known public deployments of dcrpool and suggests labeling the next release v2.0.0 to reflect that the database format is incompatible with the last major version v1.2.0.

Fixes:

  • Corrected shutdown logic to ensure that log files are properly closed if the process exits due to an error.
  • Fixed some cases where configuration errors were not being logged as expected, and removed code duplication.
  • Ensure the database is closed on all error paths.
  • Fail fast if the GUI web server’s listen port is already in use. Before this change, if the GUI could not start normally dcrpool process would continue to run, which was not expected behavior. Now the process will terminate quickly and allow the admin to resolve any issues immediately.
  • Fixed edge cases where duplicate work share IDs and payment IDs could be generated. Random numbers have been added to these IDs to ensure they are unique. This fixes test failures on fast hardware.
  • ~9 miscellaneous fixes in concurrency, cancellation, shutdown logic, and error handling.

Refactoring:

  • Removed unused code for running dcrpool as a Windows service.
  • ~11 commits cleaning up code and enabling new linters.
  • Reworked how app version numbers are handled to use a more robust approach from dcrd and dcrwallet.
  • Reworked lifecycles of several subsystems to make their startup and shutdown more reliable, easier to reason about, and protected from unintended future changes. The subsystems are: pool hub, GUI web server, pool endpoint and client, and chain state. Handling of disconnecting pool clients has been simplified.
  • Made the gui package internal since it is not intended for external consumers.
  • ~9 commits including small improvements in memory management and concurrency.

Documentation:

Test code:

  • Read from compressed test data archive in chunks — a good practice to avoid uncontrolled allocations.
  • Made test harness easier to run on Windows.
  • Made endpoint tests more robust.
  • Allow keeping the test database for inspection after test failure.
  • Removed all code related to ASICs that can no longer mine Decred and are no longer supported by dcrpool.

Lightning Network

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

DCRDEX

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

September changes included in the v0.6.3 release:

  • Added extension mode, a restricted mode where DCRDEX won’t allow changes to settings like wallet type, wallet password, or wallet accounts. This will protect the wallet from misconfiguration while the DEX is running as part of Decrediton.
  • Removed “bonus tiers”, which were an “accounting curiosity” on the server that didn’t do anything for the client but did introduce a bug where the client’s bonds could fully expire before being replaced.

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

Decred:

  • Added a minimalist GUI for VSP staking with the following features: select a VSP, view current ticket price and voting rewards, purchase tickets, view all-time staking stats, view a list of owned tickets, view and set voting preferences (consensus agendas, treasury spends, and treasury keys).
  • Allow specifying a custom VSP that is not listed in the VSP API.

Firo:

  • Implemented Firo block parsing to enable fee estimation on testnet.

Ethereum:

  • Implemented WebSocket subscriptions so the DEX server could get new block headers from chain data provider more efficiently than by polling them. When HTTP polling is still used, the poll interval will automatically increase for non-local sources. Previously, changing this interval required the server to be rebuilt.
  • Implemented a smart contract for getting balances of ETH and any number of tokens to greatly reduce the request rate to providers. Also, added a cache for responses to further reduce requests to providers between blocks.

Polygon (MATIC):

  • Changes across the board to finish the initial Polygon support: generalized the Ethereum wallet and server backend to reuse common code, added RPC compatibility tests, added Polygon token support to the test harness and gas estimation, deployed USDC swap contract on Polygon mainnet, updated token-related UI code. For user convenience, Polygon and Ethereum wallets will use the same seed and derive the same private keys and addresses as discussed here.
  • Added support for wrapped tokens WBTC and WETH and adjusted gas rates based on testing results.

Client GUI:

  • Improved active orders UI: show live orders and recent orders in one table, and show buttons when hovering an order, so the user could perform actions without expanding the rows.
  • Show average traded rate in several places.
  • Skip redundant password entry step when creating an account on the DEX server if the password is cached.

Client backend:

  • Implemented asynchronous notifications that wallets can send to the GUI. This will allow to solve some issues and keep the GUI up-to-date in more situations.
  • Allow the client to connect to DEX servers using certificates provided by trusted Certificate Authorities. Previously, server certificate had to be configured manually.
  • Optimized exchange rates fetching logic and timeouts.
  • Fixed the possibility of unexpected bond expiration and cancellation of all orders, which was caused by the concept of “bonus tiers” and incorrect guessing of account’s trading tier on the client side.

Client, trading bots:

  • Implemented an arbitrage bot with a simple strategy which only places orders when there is an arbitrage opportunity between the DEX and a centralized exchange (initially supporting Binance).
  • Updated market making UI, which now includes an overview page with all configured bots and settings pages for each one. The configuration is stored in a JSON file. The markets page was also updated not to allow users to place orders manually while market making is running.
  • Fixed the market maker bot to rebalance a bit later, when the necessary matches data is available.

Documentation:

Server:

  • Allow disabling a market in the config file.
  • Allow the server to run without TLS encryption, for example for setups where encryption is handled by nginx.
  • Added a reverse tunnel for obtaining chain data services. Instead of DEX server connecting to data providers, they can initiate connections to a public DEX server and provide RPC services. This allows obtaining chain data from private nodes that cannot accept connections. Having an integrated reverse tunnel offers some advantages over SSH tunneling used previously to achieve the same goal, such as simple configuration. DEX server can consume from multiple source nodes for redundancy.

Other:

  • Increased the minimum Go version to 1.19.
  • Fixed desktop build for Debian.
  • Added a script for setting up two wallets for manual testing on mainnet and testnet. This allows to test more scenarios.
  • ~11 smaller changes and fixes.
Image: Decred staking UI in DCRDEX
Image: Polygon integration in DCRDEX

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.

All changes listed below have been merged to master towards future releases.

New Overview page:

DEX integration:

User-facing changes:

User-facing fixes:

Decred:

  • Fixed incorrect percentage of Yes/No votes shown on proposal vote bar.
  • Fixed log spam on the Staking page if the wallet is not synced.

Litecoin:

Android:

Internal and developer changes:

Bug reports and feedback are welcome via GitHub Issues or the #cryptopower Matrix chat!

Image: Proposal voting in Cryptopower
Image: Recent trades in Cryptopower use centralized instant exchange services
Image: DCRDEX onboarding pages in Cryptopower
Image: Design for the upcoming Overview page in Cryptopower (actual implementation may differ)

Documentation

dcrdocs is the source code for Decred user documentation.

  • Updated the Proof-of-Work page removing the legacy documents related to ASICs and added information about BLAKE3 and CPU mining.
  • Updated the project history timeline adding notable events like the launch of Bison Relay, GPU mining for BLAKE3, and the block reward change.
  • Added the blake3pow and changesubsidysplitr2 agendas to the Consensus Vote Archive.

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.

September changes in both GUI and text apps included in v0.1.9 release:

GUI app changes included in v0.1.9 release:

  • Implemented first round of mobile-optimized UI design. This covers the unlock screen, LN overview, feed posts, mobile drawer/sidebar, chat lists, and new icons. Mobile layouts can be tested by reducing the window width below 500 px.
  • Updated mobile design for direct and group chats and added a date change indicator.
  • Improved listing of user’s posts. Previously, it was just text in the direct chat window. The new listing will look similar to News Feed and indicate whether posts have been downloaded or not. User menu has been tuned to show “Subscribe to Posts” item if not subscribed and “List Posts” and “Unsubscribe to Posts” items if subscribed.
  • Added a button to the Settings page that attempts to reset all old key exchanges with stale users. The period of no activity that is considered “stale” is taken from the server.
  • Fixed inability to add LN capacity after all LN channels had been closed and the app had been restarted.
  • Fixed new comments indicator not disappearing when a post has been viewed, fixed new chat indicator not appearing on new messages.
  • Fixed unnecessary redrawing of messages.
  • Fixed crash of the unlock page on small (mobile) screens.

brclient changes included in v0.1.9 release:

  • Made /list runningtips command return an error if no tip attempts are running.
  • Fixed issues when interacting with local Pages and Stores. /ln payinvoice command now understands the lnpay:// prefix in invoice links. “Order Completed” page enhanced to show order details and the validity of the invoice (1 hour). If LN invoice creation fails, for example if the seller does not have enough inbound LN capacity, an on-chain payment address will be created instead as a fallback.

In other news, @vctt is making a poker game proof of concept built on top of brclient. In the second iteration, the poker logic has been converted to a bot, which is easier to integrate in existing clients. The code can be found here.

Image: First iteration of mobile design in Bison Relay v0.1.9
Image: Pages in brclient v0.1.9
Image: Poker bot PoC game in Bison Relay GUI

People

Welcome the new first-time contributors:

  • minizilla (development, dcrd)
  • omahs (development, dcrdex)
  • Clopas (development, dcrweb)

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

  • Twitter followers: 53,407 (+101)
  • Reddit subscribers: 12,757 (+6)
  • Matrix #general users: 819 (+14)
  • Discord users: 1,795 (+134), verified to post: 744 (+67)
  • Telegram users: 2,321 (+18)
  • YouTube subscribers: 4,640 (+0), views: 240K (+5.4K)

Governance

In September the new treasury received 8,374 DCR worth $111K at September’s average rate of $13.23.

No treasury spend transactions were mined in September due to a slip in the admin approval timeframe, but a treasury spend tx spending 8,411 DCR was mined on Oct 1 after being approved with 99.9% Yes votes and 64% turnout, the highest so far. This TSpend covers July and the majority of August’s billing, in an effort to close the expanding gap between work being completed and being paid. It has 53 outputs ranging in size from 7 DCR to 1,719 DCR. The billing rate for July was $15.40/DCR and for August $13.89/DCR, at the average of $14.65/DCR the payment would cover about $123K of costs for both months combined.

As of Oct 5, the combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 866,862 DCR (11.4 million USD at $13.20).

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

Voting was completed for two proposals in September, but the voting period was disrupted by the activation of DCP-0011 and a period of around 3 days when the blockchain was stalled waiting for a new block to be found with the new hashing function, followed by a period of rapid block production as GPU miners began operating on the network. The delay of greater than 24 hours without a block caused certain safeguards to activate in the wallet software, which became convinced that the client must be offline and would have prevented normal voting behavior.

  • The Cryptopower multi-asset Golang wallet for Desktop and Mobile proposal with a budget of $61,600 was approved with 69.6% Yes votes and 62% turnout.
  • The Cake Wallet integration proposal requesting $80,000 to integrate basic DCR functionality in Cake Wallet failed to reach the quorum requirement with 18% turnout, although it was at 87% approval. Cake Wallet voting was authorized and started after the Cryptopower proposal was already voting for more than 1 day, and as a result the Cake Wallet vote was more severely affected by the voting system problems.

There were two proposals published this month, although one of them is a repeat of the Cake Wallet integration proposal.

More events and details surrounding the above proposals have been covered in Politeia Digest issue 64.

Mining

Decred mining was rebooted on August 29th when ASICs mined their last block and the chain switched to BLAKE3 proof of work.

Since the switch would remove all ASIC hashrate from the network, the mining difficulty had to be reset to a low enough value to allow commodity hardware to mine new BLAKE3 blocks. For comparison, ASICs mined their last block at difficulty of 3.5 billion while the next block had the difficulty value of 101 thousand, or 35,068 times lower.

The initial difficulty value was manually set to target about 1.45 TH/s hashrate in anticipation of GPU hashrate, but it didn’t immediately join the network and only CPU miners were active upon BLAKE3 activation. A single CPU achieves between ~5–75 megahashes per second (from old laptops to high-end CPUs). Assuming an “average CPU” as 20 MH/s, getting 1.45 terahashes would require some 72,500 CPUs. The first BLAKE3 block (794,368) was extremely lucky to be found in only 50 minutes, assuming it was found with CPUs, but afterwards the chain stalled.

In a positive development, this incident activated many old and new community members to come together and push the chain forward. The #pow-mining chat became very busy as people converted any available hardware to Decred miners and endured the generated excess heat. Devices ranged from tiny Raspberry Pi’s (1 MH/s), to old laptops (2–5 MH/s), to new laptops and desktops (10–20 MH/s), to monstrous 120 Watt+ processors with 16 and 32 cores (60–75 MH/s).

I have to say, I love how this is bringing everyone together. I’ve missed this collaborative spirit. [@jazzah]

By the end of August 31st around 25 individuals reported a total of 550 MH/s, but that (and any unreported hashrate) was still not enough. On early September 1st, @grumlin and @davecgh turned to cloud hashrate and within ~3 hours block 794,369 was found. It was 324 KB in size and included 240 transactions accumulated over the days. Since no blocks had been mined for so long, the ASERT algorithm only needed one block to reduce the mining difficulty from ~97,000 to ~1,800 and from there CPUs had no problem finding new blocks and the target block time was restored in just a few hours.

September 1–5th was the short period when CPU mining was feasible as the difficulty settled around 500 and the corresponding network hashrate stayed between 6–10 GH/s, the equivalent of ~300 CPUs or just 1 mid-range GPU. Mining address distribution became significantly more decentralized compared to the ASIC era.

Image: Mining difficulty during the CPU days
Image: Block distribution by mining address as of September 6th

However, the CPU mining days did not last long. Developers anticipated that GPU miners would show up soon given that even a single GPU mines as fast as roughly 500 CPUs, and GPU farms are quite common. First signs of GPU mining got spotted around September 2nd but it wasn’t definitive because they seemed to be intentionally keeping it in the range of plausible deniability. With a more reliable confirmation on the 5th, the developers rushed to add GPU mining support to gominer.

On September 6th, a significant increase in block production rate was a clear indicator of GPU mining happening on the network. The hashrate increased to ~32 GH/s by 15:00, from ~9 GH/s just one day before. In about one day, rewards for ~150 blocks were collected by a single address (normally ~288 blocks are mined per day). First GPU mining patch was merged in gominer around 14:30 and by 15:30 first community members got their GPUs up and running. After GPU mining was made available to everyone the hashrate went straight up, reaching ~52 GH/s by 18:30 and ~700 GH/s by 20:00. New blocks were being mined as fast as 100 per hour (the normal rate is 12 blocks/hour).

By late September 7th the hashrate reached the level expected on the fork day, around 1,500 GH/s or 150 GPUs (assuming a 10 GH/s GPU like RTX 3070). This was a good test of the new difficulty algorithm, which was designed in anticipation of such a scenario. It worked well, ASERT managed to return block times to normal by September 10th, despite the hashrate increasing to ~3,000 GH/s in the same period. With the old algorithm it would take 2 weeks in the best case.

Soon after gominer was in good shape enough that the developers switched to refreshing the codebase and adding BLAKE3 support to dcrpool. BzMiner developer @iedoc released BzMiner v17.0.0 with Decred mining support, capable of squeezing out a few extra gigahashes from the GPU compared to gominer.

Image: BzMiner v17 managing 8 GPUs mining Decred

The rest of September was not as dramatic, but nevertheless the hashrate continued to grow and reached ~8,000 GH/s by the end of the month.

Image: Mining difficulty increased x200 in just 2 days, and did another x5 through the rest of September
Image: Average block time was wild for a few days, but stabilized quickly
Image: This chart shows just how centralized the mining was before the fork, only ~5 unique mining addresses
Image: Another view at mining (de)centralization, each color represents a unique mining address

Network

Decred’s network upgrade and the corresponding technical issues have created volatility in several metrics as shown on the charts below, but most metrics have normalized by the end of September or early October.

Hashrate: September’s hashrate opened at ~0 TH/s and closed at ~8.8 TH/s, bottoming at 0 TH/s and peaking at 8.8 TH/s throughout the month.

No information about DCR mining pools operating in September is available.

Staking: Ticket price varied between 141–278 DCR.

The locked amount was 8.52–9.82 million DCR, meaning that 54.9–63.5% of the circulating supply participated in proof of stake.

Image: Low ticket buying activity caused a drop in locked DCR and stake participation
Image: Ticket price went down to stimulate ticket buying again

VSP: The 15 listed VSPs collectively managed ~7,550 (+650) live tickets, which was 18.0% of the ticket pool (+3.5%) as of Oct 1.

The biggest gainers of September are bass.cf (+495 tickets or +54%), stakeminer.com (+357 tickets or +107%), and stakey.net (+336 tickets or +128%).

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed between 147 and 159 dcrd nodes throughout the month. Versions of 153 nodes seen on Oct 1: v1.8.0–89%, v1.7.x — 4%, v1.9.0 dev builds — 2.6%, v1.8.0 dev builds — 0.7%, other — 4%.

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 60.7–62.6%. Daily mix volume varied between 40–906K DCR and made a new all-time high.

Image: Daily mixed DCR dropped during the chain stall, but came back with a vengeance marking a new ATH
Image: Total mixed and unspent DCR dipped, but quickly recovered

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer saw 211 nodes (-2), 429 channels (-2) with a total capacity of 190 DCR (+4), as of Oct 2. These stats are different for each node. For example, @karamble’s node reported 213 nodes (-4), 446 channels (-7) and 191 DCR (-1) capacity on same day Oct 2.

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network capacity remains stable
Image: Uptick in missed tickets in September was likely due to technical issues after the hard fork
Image: Monthly DCR emission was slightly higher than usual due to a period of fast blocks

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:

  • A warm welcome to vote.dcr-swiss.ch, a new VSP listed in the VSP API and on the VSP page. DCR Swiss has a low fee of 0.25%. Out of 15 existing VSPs this is the fourth lowest fee after dcrhive.com (0.15%), dcr.farm (0.15%), and vspd.bass.cf (0.2%). As of writing, the VSP reports 391 voted, 0 revoked, and 334 live tickets.

Exchanges:

  • Poloniex users who transacted in DCR in 2017–2019 may be eligible for compensation if claims are submitted by October 31, 2023. This is a result of the SEC’s proceedings against Poloniex from 2021. See more details on the Poloniex Fair Fund website and its FAQ section.
  • KuCoin and Huobi have been re-added to the Exchanges page. Apparently, Huobi never delisted DCR as planned, while KuCoin had fixed DCR issues some time ago. Hotbit has been removed following its closure in May 2023.
  • Changelly.com was observed to no longer offer DCR trading as of September 19th. Their System Health dashboard did not list DCR either, even in maintenance mode. In a response to a support ticket, Changelly replied that DCR was switched off due to “its maintenance” (possibly referring to the Aug 29 hardfork) and that it would be back at some point.
  • Binance is selling the entirety of its Russia business to CommEx, according to their tweet and a blog post. The stated reason is “operating in Russia is not compatible with Binance’s compliance strategy”. A gradual migration process has been announced to move Russian users to CommEx, after which Binance could sunset all exchange services and business in Russia. The impact on DCR services and whether CommEx will list DCR is currently unknown.

Other news:

  • A phishing site that was a near perfect clone of the official decred.org, but with an added “community airdrop” was briefly advertised in Decred’s Telegram channels. These messages were taken down within minutes after being posted. Site’s page source suggested it was targeting the users of MetaMask, Coinbase and other browser-based wallets. As a reminder, do not click any random links, and ignore DMs instructing to do otherwise. The official Decred website is decred.org with a certificate from Gandi. Official social media links are listed on decred.org/community.

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

Decred Vanguard

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

Updates: We ran a successful meme competition and gave out $200 in DCR for prizes. The other recipients of the monthly Decred Vanguard reward of $100 in DCR were @tothemoon for his Decred Discord server contributions, and @PubPete for his high activity.

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.

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

Cypherpunk Times

Engagement stats for September:

  • Total number of articles on CT: 539
  • Newsletter subscribers: 110
  • New CT posts and newsletters sent: 23
  • Active social media campaigns: 81
  • Completed social media campaigns: 18
  • Social media posts: 263
  • Social media followers across all platforms and accounts: 1,627
  • @decredsociety Twitter: followers — 981, Tweet impressions — 17.3K, likes — 295, retweets — 89
  • @decredmagazine Twitter: followers — 490, Tweet impressions — 15.6K, likes — 464, retweets — 125
  • @cypherpunktimes Twitter: followers — 156, Tweet impressions — 22.0K, likes — 461, retweets — 151
  • Posts by project for September: General crypto — 9, Firo — 3, Decred — 10, Updated Decred post — 1

Other

  • After publishing their first Decred article, the next step of BTC-ECHO proposal’s plan was to publish the podcast ad script for community’s review but then BTC-ECHO disappeared for more than a month.
  • utxostudios proposal is complete; a total of 14 short videos have been created: 2 in English, 11 in different languages, and 1 compilation. All have been uploaded to Decred’s YouTube channel and mirrored on IPFS.

Events

Attended:

@arij has signed a partnership agreement with National Institute of Innovation and Advanced Technology (NIIAT) based in Casablanca, Morocco. This 1-year agreement will facilitate cooperative efforts like workshops, study sessions, and various interactive events. One of the key topics of the event was the introduction of Islah.city, a platform where citizens of Casablanca can identify and collaboratively resolve urban challenges. The potential to integrate blockchain technology and timestamping has been discussed. The event garnered attention on the national TV news channel Al Aoula, the video clip is available on Twitter and YouTube. See more in the full report.

Media

Selected articles:

Decred:

General crypto:

Guides:

Videos:

Audio versions of some videos are published on the Cypherpunk Times Spotify podcast.

Check out the new Shorts section on @DecredTV!

Translations:

Non-English content:

  • Makertronic created French tutorials for Decred GPU mining on Linux and Windows and on HiveOS (English subtitles available). The videos got pretty good views for Decred content.
  • A video clip from Moroccan national TV news channel Al Aoula covering the partnership agreement event between Decred and the National Institute of Innovation and Advanced Technology (NIIAT) has been published on Abdellatif Belmkadem’s YouTube and @arij’s Twitter.

Discussions:

A reality check from @Tivra:

This is not “crypto” this is some trashy reality show some of you follow on X. Crypto happens on GitHub and on chain not on video. You control where your attention goes, it’s ultimately your responsibility [tweet]

Other:

Art and fun:

Image: Merch design by @lewildbeast for the hero miner who solved block 794,369 (DCR reward needs to be updated)
Image: Interpretation of the UP ONYL paradigm by @Void

Markets

In September DCR was trading between USDT 12.33–15.25 and BTC 0.00048–0.00057. The average daily rate was $13.23.

Image: Historical DCR/USD accumulation zones by @saender
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 debate around Drivechains for Bitcoin and BIP-300 was reignited after Luke Dashjr wrote an implementation. There are discussions about whether this kind of sidechain which would allow for flexible creation and use of other assets would be a positive for Bitcoin, whether there are technical downsides or if allowing people to create scam-like assets on Bitcoin is the worst aspect. There are also discussions about how to activate the soft fork, with already some miners signaling support. A new player entered the mix in September with claims of being able to operate a sidechain with a two-way peg on Bitcoin without any soft fork changes, but they as yet had no explanation which people could make sense of.

Paxos accidentally paid 19.8 BTC for a Bitcoin transaction, but F2Pool apparently returned the BTC.

The Brave browser announced a partnership with Electric Coin Company to add Zcash support to its wallet, and to develop a “private and decentralized messaging feature” with the support of Filecoin and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).

Nouns DAO, which auctions one NFT a day to fund a treasury and had amassed a sum of around $50 million in this fashion, underwent a fork which saw over half of this value exiting through a newly introduced quit mechanism. The Nouns DAO is controlled by voting of the holders of Noun NFTs, and this community has long been split between a camp which embodied the original spirit of using the fund to promote the Nouns meme, and a camp which was disturbed by frivolous spending amounts as high as $90,000 on naming a frog species, and which saw themselves as entitled to some share of the fund proportional to the number of Nouns NFTs and voting power they had. As the product of a long-running discussion, v3 of the Nouns DAO’s contracts incorporated a mechanism that allowed 20% of the NFTs to trigger a week-long forking discussion and voting period. The majority of Nouns holders chose to exit and their share of the funds is now moved to a new DAO that has a ragequit mechanism, in addition to the familiar mechanisms of Nouns DAO, which will allow them to further exit and claim their individual share of that balance, if they so desire.

Terra Classic is to cease minting and reminting USTC in hopes of returning it to parity with the US dollar, after a vote with 59% in favour of the proposal. Since the the decline of the price of LUNC, there are concerns about spam and a proposal to increase the minimum deposit amount to 5 million LUNC was approved with 93% support.

Coinbase, in its role as an Ethereum validator, received a 570 ETH MEV payment from the Curve hackers in July to prioritize the transactions which allowed them to profit from the attack. That’s about $1 million profit for Coinbase at the moment, and they seem reluctant to return it to the affected party, Alchemix, citing a legal opinion that they are under no obligation to do so.

The SEC has reached a settlement in which the makers of the Stoner Cats NFT collection and associated web series were fined $1 million and had to kill all the Cats in its possession. The case attracted attention because it featured celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis promoting the project and participating in the creation of the comedy series, which the $800 NFT would allow holders to access. The token sale generated 3,650 ETH ($8.2 million at the time) for the company, and they received a further $20 million in royalties in transactions where holders sold their NFTs on the secondary market. After the news broke, the price for the NFTs rose substantially, possibly because people expect the holders to be able to access part of the settlement, but $1 million seems quite small in the scheme of things. The people who lost out in this situation are those who bought the NFTs at their all-time high prices of around 0.3 ETH, they are unlikely to benefit from any financial penalties, and the recent rise in price to 0.05 ETH is little consolation.

Claimants in the ongoing bankruptcy processes of FTX, BlockFi and Genesis have had their details leaked by Kroll, a provider of bankruptcy services. A hacker performed a SIM swap attack on a Kroll employee and was able to access files with details of all the claimants. This further raises concerns that participants in the claims process for bankrupt crypto companies are being targeted by scammers who attempt to gain access to whatever crypto the claimants might hold off the exchange. The leaked details allow the scammers to produce more convincing materials which reference compromised information, one reported example is offering marks a way to speed the claims process or get a better outcome.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has announced settlements with three DeFi operations (Opyn, ZeroEx, and Deridex), who it charged with offering illegal derivatives trading. The companies agreed to shutting down these services and paying fines of $100,000 to $250,000 after cooperating with the CFTC’s investigations.

The CFTC is hampering the development of prediction markets by objecting to any markets relating to political outcomes. These are explicitly banned in over 10 states but the CFTC has a broader objection in that it does not want to become an “election cop” adjudicating disputes about how the contracts have been operated.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has gathered support of 9 other senators for her Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act, which would crack down on non-custodial wallets, extend Bank Secrecy Act responsibilities, and other measures to tackle illicit use of crypto.

Chase bank in the UK, owned by JP Morgan, has announced a ban on crypto-related transactions for its customers, who from mid-October will no longer be able to make debit card or bank transfers to crypto companies like exchanges. The reason given was that this is a response to a growing number of scams targeting UK users with a crypto component.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill has been passed by Parliament and is on track to become law. The legislation will require the UK’s regulator Ofcom to produce a code of conduct detailing how providers of online messaging platforms must pro-actively police illegal content on those platforms. One particular aspect which has been criticised would undermine end to end encryption by requiring service providers to sift through encrypted private content for evidence of illegal activity. Both Signal and WhatsApp have indicated that they would leave the UK market rather than comply with the new rules which would require them to undermine their encryption.

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

About

This is issue 63 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, l1ndseymm, phoenixgreen, richardred, zippycorners
  • reviews and feedback: davecgh, Dominic, jholdstock
  • title image: Exitus
  • funding: Decred stakeholders

Decred Journal — September 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Decred Journal — August 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-august-2023-6b539b82057b?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/6b539b82057b Tue, 26 Sep 2023 15:14:45 GMT 2023-09-27T09:56:56.317Z Decred Journal — August 2023
Image: Untitled by @Exitus

Highlights of August:

  • Two consensus changes activated on Decred mainnet to reduce mining rewards and change the mining algorithm. These changes disrupt ASIC mining cartels and make GPU mining more accessible.
  • Cryptopower’s first mainnet release is out. It is a new wallet building on the legacy of GoDCR, and adding BTC and LTC wallets, instant coin exchange, and more. Initially available as a desktop app but mobile apps are in development.
  • Bison Relay v0.1.8 has been released with chat history loading after app restart, initial e-commerce features, and numerous UX improvements in the graphical and text apps.
  • Full node wallet support for Dash and Firo has been merged in DCRDEX. Advanced users can try it out.

Contents:

· New Consensus Rules Activated
· Cryptopower v1.0.0 Release
· Bison Relay v0.1.8 Release
· Development
· People
· Governance
· Network
· Ecosystem
· Outreach
· Media
· Markets
· Relevant External

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:

  • Multi-coin wallet for DCR, BTC and LTC — all working in light (SPV) mode without needing to download full blockchains
  • Decred staking, mixing, and governance — voting on consensus changes, treasury spends and Politeia proposals
  • Coin conversion via centralized exchangers like Flyp.me, Godex.io, ChangeNOW.io and others
  • Custom coin selection for extra control
  • Custom gap limit
  • Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD
  • Potential to build mobile apps for Android and iOS from the same codebase

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:

Image: Cryptopower wallet selection page in dark mode
Image: Cryptopower’s send page
Image: Cryptopower supports advanced Coin Selection for extra control
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:

  • Loading of chat history after app restarts
  • Pages with hyperlinks (similar to web pages)
  • Improved reliability of key exchanges and tipping
  • Numerous bug fixes

GUI app highlights:

  • Address book with searching and filtering
  • News Feed with images and improved sorting
  • Improved notifications UI
  • Improved responsiveness on smaller screens

brclient text app highlights:

  • Initial e-commerce features
  • Client-side content filtering
  • Client data backups

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.

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:

  • Dropped official support for Go 1.19, and added support for Go 1.21 (Go 1.20 is still supported as well). This included updates to the GitHub Actions build workflow. Building against Go 1.19 is still possible, and it is highly likely to work fine, but it is no longer being actively tested.
  • Updated the Docker image to build the dcrd binary with Go 1.21.0.
  • Optimized the GitHub Actions build workflow to reduce duplicate cache entries and cache spam. This involved removing the Go module and build cache from the GitHub build workflow, since the latest setup-go action caches them by default, and this was creating duplicate cache entries. The linter is still cached separately, and this update also included a small filename change to produce significantly fewer cache objects.
  • Added a test scenario to the ASERT tests that ensures the difficulty adjusts appropriately when block times are speeding up.
  • Added a duplicate-word linter, and used it to tidy up comments in 44 different files.
  • Removed unused parameters from a few blockchain functions. These functions are internal, so this change has no impact to clients or users.
  • Added an error linter, and updated multiple errors so that they can be wrapped with useful context. This allows them to be unwrapped by function callers to identify the source of the error. This update allows the errors to work nicely with errors.Is and errors.As.

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

  • The document explains the new proof of work hash, new ASERT difficulty adjustment algorithm, and the difficulty reset at the activation block, all in great detail with formulas, diagrams, and guidance for implementations.
  • Block header stayed exactly the same; it is a compact 180-byte structure that holds important metadata about the block and allows syncing and navigating the chain very quickly.
  • Block hash remained unchanged too; it is the same BLAKE-256 14-round hash of the block header. Most Decred software uses block hash to identify blocks and needs no modifications.
  • Proof of work hash changed to BLAKE3; it is created by hashing the block header. Only mining software (and hardware) needs to adapt to this new hashing algorithm.
  • Research into difficulty algorithms has shown that ASERT is one of the best performers in the space. Side note: Bitcoin’s DA got the worst rating in the 9th category after all others. Based on that and other research, Bitcoin Cash adopted a variation of ASERT in November 2020.
  • A new ASERT difficulty must be calculated for every block, which is 144x more frequent than the previous EMA algorithm. However, the ASERT algorithm can be calculated ~16x faster, so overall dcrd will spend ~9x more time running ASERT code. Fortunately, this is on the order of microseconds per block and does not make any practical difference. Read more here.
  • DCP-11 is the biggest DCP so far, when measuring by the length of text, file count, and overall size. It is very well-made and all Decred enthusiasts are advised to read the full thing.

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.

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

  • Warn users about VSP fee payment errors caused by the wallet being locked. This will allow users to react if a locked wallet blocks VSP fee payments. Upon seeing the error, the user should unlock the wallet and try again to prevent missed tickets.
  • Fixed broken retrying logic for errored VSP ticket purchases. This issue affected many users. Any ticket purchases which worked first time were unaffected, but any purchases which ran into an error were not being retried, which would lead to tickets not being added to the VSP and votes being missed. Thankfully, re-registering the ticket with a different VSP was a workaround, but it was poor UX.
  • Fixed a bug where the fee payment status check could be unreasonably delayed. The VSP client delays actions by some random duration in order to help protect privacy. With this incorrect delay calculation the wallet would report fee payments as being unconfirmed for up to 2 hours until the next check happens, when actually the fee has been sent and confirmed. Now the user wallet will update sooner.
  • Require VSP clients to wait for the VSP to confirm fee payments before considering a VSP ticket fully purchased. This eliminates multiple problematic edge cases caused by users broadcasting their own fee transactions, such as paying too low of a fee or sending payment to the wrong address. It is a preventative fix for extremely unlikely cases which have not been seen in the wild.

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

  • Fixed another bug where confirming a VSP ticket fee transaction took longer than necessary, caused by ticket’s live and expiry block heights not getting updated after the ticket was mined. It happened with the majority of VSP tickets. The fee would eventually get confirmed if the wallet was left running. Restarting the wallet would sync it straight away. There was no risk of votes being missed. Backported change is here.

User-facing changes merged in master towards future releases:

  • Added logging of transaction changes the wallet notices during rescans. This is off during the initial rescan (during reseed or after restarting dcrwallet) because it would be too noisy. Any other rescans are typically done to fix a problem, and dcrwallet will log when it finds new wallet transactions inside an old block, or wallet transactions which were previously unmined, but are now mined. Rescans aren’t fun for users, and rescans are really just a bandaid to sync wallets that got out of sync. Having the hashes of missed transactions will be helpful to debug why a wallet had a problem syncing them, and will hopefully result in some bugfixes that reduce user’s need to rescan.
  • Added a cancellation check to non-mixed ticket purchases before publishing the purchase. Mixed ticket purchases already check for cancellation, so this may solve an edge-case bug.
  • Fixed processing of a batch of VSP tickets if one of them failed. When adding multiple tickets to the VSP client if one of them were to fail, the remaining ones would not be attempted. It is unlikely that this caused any issues in the real world. This change also added some missing logging to make users aware that some VSP tickets failed and may need investigating.

Developer and internal changes:

  • Moved the logic of finding VSP-managed tickets out of the VSP client and into the main wallet code. This is part of the continued effort to refactor VSP and wallet logic.
  • Added official support for Go 1.21 and updated the GitHub Actions build workflow.
  • Replaced all non-generated uses of interface{} with any in the codebase. While any is just a new alias, it makes the code easier to read.

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:

  • Decrediton v1.8.0 has been added to Homebrew Cask repository for macOS users.
  • Decrediton v1.8.0 has been added to winget, a package manager installed by default in Windows 10 and 11.

Other news:

  • Decrediton 2FA concept from @norwnd has been put on hold in favor of exploring a general-purpose multisig solution for Decrediton if there is demand. Currently, there is no GUI for multisig in Decred.

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:

  • Wait until all other startup tasks have been completed before listening to notifications from dcrd. There was no problem with connecting to dcrd earlier but it was unnecessary and created messy logs.
  • Changed discovery of voted and revoked tickets from using dcrwallet’s TicketInfo call to using GCS filters from dcrd. Golomb-coded Sets (GCS) enable very efficient detection of transactions, this feature is a key element in Decred’s privacy-preserving light wallets (SPV). The new method is more robust, and as a result VSP admins may notice that vspd detects some historic voted/revoked tickets which TicketInfo never detected.
  • Added a new integrity check that updates revoked tickets in the database to be either expired or missed. Initial version of vspd was unable to distinguish between expired and missed tickets and reported them all as “revoked”. Knowing how many tickets were missed by the VSP is useful for evaluating its reliability. This update uses a clever heuristic to guess ticket outcome based on how long it took to revoke it. It is not 100% accurate but is good enough for the purpose of reporting VSP stats.

Developer and internal changes:

  • Added a test to ensure the hard-coded error string returned from securecookie will not change unexpectedly when vspd is upgraded to a newer version of the library.
  • Replaced uses of interface{} with any, similar to dcrwallet.
  • Updated to Go 1.21 and newer GitHub Actions. Testing with Go 1.19 has been removed.
  • Removed client-side VSP fee payment logic from vspd repository. The idea to migrate all VSP client code from dcrwallet to vspd repository was found to be problematic, it created a circular dependency between vspd and dcrwallet which is cumbersome and not worth the maintenance burden. Most VSP client code has been removed from vspd and will continue to live in dcrwallet repository. Eventually it should become an exported package which can be reused by software seeking to add VSP staking features. What remains in the vspd repository are the absolute basics which will be useful for any consumer of the vspd API: the data types and a basic HTTP client for communicating with vspd, including signing requests and verifying signatures of responses for two-way accountability.
  • Simplified shutdown code. It was inherited from dcrwallet and was a bit more flexible and complex than required for vspd.
  • Various refactoring to allow more code reuse and improve integrity checks.
  • Refactored how data is passed internally to remove duplication and prepare for future changes.
  • Fixed a bug with processing new block notifications from dcrd (it did not affect any released version).
  • Removed contexts from structs as recommended by standard library documentation. Added linters to prevent this and other issues that came up during code review.

Lightning Network

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

  • Ported changes made in the upstream lnd between v0.11.1 and v0.12.1 (released Feb 2021). 541 commits distributed across 220 upstream PRs have been ported, of which 53 commits were needed to adjust the codebase to Decred. Full list of ported pull requests can be found here.

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):

  • Fixed a possibility of showing incorrect order book in some order cancellation scenarios.

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

Client:

  • Improved app seed display on the backup page, it will be shown in groups of 8 characters.
  • Implemented configuration restrictions for wallets controlled externally. This can hide settings like password change if the DEX GUI is embedded in Decrediton and not running standalone. In this scenario any changes to the trading wallet must be done from Decrediton, and blocking them in the DEX UI should prevent users from breaking the wallet.
  • Update browser tab/window title when changing markets. Also provide instant visual feedback when the user clicks on another market, such as clear the depth chart, order book and recent matches.

Server:

  • Only send penalize notification when user’s tier changes, avoiding unnecessary notifications.

Decred:

Bitcoin:

  • Fixed crash when attempting to reconfigure a missing or corrupted BTC wallet.

Dash:

Firo:

  • Implemented Electrum light wallet support for Firo, including test harnesses with automated Firo’s chain daemon, ElectrumX server, and wallet client.

Market maker and arbitrage bots progress:

  • Implemented balance segregation which limits the amount of funds available to each bot.
  • Implemented simulation of sideways, trending, and volatile markets. This will be used to test bot behavior. For the curious, available market simulations are documented here.
  • Updated the basic market maker strategy to place multiple orders at various distances from the basis price instead of just one.
  • Take into account the possibility of refunds in market making balance calculations.

Documentation:

Developer and internal changes:

Other:

  • A rough plan of development for fall 2023 has been published for review and discussion, including some ambitious ideas like fiat onboarding.
Image: Footgun protection will prevent accidental changes that might break the wallet when using DEX inside Decrediton
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:

  • In September 2018 Raedah Group began experimenting with GUI libraries suitable for building a Decred wallet in pure Go. A pure Go app has potential to have higher security, better performance, and reach more platforms.
  • Five prototype interfaces were built: command line, text-based terminal UI based on tview, web browser UI based on Stimulus, desktop GUI made with immediate mode nucular toolkit, and another desktop GUI made with retained mode Fyne toolkit. These prototypes and screenshots are now archived here.
  • As a result of this research another library called Gio was chosen as a winner and a new app GoDCR was started in Jan 2020.
  • First GoDCR development proposal was approved in Nov 2020 with 92% Yes.
  • First functional testnet build was released in Sep 2021.
  • Second proposal was rejected with 49% Yes in Oct 2021.
  • First mainnet release came out in May 2022.
  • Third proposal combining GoDCR and existing mobile wallet development was rejected with 20% Yes in Jul 2022.
  • Commits in the godcr repository stopped in Aug 2022 but only 2 weeks later the work continued in a private fork.
  • After a full year of private development, a rebrand to Cryptopower, a v1.0.0 release, and a new proposal have been revealed.

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:

  • Fixed issues preventing DCR ticket purchasing. If paying the VSP fee has failed, it can be resubmitted by opening ticket details page.
  • Fixed app crash when clicking on the Vote button to vote on a proposal.

instantswap library:

  • Added a function to verify that an address has received the specified amount.
  • Cryptopower wallet uses the instantswap library to convert between coins through centralized services like Flyp.me, Godex.io, ChangeNOW.io, and more. It also provides utilities for inspecting addresses and transactions via different block explorers.

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.

Image: Cryptopower’s LTC wallet
Image: Cryptopower’s wallet creation UI on Android, design is work in progress
Image: Experimental Cryptopower Android build tested on a real device

Documentation

dcrdocs is the source code for Decred user documentation.

  • Several pages have been updated for DCP-12. Overview, Glossary, and Constitution pages now have correct block reward split. Additionally, Issuance page now documents all three historical splits (60/30/10, 10/80/10, and 1/89/10), and has an updated issuance chart.
  • Updated Material theme for MkDocs to v9.2.6, which adds new validation for internal links and navigation menu items. There was an issue with one plugin but the maintainer has fixed it and released the fixed version in just one day.
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:
40.34% to PoW miners
49.63% to PoS voters
10% to the Decred Treasury [DCR Issuance]

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:

  • Bison Relay’s data directory on Windows will be moved to a new location due to issues with MSIX and an updated certificate. The user will be shown a warning and advised to make a backup before proceeding.
  • List active chats in the address book. Previously, if a chat is already open it would not be shown in the address book and users could be confused that some contacts are missing.
  • Fixed app name shown in Windows Task Manager.

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:

  • Automatically unsubscribe idle users and remove them from group chats. If a peer client is idle for 21 days an automatic handshake is sent to test if it will respond. After 60 days, if there is still no response, idle peer is forcibly unsubscribed from local user’s posts and removed from any group chats where the local user is the admin. Both time intervals can be configured or disabled by the user.

GUI app changes:

  • Fixed link opening returning error instead of opening link in the web browser.

brclient changes:

  • Generate stub simplestore files if the configured store directory exists but is empty. Previously an existing empty directory prevented this.
  • Expand environment variables and ~ in the /backup command.

Internal and developer changes:

Other

  • A concept of Monero atomic swap with BTC or BCH has been proposed in the atomicswap repository. Monero does not have primitives like hashing or timelocks needed for conventional atomic swaps, but the proposed scheme requires only one of the two chains to have sufficient scripting capabilities. There is significant interest in this research with projects like xmr-btc-swap from COMIT Network and BasicSwap from Particl exploring how to swap Monero with Bitcoin-like currencies.

People

Welcome the new first-time contributors:

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

  • Twitter followers: 53,306 (-22)
  • Reddit subscribers: 12,751 (+4)
  • Matrix #general users: 805 (+8)
  • Discord users: 1,661 (+72), verified to post: 677 (+34)
  • Telegram users: 2,303 (-52)
  • YouTube subscribers: 4,640 (+0), views: 234.6K (+2.1K)

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

Image: Treasury inflows and outflows in DCR
Image: Treasury balance in USD

There were 3 new proposals submitted:

  • Proposal requesting $61,600 budget for Cryptopower, a multi-asset version of GoDCR revival, written in Go to be cross-platform and mobile friendly. In addition to Politeia many comments have been posted in #proposals chat.
  • Proposal requesting $80,000 budget to integrate initial basic DCR support in Cake Wallet. Chat comments start here.
  • Proposal requesting $15,000 for the writing and publication of two articles about Decred on the Odaily Chinese language crypto news site.

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.

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%.

Image: Historical pool hashrate distribution

Staking: Ticket price varied between 236–244 DCR.

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%).

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%.

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.

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network node count has stabilized

Ecosystem

Vendor readiness for Decred’s August 29 hardfork:

  • Binance announced on Aug 25 that deposits and withdrawals will be suspended until the chain stabilizes after the fork, while trading will not be affected.
  • Poloniex made an announcement on Aug 25 which is very similar to Binance’s. It was also posted on their Telegram.
  • The only communication from Bittrex we could find was a generic “stay tuned”-like response on Twitter. Bittrex Global’s support sites has no mentions of “Decred” and only 2 old pages for “DCR” search queries.
  • F2Pool announced on Aug 25 (mirror) that they will terminate DCR mining services on the day of the network upgrade. DCR payouts will be completed during the week following the network upgrade. Users can fetch their mining reward history until 2023–09–29.
  • Poolin announced the closure of DCR mining pool on Aug 28 and kindly reposted it in Decred’s Telegram chat. The notice warned pool users to configure or shut down their miners because earnings will be greatly reduced after the fork, and called to withdraw DCR from the pool ASAP. An unusual detail here is, unlike the other vendors, Poolin has totally missed the change of the mining algorithm to BLAKE3, and planned to run the pool for 1–2 days after the fork “so that you will have more time to configure your miner(s)”.
  • This list only covers updates that have surfaced in Decred chats. If you know more news don’t hesitate to share in #ecosystem!

Communication systems:

  • stakey.net has launched a Nostr relay at wss://nostr.stakey.net and a web client at citadel.stakey.net, powered by snort. Nostr web client replaces the Mastodon server which was hosted on the same domain previously. Mastodon was used for stakey.net’s announcements. It was also open for Decred community members to register and post but has seen little use, and was eventually shut down in favor of Nostr. Nostr users can follow stakeynet for service updates about the VSP.

Other news:

  • Two Decred community members have requested Kraken to list DCR via their listing form and Twitter. This has been done many times in the past, the chances are low but doesn’t hurt to keep trying. Additionally, multiple #trading members have rated DCR in the Coinbase app, hoping that more searches and ratings will make a difference.

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:

  • Pitched one news update to target crypto publications
  • Pitched four story ideas to target crypto publications

Secured the following media placements:

  • An article in BeInCrypto on how blockchain can expose fake news and help improve democracies. The piece looks at how Decred has been used in Brazil’s elections and talks about the role social media can play, featuring details about Bison Relay, with quotes from @jy-p. The article was syndicated to eight publications including Bitcoin Linux and Trading View.
  • The article was also posted in Spanish version of BeInCrypto, which was syndicated to Cryptocity.press.
  • An article in ZyCrypto featuring commentary from @jz on the fall of 3AC. The article was syndicated to three publications including Bitcoin Crypto.
  • An article in Cryptonews.com about the Bison Relay v0.1.8 release, including details about the new features, Simplestore infrastructure, and quotes from @jy-p. The article was syndicated to three publications including Globe Echo World News.
  • An paragraph in CoinDesk’s “Protocol Village” news roundup about the Bison Relay release, with links back to the Decred website and GitHub.
  • An article in The Currency Analytics about the Bison Relay release, including details about the new features and how the upgrade is “Paving the Way for Decentralized E-commerce”.

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:

  • Total number of articles on CT: 517
  • Newsletter subscribers: 105
  • New CT posts and newsletters sent: 20
  • Active social media campaigns: 80
  • Completed social media campaigns: 9
  • Social media posts: 192
  • Social media followers across all platforms and accounts: 1,575
  • @decredsociety stats: followers — 967, tweet impressions — 12.8K, likes — 311, retweets — 79
  • @decredmagazine stats: followers — 481, tweet impressions — 15.4K, likes — 450, retweets — 144
  • @cypherpunktimes stats: followers — 127, tweet impressions — 31.0K, likes — 550, retweets — 170

Other

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:

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

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

  • writing, editing, publishing: bee, bochinchero, Exitus, jz, karamble, kozel, l1ndseymm, phoenixgreen, richardred, zippycorners
  • reviews and feedback: davecgh, jholdstock
  • title image: Exitus
  • funding: Decred stakeholders

Decred Journal — August 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Decred Journal — July 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-july-2023-e972352272e9?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/e972352272e9 Mon, 21 Aug 2023 23:12:52 GMT 2023-08-21T23:12:52.332Z Decred Journal — July 2023
Image: The Perfect Storm by @Exitus

Highlights of July:

  • Votes on the two consensus changes (PoW hash function and PoW/PoS subsidy split) concluded with near unanimous support, the changes will activate in late August (so upgrade to v1.8).
  • Cypherpunk Times launched its rebranded site (formerly Decred Magazine), and onboarded its first project besides Decred to contribute content, Firo.
  • Discord is now bridged to the Matrix rooms again with a new improved bridge that allows Matrix users to block individual Discord users, the approval procedure for new members on Discord has also been improved.

Contents:
· Development
· People
· Governance
· Network
· Ecosystem
· Outreach
· Media
· Markets
· Relevant External

Upgrade for the Coming Fork!

Voting has concluded for two consensus changes Change PoW to BLAKE3 and ASERT and Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split To 1/89 which were originally proposed on Politeia in March 2023.

Both changes have been approved with 99%+ Yes votes and 60%+ voter turnout. Changes are now locked in and will activate in block 794,368 around August 29. Remaining time can be tracked at the Voting Dashboard or at dcrdata Agendas.

All users are recommended to upgrade to latest core software, standalone DEX app, or any other wallets being used. As always, we recommend to verify the files before running.

Development

The work reported below has the “merged to master” status unless noted otherwise. It means that the work is completed, reviewed, and integrated into the source code that advanced users can build and run, but is not yet available in release binaries for regular users.

dcrd

dcrd is a full node implementation that powers Decred’s peer-to-peer network around the world.

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

  • Updated GetBlock and GetBlockHeader commands to show the new proof of work hash. For blocks after DCP-11: Change PoW to BLAKE3 and ASERT activates, the proof of work hash will be the new BLAKE3 hash. For blocks prior to DCP-11, the block hash and the proof of work hash will be identical. This update enables consumers like dcrddata to easily access the new hashes.
  • Updated the Docker image to build the dcrd binary with newer Go and Alpine Linux. Node admins can consider Docker a good security option as opposed to using a virtual machine which has a much bigger attack surface.
  • Updated the RPC server to dynamically reload new RPC certificates without shutting down and restarting. This is a quality-of-life improvement for node admins, since it enables them to hot-swap the server certificate/key pair, as well as any potential client certificates. For example, a certificate update is required when the RPC server is exposed publicly and its IP address or domain name changes. Another example is when client certificates need to be modified to revoke clients, add new ones, or allow existing clients to change their private keys. This update is robust, minimizes disk access, does not require platform-specific dependencies, and is resilient against user-errors to avoid breaking a working config.
  • Explicitly configured RPC clients connecting to dcrd via HTTP to use TLS v1.2 or higher. This was already the implicit minimum, but now it is more clear.

Developer and internal changes merged in master:

  • Updated the comments detailing the ASERT calculation coefficients in the mining code so that they match the consensus code comments.
  • Added a new linter, addressed some linter complaints, and moved linting logic to its own script outside of the testing script.
  • Updated Github Actions, and ensured that the continuous integration actions happen in the correct order.
  • Updated golangci linter, and changed its method of installing from curl to go install, which has the benefit of reducing potential security risks from supply-chain attacks. Also, cached the binary for faster future runs.
  • Current versions of Go have a confusing way of handling loops. Both “for loops” and “range loops” treat internal loop variables ambiguously, which has led to code which is difficult to read and tricky to debug. Devs have had to treat loops with an abundance of caution, yet still potentially deal with annoying errors. A full explanation of the problem can be read here, especially the section which talks about the rationale. Future versions of Go (likely 1.22) will introduce a breaking change to how loops are handled. While the new loop semantics will be less confusing and error-prone, projects will have to set a very high minimum supported Go version to avoid bugs when compiled with older Go. To ensure the dcrd code will work correctly with Go 1.22, as well as remain backwards-compatible and compile correctly with older versions of Go, all necessary loops were updated. This will avoid any potential issues before they even have a chance to arise.

dcrwallet

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

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

The primary improvements users may notice are related to purchasing tickets through a VSP:

  • Fixed broken retrying logic for errored VSP ticket purchases. This issue affected many users. Any ticket purchases which worked first time were unaffected, but any purchases which ran into an error were not being retried, which would lead to tickets not being added to the VSP and votes being missed. Thankfully, re-registering the ticket with a different VSP was a workaround, but obviously it was poor UX.
  • Fixed a bug where the fee payment status check could be unreasonably delayed. The VSP client delays actions by some random duration in order to help protect privacy. With this incorrect delay calculation the wallet would report fee payments as being unconfirmed for up to 2 hours until the next check happens, when actually the fee has been sent and confirmed. Now the user wallet will update sooner.
  • Require VSP clients to wait for the VSP to confirm fee payments before considering a VSP ticket fully purchased. This eliminates multiple problematic edge cases caused by users broadcasting their own fee transactions, such as paying too low of a fee or sending payment to the wrong address. It is a preventative fix for extremely unlikely cases which have not been seen in the wild.
  • Fixed a bug where some VSP tickets could be skipped and not updated during various stages of the VSP ticket management lifecycle. No users have reported any issues caused by this bug. The improved error handling code uses the new Errors.Join feature that was made available by updating to Go 1.20, which is discussed below.

Developer and internal changes merged in master:

Go 1.20 unlocked better error handling, which inspired a few changes:

  • Removed an unused variable and a confusing custom error function from dcrwallet’s internal errors definition.
  • Dropped support for Go 1.19, and bumped support to Go 1.20 and 1.21.0-rc3. This is because Go 1.19 doesn’t have Errors.Join.
  • Added the new Errors.Join function from Go 1.20’s standard library. This new function is a simple way to wrap several error messages together. In Go 1.19 and previous, it was somewhat possible with the Errors.Is/As functions, but wrapped errors could be hidden, which made error tracing quite difficult. Errors.Join is a much better solution.

Additionally:

  • Updated the LRU cache to use Go Generics and accept multiple variable types. LRU a standard caching schema which removes the Least Recently Updated values once the cache is full. The main advantage of a generic LRU cache is to reduce code duplication and unlock easier code reuse. This has the added benefit of more explicit code by specifying the types for each new LRU cache instance, as well as better code verification by the compiler. Generics were added in Go 1.18 (March 2022), and are relatively controversial, but only because they have tradeoffs that devs must consider. Ideally, the Go compiler would treat generic functions the same as it would treat functions with specific variable types, and each would be equally as optimized. In practice, this isn’t always the case. The benefits of generics sometimes come at the cost of more complexity and slightly slower performance. In this case, dcrwallet currently makes minimal use of generics, so the performance impact is minimal.
  • Improved and polished wallet tests, including removing redundant code.

dcrctl

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

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

  • Removed stale dependencies from the main module, and updated the dcrd and dcrwallet modules to their latest versions. Notably, this makes dcrd’s new verbose results of getblock and getblockheader available.
  • Updated the README to recommend that developers use local Go Workspaces when working with development versions of 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).

In progress:

In July, @norwnd proposed a 2FA storage for Decrediton based on simple 2-of-2 multisig. The idea is to provide a more secure solution for storing DCR by using a second device to sign transactions, initially an Android smartphone. This should protect from threats like a weak wallet encryption password or a stolen laptop. As a bonus it could make multisig features more accessible to regular users who don’t have skills to program a multisig solution themselves. It is currently in early discussion and feedback phase but some effort has been made to test multisig features in dcrwallet and test how much data can be passed in QR codes.

vspd

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

Changes that were included in the v1.2.1 release:

  • Fixed transaction broadcasting logic to not generate an error when the transaction already exists (which is not a problem). This missing error condition was noticed when investigating the broken retry issue in dcrwallet’s VSP client. It’s a preventative fix, there have been no reported issues caused by this bug.

Lightning Network

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

  • Improved tracking of closed channels. It’s been observed on Decred LN mainnet that some channels that have been closed on-chain are still being announced on the network. While the root cause has not been determined, this change reduces the amount of invalid channel announcements and their negative effects, specially for nodes running in SPV mode (such as Bison Relay clients). This is implemented by saving channel IDs that are known to be closed and using that information to skip invalid updates or avoid expensive operations.

DCRDEX

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

Backported fixes to be included in the next v0.6 patch release:

  • Server: Increase order limits as users lock more funds in bonds and ensure accounts with positive tier always have a positive order limit, big enough for at least a single lot. This should fix inability to submit orders for some users.
  • Client: Ensure the server is aware that the client has completed the trade. In certain cases the client would fail to inform the server of a completed match, which could negatively affect account’s reputation. With this fix the client will keep retrying the message until the server receives and acknowledges that the client has redeemed (received) the funds.
  • Client: Updated btcwallet and neutrino dependencies to fix crashes in the built-in BTC wallet. Developers normally avoid upgrading dependencies in released versions to not introduce new bugs. This case is an exception however, considering the trouble caused by the bug, and that the next major release of DCRDEX is still quite far away.

Below are changes merged in master towards future releases.

Client:

  • Improved app setup flow. After setting app password the user will be shown Quick Configuration page that allows to enable DEX servers and select which wallets to activate. After that, a new page will remind the user to back up their app seed. Landing page shown after the setup has been changed to Wallets.
  • Switched from WebView to MacDriver library on macOS. This enables native macOS behavior like: keeping the app running without windows, creating new windows, and having a dock icon menu.
  • Disallow making transactions if the wallet is not synced and has no peers to sync from. This avoids transactions that never get mined and confuse users.
  • Fixed misleading “Action required to trade” startup message asking the user to add more bonds. It could happen when bond transactions have not been sent yet and the user just needs to wait without taking any action.
  • Fixed a bug where green triangle markers for own orders were not always shown on the depth chart.

Client, internal changes:

  • Implemented function to place multiple orders in one go for Decred, Ethereum, and Ethereum token wallets. This will be used by the market making bots and may unlock trading optimizations.
  • Refactoring and test code improvements.
  • Updated npm dependencies to fix security warnings (affected packages were not used by the DEX at runtime).

Bitcoin, internal changes:

  • Fixed bug in coin selection logic. It was not critical as it only affected the MultiTrade function, which is in not in production use yet.

Ethereum:

  • Added fiat values to the token approval form. A one-time approval is required to allow the swap contract to handle tokens (such as USDC) on behalf of the user. Both granting and revoking this permission requires a small ETH transaction.

Highlights of work-in-progress:

Image: Reworked app setup flow in DCRDEX
Image: Dock menu in macOS will list all DEX windows

dcrdata

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

  • Added the new BLAKE3 proof of work hash to the block details page. If dcrdata is running with a fairly new version of dcrd, it will make use of its newly updated GetBlockHeader command to obtain the PoW hash faster.

Timestamply

Timestamply is a free service for timestamping files powered by Decred blockchain. A timestamp proves that a certain file has existed at a certain moment of time. This has a range of applications in protecting data integrity.

Bison Relay

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

GUI and CLI apps:

  • Added syncfreelist config option to tune the bbolt database used by the internal Lightning Network node. Setting it to false improves running performance at the cost of startup performance.

GUI app:

CLI app:

  • Added basic /backup command.
  • Added content filtering system which can block messages from being displayed to the end user at the client level. To create a filtering rule the user needs to specify in what context it will work (direct chats, group chats, posts, post comments, or all) and what content it should match (can be simple strings or regular expressions). Try /help filters add and /help filters addrule to learn how it works. Currently, it is only exposed in the CLI app but the low level parts can be wired to GUI app in the future.

Other

  • All legacy VSPs (called “stakepools” back then) have been removed from dcrwebapi, the service that powers Decrediton and the VSP list at decred.org. Legacy VSPs have been deprecated with the release of vspd in 2020 and all known public servers have shut down by around 2022.

People

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

  • Twitter followers: 53,328 (-230)
  • Reddit subscribers: 12,747 (+9)
  • Matrix #general users: 797 (+10)
  • Discord users: 1,589 (+3), verified to post: 643 (+8)
  • Telegram users: 2,355 (-7)
  • YouTube subscribers: 4,640 (+0), views: 232.5K (+1.4K)

Governance

In July the new treasury received 7,859 DCR worth $121K at July’s average rate of $15.40. 4,943 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $76K at same rate.

A treasury spend tx was approved with 5,274 Yes votes and 37% turnout, and mined on July 25. This one got 9 No votes, becoming the second TSpend out of 15 mined so far to have non-zero No votes. It had 32 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 1.5 DCR to 1,692 DCR. Most of this DCR was likely paid for May work, at its billing exchange rate of $17.13 the TSpend is worth around $85K.

As of Aug 6, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 865,895 DCR (12.6 million USD at $14.56).

Image: Lower DCR/USD contributes to higher treasury outflows
Image: Treasury balance USD equivalent

There were 4 proposals that finished voting in July:

  • A proposal to fund development of the Decred.club website with Chinese language content and grow a community around it for $2,400 was rejected with 28% Yes votes and 26% turnout.
  • A proposal to rebrand Decred Magazine to Cypherpunk Times and continue producing it for another year with an increased budget of $44,000 — was approved with 95% Yes votes and 47% turnout.
  • A proposal to produce 90-second videos of people in ski masks talking about Decred in 12 languages at a cost of $23,650 was approved, with 75% Yes votes and 42% turnout.
  • A proposal to produce a promotional website for DCRDEX at a cost of $2,000 was rejected, with 30% Yes votes and 34% turnout.

Network

Hashrate: July’s hashrate opened at ~52 PH/s and closed ~55 PH/s, bottoming at 49 PH/s and peaking at 69 PH/s throughout the month.

Image: Decred hashrate

Distribution of 55 PH/s hashrate reported by the pools on Aug 1: F2Pool 58%, Poolin 32%, BTC.com 8%, AntPool 3%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Aug 1: F2Pool 52%, Poolin 38%, BTC.com 7%, AntPool 3%.

Image: Historical pool hashrate distribution

Staking: Ticket price varied between 196–277 DCR.

Image: Ticket price stabilizing

The locked amount was 9.73–9.87 million DCR, meaning that 63.3–64.2% of the circulating supply participated in proof of stake.

Image: Total locked DCR retesting its ATH
Image: Monthly missed tickets went down after a small uptick in June

VSP: The 14 listed VSPs collectively managed ~6,150 (-480) live tickets, which was 15.1% of the ticket pool (-1.4%) as of Aug 1.

The biggest gainers of July are bass.cf (+96 tickets or +15%) and decredcommunity.org (+37 tickets or +8%).

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed between 162 and 170 dcrd nodes throughout the month. Versions of 164 nodes seen on Aug 1: v1.8.0–84%, v1.7.x — 11%, v1.9.0 dev builds — 1.2%, v1.8.0 dev builds — 0.6%, other — 4%.

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

The share of mixed coins varied between 62.0–62.3%. Daily mixed volume varied between 351K-486K DCR.

Image: DCR StakeShuffle volume
Image: Transaction volume has taken a summer vacation. The metric is defined by Coin Metrics.

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer has seen 219 nodes (+7), 445 channels (+18) with a total capacity of 188 DCR (-3), as of Aug 1. These stats are different for each node. For example, @karamble’s node reported 220 nodes, 464 channels and 191 DCR capacity on same day Aug 1.

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network node count growing slowly
Image: Decred’s Lightning Network capacity stabilized around 200 DCR

Ecosystem

Voting Service Providers:

  • New VSP at vote.dcr-swiss.ch has voted its first mainnet tickets and applied to get listed in Decrediton wallet and the VSP page. DCR Swiss has a low fee of 0.25%. Out of 14 existing VSPs this is the third lowest fee after dcrhive.com (0.1%) and vspd.bass.cf (0.2%).

Wallets:

  • Android and iOS Decred wallets will stop syncing in late August when new consensus upgrades activate. The apps have been removed from Google Play and Apple Store to prevent users from installing apps that are no longer maintained. If you have used Android or iOS Decred wallets feel free to comment in a Reddit survey.

Exchanges:

  • EXMO announced on July 6 that they will delist DCR and 3 other tokens by July 20 due to low liquidity. EXMO was the only exchange to list DCR via a non-expensive proposal that got approved in May 2019 and fulfilled in June 2019.
  • #trading members discovered on July 9 that DCR was trading around $20 at Indian Bitbns while it was around $16 on other exchanges. As of July 31 DCR was still trading at a premium and with significant 24-hour volume of $68K making DCR/INR a top 10 pair at Bitbns (if we trust reported volumes of course). DCR price chart suggests it was listed in May 2022.

Communication systems:

  • Public access to Twitter has been mostly unavailable between June 30 and July 5. Browsing Twitter required login and was subject to rate limits even for paid accounts. According to Elon Musk it was a temporary emergency measure to combat AI bots which were pulling so much data from Twitter that it effectively became a denial of service attack. Public API restrictions also broke Nitter, a lightweight alternative for browsing @decredproject and other accounts. Login requirement was removed on July 5. Despite all problems and revelations Twitter remains Decred’s main outreach platform with 53.3K followers as of Aug 1.
  • The two-way bridge between Matrix and Discord is back! It was made possible by the new user verification flow that is much better at preventing spam. The new bridge allows blocking individual Discord users on the Matrix side without affecting other Discord users, this was not possible with the old bridge. Also, message editing should propagate in both directions. New bridge is hosted by t2bot.io, a free service providing bots and bridges for Matrix communities. It is operated by a single person and is supported by donations. As of writing the following Matrix rooms are bridged to Discord: #101, #dex, #marketing, #media, #memes, #proposals, #showerthoughts, #support, and of course #trading.

Other news:

  • In May both @StakeShuffle_ and @dcrtimestampbot announced that the bots are “down until further notice due to recent twitter-api changes”. The bots have been developed by @cli_query and sponsored by a total of 3 low-budget proposals. It appears that developer time is limited to maintain these projects, but the Python source code of StakeShuffle_ and dcrtimestampbot is available on GitHub for contributors to pick up and improve.
  • Cypherpunk Times is live. See the Outreach section below for more details.

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

First iteration of the new multi-coin publication Cypherpunk Times is live! It is a continuation and a rebrand of Decred Magazine, approved and funded by Decred stakeholders in July 2023. The new social media handle is @cypherpunktimes on Twitter, Facebook, and Spotify podcasts. Any support is greatly appreciated.

Firo is the first project to contribute content to Cypherpunk Times. In July Firo has onboarded 3 content and published their first article.

TikTok account @decredmagazine was renamed to @dearcryptopunk. Moving forward its scope will be extended from supporting Cypherpunk Times to general Decred outreach, and it will move under the umbrella of Decred Vanguard proposal. Twitter account @decredmagazine will keep running for now to support Decred-only content.

Cypherpunk Times engagement stats for July:

  • Total number of articles on Cypherpunk Times: 497
  • Newsletter subscribers: 104
  • New CT posts and newsletters sent: 18
  • Active social media campaigns: 68
  • Completed social media campaigns: 2
  • Social media posts: 128
  • Likes: 496
  • Re-tweets: 120
  • Social media followers across all platforms and accounts (including @DecredSociety and the old @decredmagazine): 1,440

Totti from BTC-ECHO has collected two rounds of feedback posted across Politeia and the #writers chat and incorporated it in the first German article. BTC-ECHO suggested to wait through the lower seasonal activity and publish the first article in mid-August. The delay was used to add mentions of hardfork resistance and on-chain governance which are key to Decred consensus.

Monde PR’s achievements:

  • Pitched two commentary opportunities
  • Pitched three story ideas to target crypto publications
  • Secured one media interview

Secured the following media placements:

Media

Selected articles:

Videos:

Livestream:

Audio:

Art and fun:

Image: DCR top tier list by @Void

Translations:

Discussions:

Markets

In July DCR was trading between USDT 13.70–19.75 and BTC 0.00047–0.00064. The average daily rate was $15.40.

#trading members observed a $1 million sell wall on Binance DCR/USDT. Also, trading volumes across all markets were unusually low on some days, possibly due to summer time.

Image: DCR performance compared to other privacy coins by @saender
Image: Decred Pricing Metrics by @bochinchero

The chart above is based on same Staked Realized Value model we showed last month but with price instead of market cap.

Image: DCR/BTC in June-July
Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD does not like summer time

Relevant External

DeFi lending platform Curve, a pillar of DeFi on Ethereum, has been hacked. The hack involved using a malfunctioning reentrancy lock in certain versions of Vyper which made certain pools but not others vulnerable to being drained. Similar protocols Metronome and Alchemix were also affected, and together the 3 projects lost $61.7 million worth of assets. The attacker was only able to drain some of the affected pools because when the action started many white hat hackers stepped in to rescue their funds. By Aug 7 a reported 73% of the assets had been recovered, some from the white hats but also significant amounts from the attacker. Curve offered a 10% bounty for voluntary return of funds until August 6, but with over $18 million still in the hacker’s possession at the deadline the chance to end the matter there was lost and the bounty opened up to public investigators who could help to secure recovery.

Gitcoin has launched an Ethereum Layer 2 called Public Goods Network (PGN), it uses the Optimism stack and a proportion of the sequencer fees will be collected in a pot to fund public goods.

Arkham Intelligence has launched a crypto identity data marketplace or “doxx to earn program”, where users can place bounties on the identity of certain crypto wallet addresses and eager researchers attempt to discover who owns the wallet for a pay day. Arkham also showed casual disregard for its own users by generating referral links using an easily reversed algorithm revealing the email addresses of the promoters.

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin launched its eyeball-scanning orbs in 1,500 locations around the world, allowing people to scan their iris to set up a wallet and receive 25 free WLD (worth ~$50). The prospect of an AI company founder sending orbs out into the world to scan peoples’ eyes for small handouts has been decried as dystopian by many in the crypto space, Worldcoin is not a popular project. However, Vitalik Buterin has recently published a blog post about biometric proof of personhood where he seems to find quite a lot of merit in Worldcoin’s approach, suggesting it protects privacy better than most of the alternative approaches to proof of personhood, although still having some negative aspects. A day after Worldcoin’s launch, the UK data watchdog was reported to be looking into whether it complies with data protection regulations. In Kenya, where Worldcoin had been in communication with the Office of Data Protection Commissioner since April, it was thought to be operating legally but its scanning operations were suspended and it’s not clear if this was self-imposed by Worldcoin to improve on “crowd control” issues with long lines at the sign-up stations, or if the authorities changed their mind about its legality.

FedNow, the US government’s instant payments system, launched with 35 financial institutions set up to use the service which allows for 24/7 instant settlement. This is seen as bridging a gap where the US is quite behind other jurisdictions that already have such instant bank transfer facilities. It is anticipated that it will take some time for uptake of FedNow by institutions to make the service broadly available to end users.

The Token Engineering Commons (TEC) has completed the first round of its new grants program, using Quadratic Funding (like Gitcoin grants) to distribute a funding pool of $25,000 and drawing donations of $6,162 to augment this and determine where the grants would go. TEC have added to the usual Quadratic Funding model (in which a greater number of individual donations to a project means a larger slice of the matching pool) by adding a mechanism for the expression of “Subject Matter Expertise”. Contributors who had TEC tokens and/or NFT knowledge attestation certificates in their wallet were considered to be “experts” and a stronger weight was applied to their donations when determining the matching amount — this was done to tackle a perceived issue where projects that are good at mobilising community support do the best in Quadratic Funding rounds.

Legislation concerning stablecoins has made it out of committee in the US Congress for the first time, meaning that should soon be voted on and if approved passed to the Senate. The bill had bipartisan support for some of its life but Democrats withdrew that support late in the process over a failure to negotiate a resolution to some points of conflict, lessening the bill’s chances of making it all the way into law. One key point of dispute seems to be the role of a federal regulator to oversee stablecoins licensed at the state level, with Democrats pushing for this kind of oversight and Republicans rejecting it.

The much-hyped round of Bitcoin ETF applications from major financial institutions incorporates a new feature, Surveillance Sharing Agreements (SSAs) with Coinbase as a provider of market intelligence where the ETF providers and regulators can pull data directly including the capacity to request personally identifiable information from Coinbase where this is deemed necessary to investigating or preventing market manipulation. In previous ETF filings the market provider would push information to regulators about suspicious activity, the SSAs turn this around to give more oversight. SSA with Coinbase was first introduced by BlackRock but has been copied by the other applicants in this round of ETF applications.

A European Commission document about its Metaverse strategy was leaked ahead of its publication. The document describes the potential of virtual worlds to being “unprecedented opportunities in many societal areas”, and the need to remove barriers to new organizational forms such as DAOs to realise their benefits.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has revealed that shortly before suing them the SEC demanded that they drop all assets except Bitcoin, which made it an easy choice for the company to take the matter to court because that would have meant the effective end of their business in the US.

Binance’s Australian headquarters has been raided by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), in an investigation into unlawful derivatives dealings that involved mislabelling retail and institutional customers. Binance also withdrew its application for a license in Germany, after being told that it was not going to be granted in its current form. After Binance US lost its banking partner BTC has been trading at a discount, something similar happened in Australia in May.

Binance has completed integrating Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.

The LBRY company has shut down after losing its case against the SEC, having its LBC token sales defined as unregistered securities offerings and being restricted from doing any more of this without first “registering with the SEC”. The LBRY protocol lives on, it was never the target of the litigation, and the LBC token’s status remains ambiguous as to whether it is now a security, since the SEC have bankrupted the incorporated “common enterprise” that token-holders were deemed to seek profit from.

Richard Heart, mastermind and primary beneficiary of the Hex and PulseChain projects, has been sued by the SEC for securities fraud violations. Although the Heart/Hex ecosystem is widely regarded as a scam, it has been suggested by several crypto legal personalities that the case doesn’t seem very strong. The HEX terms referred to sacrificing money into a black box mechanism and Heart himself was very clear that he was spending a lot of the proceeds on designer clothes, portraying this as part of a marketing strategy which was going to help pump the price of the related tokens.

Alex Mashinsky, former CEO of Celsius, has been arrested and charged with a number of crimes including wire fraud and market manipulation. The Chief Revenue Officer was also charged. The filing indicates that Celsius was actively manipulating the price of CEL tokens while lying about key aspects of its performance, pumping and dumping the tokens to cash our large sums, $42 million allegedly in Mashinsky’s case.

A report by Elliptic researchers has identified Russian (Garantex) and Australian crypto exchanges as key intermediaries in facilitating the trade in Fentanyl precursors. They identified and communicated with over 100 sellers who were ready to ship Fentanyl or its precursor chemicals, and followed the crypto payment addresses to find out about their other transactions. In this way they uncovered addresses receiving $19M in Bitcoin and $13M in USDT, mostly from certain centralized exchanges.

Bittrex has reminded its US customers to withdraw crypto assets from the bankrupt platform, they have until August 31st but Bittrex suggests doing it sooner rather than later for fear of “unforeseen issues”.

Blockchain technology broke new ground again in the realm of gambling, with the world’s first live hamster racing platform launching, where users can deposit ETH, BNB or BUSD and gamble it away betting on which hamster crosses the line first. Based on observation of several races (which are streamed on Twitch) the hamsters don’t so much race as wander around (or not), showing very little interest in the finish line or motivation to get there first.

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

About

This is issue 61 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, l1ndseymm, phoenixgreen, richardred, zippycorners
  • reviews and feedback: davecgh, jholdstock
  • title image: Exitus
  • funding: Decred stakeholders

Decred Journal — July 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Decred Journal — June 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-june-2023-1e6532f40ee6?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/1e6532f40ee6 Sat, 22 Jul 2023 20:47:29 GMT 2023-07-22T20:47:28.769Z Decred Journal — June 2023
Artwork by @Exitus

Highlights of June:

  • Decred core software v1.8.0 was released, unlocking new consensus voting options and features.
  • DEX v0.6.2 was also released, preparing for the new consensus votes and deploying many other improvements.
  • Voting started for the two new consensus proposals (change subsidy split and proof of work hashing function) once the upgrade process had progressed sufficiently in early July.
  • Funding for development of decentralized mesh architecture for DCRDEX was approved.

Contents:

· Upgrade and Vote on New Consensus Changes!
· Core Software v1.8.0 Release
· DCRDEX v0.6.2 Release
· Development
· People
· Governance
· Network
· Ecosystem
· Outreach
· Events
· Media
· Markets
· Relevant External

Upgrade and Vote on New Consensus Changes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Core Software v1.8.0 Release

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

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

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

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

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

DCRDEX v0.6.2 Release

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

Highlights of the new release:

  • Support for Decred 1.8 consensus changes
  • More accurate fee estimates for built-in SPV wallets for BTC, LTC, and BCH (be sure to enable “External fee rate estimates” in the wallet settings)
  • The suggested BTC amount for the registration bond has been significantly reduced
  • Fixes and optimizations

Check the updated client guide for step by step instructions.

Get the latest DEX client as a standalone app, or as part of Decrediton, or install it from Decred’s custom Umbrel App Store. As always, we recommend to verify the files before running.

Development

The work reported below has the “merged to master” status unless noted otherwise. It means that the work is completed, reviewed, and integrated into the source code that advanced users can build and run, but is not yet available in release binaries for regular users.

dcrd

dcrd is a full node implementation that powers Decred’s peer-to-peer network around the world.

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

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

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

  • Made the block hash and proof of work hash separate and independent so that each hash can be modified without changing the other. A great practical consequence is that block hash consensus will remain unchanged with DCP-11, meaning that all software which handles block hashes will need no modification. Smaller, focused upgrades mean minimal downstream effects for consumers.
  • Added support for the BLAKE3 hash function and split methods for computing the old PowHashV1 (BLAKE256) and the new PowHashV2 (BLAKE3). Notably, it is not possible to completely remove PowHashV1 and other old-consensus code. Even when blockchain consensus changes, it must remain possible to validate the old chain. Therefore, legacy concensus code is maintained to be able to validate the entire Decred blockchain prior to newer consensus changes. The third party dependency chosen for BLAKE3 is lukechampine.com/blake3 — an implementation that balances performance and code readability, hoping to eventually land in Go standard library. In addition to pure-Go version, the package also provides AVX-512 and AVX2 routines for increased performance. Another added dependency is cpuid — a Go package for detecting available CPU features.
  • Updated the getwork command and notifywork websocket notification. These are used by the mining code to fetch new data for hashing.
  • Implemented ASERT difficulty calculation in consensus code that validates the chain, and separately in block generation mining code. Normally code duplication is avoided but in this case two copies were created intentionally. The main reason is to use one copy for catching bugs in the other, a principle known as dissimilar redundancy. The other reason is to implement different optimizations in consensus and mining code in the future. For those who love fast math and bit tricks, make sure to read the ASERT code here.
  • Implemented the DCP-11 consensus vote. It will show up as blake3pow in voting software.

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

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

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

If DCP-11 is approved, after the 1-month upgrade period the difficulty will be reset to a hard-coded value which equates to an initial target hashrate of about 1.45 TH/s. This number does matter much though because it will very quickly adjust due to the new difficulty algorithm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Updated the Docker image to build the dcrd binary with newer Go and Alpine Linux. It’s noteworthy to mention that the dcrd Docker template does not persist the Alpine Linux OS. After building the binary, the OS is removed, and dcrd runs in a scratch Docker container by itself. No OS, no root user, not even a shell. A lightweight container with maximum security.
  • Added release notes for v1.8.0.
  • Improved test flag handling, especially in cases where default home directories are inaccessible (such as with NixOS) and need to be changed. Additionally, a DCRD_APPDATA environment variable can now be used to override the default directory. Environment variables are generally the preferred approach for overriding defaults in containers.

Developer and internal changes merged in master:

  • Updated to use latest dcrtest, and excluded unused modules from regular builds.
  • Cleaned up database test logic.
  • Added release notes templates.
  • Added CI support for test and module caches, which will result in faster CI runs. CI is Continuous Integration, a service that continuously builds and tests the code to ensure all changes integrate well. Faster CI runs reduce developers’ wait time to see if their changes pass all tests. The cache cuts CI run time from ~10 to ~1 minute.
  • Updated module hierarchy diagram to accurately reflect module dependencies.

Changes merged in the dcrtest framework:

  • Updated the voting wallet to support DCP-12 block reward split semantics on simnet.
  • Updated the voting wallet to support DCP-11 proof of work semantics on simnet.
  • Updated to use latest released Decred module dependencies and latest main dcrd module.

dcrwallet

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

Changes that were included in the new 1.8.0 release:

  • Ensured that the wallet can correctly validate blocks mined with either the original BLAKE-256 or the upcoming BLAKE3 proof of work hashes, and updated the vote version.
  • Mixed ticket purchases now have a random 20–60 second delay before the wallet publishes each transaction to the mempool. This trickle effect will improve privacy by making it much harder for anyone surveilling the mempool to link tickets together based on published timestamp.
  • Updated dcrd and cspp modules to their latest versions. dcrwallet v3.0.0 module has been released for consumers like vspd, DCRDEX, or Politeia.

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

  • Updated the README for people building from source.
  • Bumped the major module version of the in-dev dcrwallet module to v4 to prepare for future changes.
  • Removed a deprecated option from the internal wallet config which enabled automatic AddressReuse in some functions like the auto ticket buyer. The option was originally deprecated in v1.5 and removed from the main package in v1.6 because reusing addresses is bad for privacy. The wallet stopped using the AddressReuse option, but it was left deprecated in the internal package to preserve code compatibility at the time.
  • Maintenance: tweaked logging, code cleanup, test code updates for Go 1.21.

Work done to consolidate VSP code into the vspd repository:

  • Brought dcrwallet up to date with vspd, and reduced dependencies between the VSP client and dcrwallet.
  • Moved the logic of selecting unmanaged tickets out of the VSP client module and into the wallet module.
  • Internal refactoring, cleanup, added more tests.

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

dcrctl

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

  • Updates for the v1.8.0 release: use the latest released dcrd and dcrwallet modules so that all their new functionality can be accessed.

Decrediton

Decrediton is a full-featured desktop wallet app with integrated voting, StakeShuffle mixing, Lightning Network, DEX trading, and more. It runs with or without a full blockchain (SPV mode).

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

  • Updated DCRDEX module to the v0.6.1 release.
  • Removed staking pages for hardware wallets, since they can’t participate in staking. Also added warnings to not use hardware wallets to receive staking or treasury funds, since hardware wallets can’t spend those funds.
  • Added in-app release notes for v1.8.0.
  • Updated the Polish translation.
  • Fixed an error that occurs when people break the connection between Decrediton and the DEX wallet. The default behavior when using the DEX from Decrediton is that there is only one wallet controlled by Decrediton and the DEX module simply uses that. However, it’s possible for users to break that connection and force the DEX wallet type to “SPV”, which creates a brand new wallet fully managed by the DEX. Decrediton’s main wallet will still work, but it can no longer control the new wallet created by the DEX and will throw errors in certain cases. The error is fixed by not allowing Decrediton to attempt to change the password on the DEX wallet it no longer controls. However, users should still avoid this uncommon configuration and not change the wallet type from within the DEX module.
  • Other minor updates and fixes including some typos, and bumping dependencies.
  • Updated app metadata for official publications, as part of the work done to add Decrediton to the winget package repository.

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

  • Updated DEX module to v0.6.2, which is required to follow the Decred 1.8.0 hardforks due to consensus changes. In addition, this fixes the “response buffer too short” error reported by some users.
  • Updated the Arabic translation.
  • Fixed placeholder text in the intro tutorials. This also adds proper release artwork for v1.8.
  • Updated web dependencies.
  • Updated to Electron v23 from v18. Among other things, this allows Decrediton to communicate with USB devices, which is required for some hardware wallets like Ledger. Since WebUSB is built-in to the newer versions of Electron, it means devs don’t have to use external dependencies, which is good for security.

In progress:

  • As mentioned last month, work is ongoing to add Ledger support, particularly the Ledger UI. The most interesting new developments for June have been work to add the Ledger backend functions so that the UI can actually interact with the Ledger itself. The primary difficulty isn’t simply verifying that the functions work as intended, but rather removing as many dependencies as possible to reduce the massive risk of dependency supply chain attacks. Ledger software uses numerous dependencies, and if any of those dependencies were to be compromised by a bad actor, it could put wallet security at risk. Therefore, the Decred devs are taking great care to get this integration right.

Politeia

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

  • Fixed a bug where the Politeia webserver would crash when trying to process a new user’s registration payment if the transaction couldn’t be found. Now, if the transaction cannot be found, the server will simply respond that the user hasn’t paid yet.
  • Internal dev updates: require either Go 1.19 or 1.20; improved linting and logging.

vspd

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

Changes that were included in the v1.2.0 release:

Changes merged to master towards future releases:

  • Updated the admin web UI to show human-readable fee transactions instead of just raw bytes. This quality-of-life improvement for VSP admins also included some extra features like a nicer ticket search input and better JSON formatting.

dcrpool

dcrpool is server software for running a mining pool.

  • Updated CI config and dependencies to use Go 1.20, PostgreSQL 15, dcrd and dcrwallet modules from v1.8.0 release, newer third party dependencies, and enabled additional code checkers (aka linters).

Lightning Network

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

  • Updated to use latest dcrd and dcrwallet modules from v1.8.0 release.
  • Improved startup time of dcrlnd and ported a few upstream changes to make it easier. The optimization is based on providing fast access to in-flight payments and skipping the expensive scan of all historical payments on startup.
  • Updated output of dcrlncli --version to be consistent with other Decred software.
  • Updated CI configs for normal builds and Docker builds.
  • Bumped version to v0.4.0 to reflect breaking changes since v0.3.8.
  • Switched tests from the old rpctest package from dcrd repository to use the new dcrtest framework.

cspp

cspp is a server for coordinating coin mixes using the CoinShuffle++ protocol. It is non-custodial, i.e. never holds any funds. CSPP is part of StakeShuffle, Decreds privacy system.

  • Changed mix server’s send and receive timeouts to be calculated ahead of time based on the start of the mix. This implements a more robust schedule of deadlines of each step of the mixing protocol. Client-side timeouts have been greatly increased. Clients don’t need to precisely track protocol deadlines because they are coordinated by the server. Bigger client-side timeouts allow flexibility to adjust deadlines on the server without having to update client software.
  • Added StartSolver function which allows RPC clients to start the solver background process and detect its startup issues earlier before beginning a mixing session.
  • Updated dependencies.

DCRDEX

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

Changes included in the v0.6.2 release:

  • Improved help text explaining bonds in the registration flow. This is based on feedback from the community and other users new to Decred.
  • Significantly reduced the initial deposit required for bonds, from 0.056 BTC ($1,500) to 0.0035 BTC ($100). This will make it easier to onboard new users. Note that bonds can be funded with DCR too.
  • Updated to latest dcrd and dcrwallet modules from the v1.8.0 release.
  • Enabled use of external fees information for SPV wallets such as built-in DEX wallets or Electrum wallets. This works for BTC-based assets: BTC, LTC, and BCH. Before this change it was possible to pay unreasonably high fees in some scenarios.
  • Optimized loading of static GUI assets in the browser. CSS, JavaScript, images, and font files will now load faster.
  • Fixed a bug where registration flow could proceed without waiting for sufficient bond funds to be deposited.
  • Fixed a bug where the Settings page was using incorrect fund amounts for bonds.
  • Added a workaround for a Badger database truncation error which may happen on Windows after a crash. The Badger database aims to be crash-resilient without any data loss, and one way it does this is by aggressively saving all data to memory-mapped files and recovering from them after a crash. Windows handles memory-mapped files differently from other operating systems and Badger has to overallocate a huge chunk of the file upfront. After a crash, Badger needs to truncate (remove) the excess allocation before resuming normal operation. On Unix-based OS the need to truncate the file might indicate data loss, but on Windows it is just how it works and there almost zero risk of data loss in this scenario.

All changes reported below are towards the next release.

Client:

  • Added support for HTTPS connection between client’s front-end (browser UI) and back-end (the dexc process). When dexc is running on a public network HTTPS will be enabled by default, otherwise it can be forced with --webtls flag. The browser will show a scary warning about a self-signed certificate but it can be overridden.
  • Added tooltips to explain various wallet balances (Available, Locked, Immature, Bond Reserves).
  • Added a system tray option to keep the DEX running even after all windows are closed.
  • Updated the Client Installation and Configuration wiki page to make it clearer, more concise, and up-to-date with the latest release. One notable addition is a table summary of wallet types supported for each asset.
  • Added release notes for v0.6.1.
  • Fixed a bug where Accelerate button was showing for revoked (canceled) trades.

Bitcoin:

  • Recycle unused redemption and refund addresses. DEX generates new Bitcoin addresses to be used for redemptions (trade completed normally) and refunds (trade was canceled and refunded). Many addresses end up being unused. In Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets this may create gaps between used addresses that are bigger than the gap limit, which may cause problems with discovering funds and restoring wallets from seed. To avoid exceeding the gap limit, generated addresses that were not used for redemptions or refunds will be saved and used for future trades.
  • Fixed a crash of the built-in BTC wallet when syncing. Testing DEX walllets revealed a crash in the upstream btcwallet code. DEX developers contributed to investigating and fixing it.
  • Implemented a function to place multiple orders in one go. This will be used by the market making bots and may unlock trading optimizations.

Polygon (MATIC):

  • Implemented several low-level primitives and a test harness to aid in developing Polygon support. The harness was able to sync balances and send funds on simnet and testnet. Existing Ethereum code has been refactored to be more generic and reusable by Polygon code.
  • Extended the test harness to create two nodes, connect them together, and mine blocks.

App packaging:

  • Added packaging scripts to build a DMG installer for macOS.
  • Created a DCRDEX package in Arch User Repository (AUR). On Arch or Arch-based Linux distributions like Manjaro it can be installed with an optimistic command like $ yay dcrdex. Documentation has been updated with a list of existing and upcoming packages for various packaging systems.

Server:

  • Changed order limits to be based on bond strength. Increasing the bond tier by locking more funds will unlock bigger order sizes. Order limit is also reduced by bad behavior like not completing the swaps. This change should fix inability to submit orders for some users. The penalty and reward system is still a work in progress.

Developer and internal changes:

  • Updated simnet blockchain with new proof of work.
  • Added scripts to automatically update cache busters.
  • Enabled caching of Go build outputs produced by GitHub Actions. This avoids unnecessary recompilation and speeds up builds and tests, which run for every pull request. As a result, it takes less time to see if a change being developed breaks any tests.
Image: Improved intro to bonds in DCRDEX
Image: Wallet types supported by DCRDEX

dcrdata

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

  • Updated to use latest dcrd modules released in v1.8.0. This makes dcrdata and its clients like Decrediton aware of the new consensus votes, and also adds them to the Agendas page.
  • Updated block rewards math to be aware of the DCP-12 activation date, as well the new block reward split.
  • Fixed a bug where TSpend transactions were included in coin supply data shown on Charts page. Combined with a fix for coin supply reporting in dcrd this fixes supply discrepancy between dcrdata’s Home and Charts pages.
  • Updated CI build config, Docker config, and linters.

Timestamply

Timestamply is a free service for timestamping files powered by Decred blockchain. A timestamp proves that a certain file has existed at a certain moment of time. This has a range of applications in protecting data integrity.

Documentation

dcrdocs is the source code for Decred user documentation.

Bison Relay

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

All work reported below is merged to master towards the next release.

GUI and CLI apps:

  • Create new group chats version 1 by default. This is the latest version that supports multiple admins in one group chat.
  • Persist received but not fully processed group chat messages. This helps to show messages in the correct order, especially after app restart.
  • Reduced max number of idle HTTP connections from 100 to 2. HTTP connections to the “normal web” are used to fetch DCR/BTC and BTC/USD exchange rates.
  • Made server reconnection loop faster.
  • Fixed some issues with key exchanges (KX). Improved reporting of completed KX in direct and group chats. Avoid multiple KX attempts with same user when joining multiple group chats. Added automatic KX attempts when sending messages to group chat members, this should fix message delivery issues due to missed KX with target user.

GUI app:

  • Added Address Book that lists all known users and group chats. Recent chats list was optimized to hide empty chats and show newer chats on top. Hidden empty chats can be brought back from the address book.
  • Added search and filter function to the Address Book page.
  • Added ability to hide non-empty chats. Hidden chats can be shown again via the address book.
  • Create config directory if it is missing.
  • Store and load invoices to better track tip status across app restarts.
  • Improved sorting of Feed posts to take recent comments into account.
  • Improved post commenting UX to better visualize if the user is adding a top-level comment or a reply to another comment.
  • Refined chat list UX.
  • Optimized vertical space on inbound and outbound channel pages.
  • Updated Flutter dependencies.
  • Fixed loading of history for contacts that have not completed a key exchange.
  • Fixed a bug that could prevent errors from being properly shown on the onboarding page.
  • Fixed a bug where the Chats page was not aware of hidden chats and would erroneously show “Funds Needed” or “Invite Needed” pages.
  • Fixed Suggest KX action not working properly. This also adds hidden users to the dropdown.
  • Fixed possibility to open multiple file pickers in places like creating posts or generating invites.

CLI app:

Stores implementation:

  • Added a page to see information about one order.
  • Allow store admin and customer to add comments to the order, and show them on both admin and customer order pages.

Preparations for mobile app builds:

  • Configured the embedded dcrlnd to not include IP or hostname in generated TLS certificates. This is needed to make the Android version compile.
  • Updated gomobile library.
  • Fixed compilation of golib with gomobile. golib is an adapter for the low level Bison Relay code in Go for reuse by the high level GUI code, which is written in Dart and Flutter.
  • Moved and adapted some desktop code to a shared location to enable reuse on mobile.
  • Made multiple changes specific to iOS and Android builds.
  • First pass of making views responsive and usable on smaller screens and mobile platforms. A more thorough design implementation will be done in the future once UX specs are finalized.

Developer and internal changes:

Other

  • Testnet coin faucet updated to Go 1.20 and Decred modules released with v1.8.0. Faucet is used by developers to obtain testnet DCR.
  • gominer was updated for latest Decred modules, linters, and GitHub Actions build config.
  • Voting Dashboard: updated for Go 1.20 and newer Decred and third party dependencies, added display of consensus voting agendas in v1.8.0, fixed voted versions for testnet3.
  • dcrinstall, an automatic installer/updater for command-line apps, has been updated to v1.8.0. Latest version can be downloaded on the Releases page.
  • dcrseeder, a service for bootstrapping Decred node discovery, has been updated for Go 1.20 and Decred modules from v1.8.0 release.

People

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

  • Twitter followers: 53,558 (+450)
  • Reddit subscribers: 12,738 (+15)
  • Matrix #general users: 787 (+13)
  • Discord users: 1,586 (-4), verified to post: 635 (+1)
  • Telegram users: 2,362 (-108)
  • YouTube subscribers: 4,640 (+0), views: 231.1K (+1.5K)

Governance

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

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

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

Image: Decred Treasury balance in DCR
Image: Decred Treasury balance in USD

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

  • A proposal to fund development of the Decred.club website with Chinese language content and grow a community around it for $2,400.
  • A proposal to rebrand Decred Magazine to Cypherpunk Times and continue producing it for another year with an increased budget of $44,000.
  • A proposal to produce 90-second videos of someone in a ski mask talking about Decred in one of 12 languages at a cost of $23,650.
  • A proposal to produce a promotional website for DCRDEX at a cost of $2,000.
  • The proposal to fund exploration of Mesh architecture for DCRDEX with a budget of $164,000 was approved with 94% Yes votes and 44% turnout.

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

Network

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

Image: Decred hashrate

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

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

Staking: Ticket price varied between 175–328 DCR.

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

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

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

Image: Node operators have been quick to upgrade to v1.8.0. The red area before Jan 2023 indicates incomplete data we had at that time.
Image: Block version 10 quickly took over to unlock consensus voting

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

Image: Spikes in daily StakeShuffle volume
Image: Biggest monthly StakeShuffle volume so far

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

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

Ecosystem

Voting Service Providers:

  • VSP operators have been upgrading quickly to support the upcoming consensus upgrades. 7 out of 14 VSPs have upgraded in just 3 days after new vspd was released. By Jun 30 all VSPs have been running v1.2.0.
  • New VSP at vote.dcr-swiss.ch has started their testnet and mainnet testing to get added to the VSP list.

Wallets:

  • DCRDEX has been added to decred.org Wallets page as a “multi-coin light wallet with DEX support”.
  • Atomic Wallet has been compromised around June 2–3. Losses are estimated between $67 million and over $100 million by third party researchers, while Atomic Wallet prefers to measure it as “less than 0.1% of users”, that is less than 5,000 users based on the 5 million users claimed on the website. The root cause has not been identified as of June 20. Estonia-registered Atomic Wallet has DCR support since August 2018. DCR was not in the list of affected coins posted by ZachXBT on June 4 and we have not seen any loss reports from DCR users. If you know any please share in the #ecosystem chat.
  • Ledger Live users may want to set a password because until it is set, Ledger Live may leak an unencrypted extended public key to the file system. This single key allows to find all addresses and transactions used by the wallet.

Exchanges:

  • A brief outage of DCR deposits has been observed at Binance on June 14 with a notice about “undergoing maintenance”. This was likely due to a misunderstanding about Decred’s forking process and the v1.8.0 release which came out on June 13. The issue was resolved in less than 12 hours.
  • Binance has reverted its decision to delist DCR in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain starting June 26. Customers received an updated list of coins that do not allow to “fully monitor transactions” with only 5 out of the 12 coins originally planned for delisting. DCR is not in the updated list, possibly due to its privacy system being opt-in.
  • Binance and CZ have been sued by U.S. SEC for violating securities laws. The charges are similar to those filed against Binance by CFTC in March. The news has triggered massive withdrawals from Binance and Binance.US. DCR is still not in the updated list of 50+ assets mentioned as “securities” by the SEC at different points in time. Binance is still the biggest market for DCR if the reported traded volume can be trusted.
  • Other Binance news include deregistering in Cyprus, leaving Netherlands, an order to stop services from a Belgian regulator, and an upcoming change of the SEPA banking provider. The latter may require users to accept new terms and update their banking details after September 25, 2023.
  • KuCoin is adding mandatory KYC for all users starting July 15, 2023. Their first verification level called “Basic Personal Info” may be sufficient but it needs testing — reports are appreciated! This change may have an unfortunate effect of ending support for U.S.-based users who were allowed previously as long as they remain unverified, according to Forbes and a couple of user reports we have seen. KuCoin is based in Seychelles and has DCR trading pairs since September 2018. As of July 7 the DCR/BTC market reported a $20K 24-hour volume.

Communication systems:

  • Decred’s Discord was saved from death and continues to operate with stricter rules. On May 1 it has been announced that chat bridges to Discord were disabled and that Discord is likely to be shut down due to the difficulties of preventing and removing bad content. @tothemoon stepped in to fix that, resulting in the new user verification flow that is much better at preventing spam. New rules require users to link a social media account like Reddit, Twitter, or GitHub, or request a special manual approval from the admins. All existing members went back to unverified state if they did not meet the rules, which affected ~300 out of 900 members.
  • Telegram and Discord support channels have been removed from the Community page to reflect the recent changes. All support requests are now redirected to Matrix chat.
  • Decred announcements are now available on Bluesky. As of July 4 Bluesky is still in the invite-only beta and you need an account to follow Decred. Bluesky source code was made public in May 2023.
  • Decred Twitter community has been created. Twitter Communities allow to have dedicated, moderated spaces where only members can tweet and reply, while the activity is visible publicly. Communities compete with Reddit and Facebook Groups.

Other news:

Services discovered but not tested by the community yet:

Join our #ecosystem chat to get more news about Decred services.

Warning: the authors of the Decred Journal have no idea about the trustworthiness of any of the services above. Please do your own research before trusting your personal information or assets to any entity.

Outreach

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

Monde PR’s achievements:

  • Pitched 1 commentary opportunity
  • Pitched 2 story ideas to target crypto publications
  • Secured 2 media interviews
  • Secured 1 media opportunity

Below is an update from Decred Vanguard team.

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

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

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

$100 prize winners for June:

  • @PubPete — Exceptional activity
  • @TallAmericano — Exceptional activity

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

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

Events

Attended:

  • @arij and @khalidesi attended GITEX Africa Digital Summit in Marrakech, Morocco. There was no Decred stand due to high cost, instead @arij and @khalidesi represented the project less formally by networking with the visitors and made some valuable contacts. Here is the report.

Media

Selected articles:

Decred Magazine engagement stats for June 2023:

  • Total number of articles on DM: 479
  • Newsletter subscribers: 101
  • New DM posts and newsletters sent: 19
  • Active social media campaigns: 66
  • Completed social media campaigns: 44
  • Social media posts: 160
  • Likes: 1,070
  • Re-tweets: 256
  • Social media followers across all platforms and accounts (including @DecredSociety): 1,410

Videos:

Live stream:

Audio:

Art and fun:

Translations:

  • Decred Journal March-May got a total of 3 new translations to Arabic (@arij, @abdulrahman4), Chinese (@Dominic) and Polish (@kozel). Thank you folks!

Discussions:

Selected non-Decred articles posted on Cypherpunk Times:

Image: Leading the DAO pack by @OfficialCryptos

Markets

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

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

Image: DCR/USD accumulation zones analysis by @saender
Image: Market Valuations (USD) based on Decred-specific Staked Realized Value metric from @bochinchero
Image: Decred-specific SASRV/RV Ratio metric by @bochinchero provides a lagging indicator of the direction that the market is trending

And one new chart from @bochinchero:

another interesting one I had been tinkering with before, estimating what the realized value would be without tickets/votes (e.g. RV-SRV), it looks a lot like the BTC RV does… and seems to indicate local bottoms pretty well
obviously given the manipulated markets a lot of this can be taken as a grain of salt, trying to read rigged tea leaves
Image: Realized Value minus Staked Realized Value by @bochinchero
Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

Relevant External

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About

This is issue 60 of Decred Journal. Index of all issues, mirrors, and translations is available here.

Most information from third parties is relayed directly from the source after a minimal sanity check. The authors of the Decred Journal cannot verify all claims. Please beware of scams and do your own research.

Credits (alphabetical order):

  • writing, editing, publishing: bee, bochinchero, Exitus, jz, karamble, l1ndseymm, phoenixgreen, richardred, zippycorners
  • reviews and feedback: davecgh, jholdstock
  • title image: Exitus
  • funding: Decred stakeholders

Decred Journal — June 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Decred Journal — May 2023]]> https://medium.com/decred/decred-journal-may-2023-6221b5da61e7?source=rss----894ef2a75543---4 https://medium.com/p/6221b5da61e7 Thu, 22 Jun 2023 20:01:44 GMT 2023-06-22T20:01:44.678Z Decred Journal — May 2023
Image: Cyberstorm by @Exitus

Highlights of May:

  • DCRDEX v0.6.1 has been released, with DigiByte support and important fixes for LTC and ZEC.
  • The Decred Vanguard proposal was approved and the community-driven social media outreach program has already started.
  • Bison Relay has been making progress, with a first version of pages being merged as well as the merchant tools for Stores.

Contents:

· DCRDEX v0.6.1 Release
· Development
· People
· Governance
· Network
· Ecosystem
· Outreach
· Events
· Media
· Markets
· Relevant External

DCRDEX v0.6.1 Release

This DEX release features:

  • Initial DigiByte (DGB) support (requires a full node wallet running alongside)
  • Important fixes for Litecoin (LTC) and Zcash (ZEC)
  • Rate of an order in Your Orders table is easier to see now
  • Chart candle size is now remembered and the default size changed to 1 hour

Get the latest DEX client as a standalone app, or as part of Decrediton, or install it from Decred’s custom Umbrel App Store. As always, we recommend to verify the files before running.

Development

The work reported below has the “merged to master” status unless noted otherwise. It means that the work is completed, reviewed, and integrated into the source code that advanced users can build and run, but is not yet available in release binaries for regular users.

dcrd

dcrd is a full node implementation that powers Decred’s peer-to-peer network around the world.

Changes merged in master towards future releases:

  • Cleaned up several functions by removing error states which no longer occur.
  • Last August, in order to combat ASIC attacks on the testnet and ensure CPUs will always be able to mine new testnet blocks, the testnet was updated so that the testnet mining difficulty is throttled by a maximum value. This month, the mining template generator and CPU miner were updated to remove the old testnet logic that no longer applies, since all new testnet blocks enforce difficulty throttling.
  • Removed a deprecated internal method which listed subscribed clients waiting for blockchain updates. Since this method was internal, it never needed to be shared outside of dcrd.
  • A bug was discovered via dcrdata where the total coin supply calculation returned from the dcrd RPC server did not include the new TreasuryBases - the part of each block’s reward that flows into the new decentralized treasury. The total coin supply calculation has now been updated, which also included an update to the database. It should be noted that this bug was only a minor error with the RPC coin supply calculation, and did not affect consensus in any way.

In progress:

  • Implementing DCP-11 PoW hash consensus vote.

dcrwallet

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

Backported changes ready for the next v1.7.x release:

  • Respect proxy config for SPV and P2P seeder connections. This is to prevent leaking internal network details.

Changes merged in master towards future releases:

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).

In progress:

Other:

  • Decrediton has been added to the winget package repository. Windows user can now install it with winget install Decred.Decrediton.

vspd

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

  • Copied and adjusted automatic VSP fee payment from dcrwallet to vspd repository. This code was private in dcrwallet but in vspd it can be consumed by other software, which will be utilized by DCR staking integration in DCRDEX.

Lightning Network

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

  • Added support for custom connection for dcrwallet. It allows LN code to configure dcrwallet to connect to SPV peers using a proxy server.

cspp

cspp is a server for coordinating coin mixes using the CoinShuffle++ protocol. It is non-custodial, i.e. never holds any funds. CSPP is part of StakeShuffle, Decreds privacy system.

  • Prevent duplicate inputs earlier in the mixing process. Before this fix double spends would trigger an error when sending the mix transaction, it could fail a mixing session and avoid blame assignment.
  • Improved logging of mixing sessions to always capture session ID, run number, and denomination value of mixed outputs.
  • Prevent CoinJoin transactions from exceeding mempool size limits. This may exclude some peers from a mix, if that happens the server will attempt to pair them in the next mixing epoch. A check has been added to retry the session if the number of peers drops below the minimum setting.

DCRDEX

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

Changes included in v0.6.1 release:

  • Set high enough Zcash transaction fee rate. DEX calculates fees based on transaction size, but Zcash is an exception as it currently uses a standard fee of 1,000 zats or 0.00001 ZEC per transaction, regardless of size. This will change when ZIP 317 activates, resulting in higher fees. To ensure DEX transactions are always relayed and mined, this change bumps fees to be around 0.0002–0.0003 ZEC. A hard-coded fee rate of 84 zats/byte is used as a workaround for Zcash not having an easy way to estimate fees.
  • Added DigiByte trading support with full node wallets.
  • Added block explorer links to ZEC transactions.
  • Added compile time option for the interval at which DEX server polls for new blocks of Bitcoin-like assets. It allows to use slower polling for remote nodes where the default 1-second interval would be too fast.
  • Fixed failure to reconfigure a disconnected Bitcoin-like wallet in certain circumstances.
  • Fixed Bitcoin-like wallets always requiring a restart and not having a chance for live reconfiguration.
  • Fixed full restart not being triggered in some scenarios of changing RPC connection config.
  • Fixed incorrect transaction ID shown when sending ZEC.
  • Fixed several issues with bonds for ZEC and non-SegWit assets.
  • Backported ~22 fixes and improvements made in master before May.

All other changes below are merged in master towards future releases.

Client:

  • Added expected refund time to the Matches card. Previously it could show a confusing <Pending> for hours.
  • Automated more wallet enable/disable steps. Disabling chain’s primary asset wallet will also disable all token wallets for that chain. Enabling a token wallet will also enable chain’s primary asset wallet.
  • Optimized request handling by minimizing expensive calls to load user information.
  • Restored colored logging of HTTP requests to stdout.
  • Utilize external fee rate sources in SPV mode. Before this change it was possible to pay unreasonably high fees when sending from an SPV wallet.
  • Removed requirement to enter a password when canceling an order.

Bitcoin:

  • Fixed issues: simnet wallet could attempt to connect to mainnet, Bitcoin-like wallets always require a restart, reconfiguring a disconnected wallet could fail in certain circumstances.

Ethereum:

  • Made token approvals a separate manual step instead of an automatic part of the first swap. In order to trade tokens (such as USDC) the swap contract must be approved to handle tokens on behalf of the user. Making it a manual action allows users to be aware of what is happening and not be surprised by the high fee of their first swap. An approval can be later revoked in wallet settings.

Firo:

App packaging:

  • Introduced a new executable dexc-desktop that wraps the DEX web app in a WebView component to look like a desktop app. The app will keep running in the background if there are active orders (but can be force-closed using the --kill switch on the command line).
  • Added script to build Debian packages.

Developer and internal changes:

  • Updated npm dependencies.
  • Moved the market making bot logic out of the Core package into its own package. This is needed to improve architecture and add more bot strategies in the future.
  • Enabled the makezero linter to detect more bugs in memory allocation.
  • Updated build and test workflow to add Node.js v20 and remove v16. Node.js v16 will reach end-of-life in September 2023.
  • Changed chain tip and peer tracking goroutines to shutdown more cleanly.
Image: DEX’es swap contract requires a one-time approval to swap your tokens.
Image: Solar setup running Umbrel with DEX market maker + arbitrage. By @busyLightz.

dcrdata

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

  • Fixed numbers being slightly off on the address balance charts due to not filtering out sidechain and invalid outputs.

Bison Relay

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

All work reported below is merged to master towards the next release (likely v0.1.8).

GUI and CLI apps:

  • Implemented initial version of the Pages feature. Pages allow to browse static content from a remote user. Only Markdown pages are supported. Pages can link to other users’ pages using br:// links. Limitations of the first iteration are listed in the pull request. Pages is a big feature that will need rounds of improvements in response to user feedback.
  • Improved tip retry strategy. Instead of making multiple parallel attempts at paying tips for one user, only a single one is tried at a time. This should help avoid problems with tip payments failing due to LN nodes with low capacity. Also tip attempts failed for having no LN route will be retried (this error may be temporary). CLI app can list running tip user attempts with the new /runningtips command.
  • Added ability to connect the embedded dcrlnd through the configured proxy server (such as Tor) to both the CLI app and the GUI app. New circuitlimit config parameter allows to limit the number of open connections when using proxy.
  • Added handshake feature that allows users to test that their encryption ratchets are still working.
  • Implemented persistent chat history that remembers last 500 messages and shows them after restarting the app. All chats are stored in log files but accessing history from the app itself is better UX and has been a frequent feature request. The plan is to eventually add on-demand loading of history as the user scrolls back in time.
  • Fixed possible broken ratchets when two users simultaneously attempt to exchange keys with each other. This could happen when two users are added to two different group chats where the other user already exists, which initiates two key exchanges at the same time.

GUI app:

  • Added context menu to individual chats and group chats.
  • Added a floating button to jump to recent messages.
  • Restricted size of embedded images shown in chats and posts. Bigger image is shown if clicked. This fixes issues with scrolling and different image sizes.
  • Fixed some issues with text selection, added height limit to code blocks and made code blocks scrollable. Two Flutter widgets have been forked and patched to work around the issues, but double click (select word) and triple click (select paragraph) still don’t work.
  • Fixed scrollbar issues on LN management views.
  • Smaller fixes for scrolling and overflow behavior.

CLI app:

  • Enabled brclient to delegate Pages and Store requests to another program via the clientrpc API, and forward its responses back to requesting BR users. This flexibility will enable useful features in the future.
  • Enabled brclient to delegate requests to a HTTP or HTTPS website. This allows BR users to access HTTP/HTTPS resources through another BR user who acts as a proxy.
  • Sort posts by most recent activity. Also unread posts will be highlighted with a different color.
  • Allow to use the /closechannel command with a short prefix of the channel ID (full ID is 64 characters long).

Stores progress:

  • Implemented merchant-side foundations for simple Stores. Unlike Pages, Stores are dynamic resources that can present product items for sale. Store has a front page and individual product pages that are generated from local files. Store is reloaded automatically when its files change. BR client running the store can serve product pages, maintain shopping carts, handle order placements, and create invoices. Prices will be shown in USD but paid in DCR. Exchange rate is fetched from dcrdata. DCR amount to be paid is locked for 60 minutes while the order is valid. CLI app only supports on-chain payments.
  • Implemented simple forms. Forms can be viewed, filled and submitted by store customers to add items to the shopping cart or to place an order.
  • Added shipping details to orders. Some products may require to fill shipping info.

Other:

  • Added end-to-end performance tests.
  • @JC made an onboarding event in #trading with a giveaway of 20 prepaid invites with 0.05 DCR each.

People

Community stats as of Jun 2 (compared to May 3):

  • Twitter followers: 53,108 (+31)
  • Reddit subscribers: 12,723 (+22)
  • Matrix #general users: 774 (+11)
  • Discord users: 1,590 (+17), verified to post: 634 (-287) — Discord was unbridged and got stronger verfication rules
  • Telegram users: 2,470 (-38)
  • YouTube subscribers: 4,640 (+10), views: 229.6K (+1.5K)

Governance

In May the new treasury received 8,088 DCR worth $139K at May’s average rate of $17.13. 3,591 DCR was spent to pay contractors, worth $62K at same rate.

A treasury spend tx was approved with 6,722 Yes votes and 52% turnout, and mined on May 20. It had 23 outputs making payments to contractors, ranging from 4 DCR to 1,464 DCR. Most of this DCR was likely paid for March work, at its billing exchange rate of $20.69 the TSpend is worth around $74K.

As of June 17, combined balance of legacy and new treasury is 858,136 DCR (12.1 million USD at $14.08).

Proposals approved in May:

  • Decred Vanguard proposal was approved for a budget of $46,784 to fund growth of a community driven outreach program, with 94% Yes votes and turnout of 39%.
  • BTC-ECHO proposal was approved for a budget of $9,500 for a three month trial with German crypto site BTC-ECHO.de during which they produce two sponsored articles, with 69% Yes votes and turnout of 32%. Prior to the vote it was edited to include additional promotion on their social media and a 2-week ad on their podcast. Second edit clarified that they do not require upfront payment and agree to wait for the payment for up to 60 days after the campaign has ended, in line with how most existing proposals and contractors operate. After the proposal was approved they posted an update about next steps and the timeline.

Proposals submitted in May:

See Politeia Digest issue 60 for more details on the month’s proposals.

Network

Hashrate: May’s hashrate opened at ~74 Ph/s and closed ~66 Ph/s, bottoming at 61 Ph/s and peaking at 88 Ph/s throughout the month.

Image: Decred hashrate

Distribution of 67 Ph/s hashrate reported by the pools on Jun 1: Poolin 40%, F2Pool 40%, AntPool 16%, BTC.com 5%.

Distribution of 1,000 blocks actually mined by Jun 1: F2Pool 40%, Poolin 35%, AntPool 17%, BTC.com 8%.

Image: Historical pool hashrate distribution

Staking: Ticket price varied between 173–334 DCR.

Image: Ticket price made another swing

The locked amount was 9.38–9.90 million DCR, meaning that 61.7–65.1% of the circulating supply participated in Proof of Stake.

VSP: The 14 listed VSPs collectively managed ~6,650 (-310) live tickets, which was 16.8% of the ticket pool (0.3%) as of Jun 1.

Image: Distribution of tickets managed by VSPs

Nodes: Decred Mapper observed 147 dcrd nodes on Jun 1 of the following versions: v1.7.7–25%, v1.7.1–21%, v1.7.5–18%, v1.7.2–10%, v1.8.0 dev builds — 9%, v1.7.0–7%, v1.7.4–3%, other — 8%.

Image: Historical dcrd version distribution, data from nodes.jholdstock.uk. Data before Jan 2023 was incomplete.

The share of mixed coins varied between 61.8–61.9%. Daily mixed volume varied between 143–497K DCR.

Image: Monthly StakeShuffle volume in USD

Decred’s Lightning Network explorer has seen 211 nodes (+15), 423 channels (+24) with a total capacity of 176 DCR (+13), as of Jun 1. These stats are different for each node. For example, @karamble’s node reported 210 nodes (+17), 446 channels (+17) and 182 DCR (+9) capacity on same day Jun 1.

Image: Decred’s Lightning Network capacity

And a few new charts from @bochinchero:

Image: Average block time remains stable at 5 minutes
Image: Decred chain is adding ~180 MB per month
Image: The full Decred blockchain can fit in modern smartphone’s storage
Image: Monthly DCR issuance in USD — rewards shifted from miners to stakers and will shift more soon
Image: Total monthly fees — Decred is still cheap to use

There are more charts now than it is feasible to show in the Journal. The above and other charts can be found here — reuse on social media is highly encouraged!

Ecosystem

New services:

  • ZEC/BTC and ZEC/USDC pairs have been launched at dex.decred.org.
  • DGB/BTC market went live. DEX client version 0.6.1 or higher is required, it can be obtained as a standalone app or with Decrediton v1.8.0. Only full node-based DGB wallet is supported initially, but built-in light wallet may become possible when DigiByte v8.22 is released.
  • Decred’s Matrix chat logs can now be viewed archive.matrix.org — a new chat archive browser replacing view.matrix.org. The service works without JavaScript and does not require a Matrix account.

Services lost:

  • Binance is leaving Canada in response to recent crypto regulations that prohibit registered exchanges from accepting stablecoin deposits or selling them to the customers without approval from CSA. Other restrictions include a ban on margin trading and investor limits. According to #trading chat customers were asked via email to close any open positions by September 30, 2023.
  • Binance plans to delist 12 privacy coins in France, Italy, Poland and Spain. Starting from June 26, residents of these countries will no longer be able to trade DCR. Binance has recently acquired appropriate licenses in the affected jurisdictions. The move came soon after the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) has passed in the EU on May 16.
  • Hotbit announced it is shutting down operations and asks to withdraw all assets by June 30. DCR trading was available on the main hotbit.io since October 2019 and on its Korean branch since November 2020. According to some community members DCR was delisted some time ago and no DCR users should be affected. Reasons to sunset the exchange included: losses from the criminal investigation, outflow of funds from CEXes, unsustainable business model of trying to list too many coins of which many get hacked, and difficulties to comply with regulation. Quoting the goodbye announcement: “either embrace the regulation or become more decentralized”. We’re on it!

Other news:

  • Apparently Huobi did not delist DCR as it planned to in September 2022. The announcement page has been removed but an archived copy is available. USDT trading pairs for DCR and 6 other privacy coins from that list are still live and report good-looking volumes on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap as of May 12. Observers from the #trading chat said that DCR has never stopped flowing back and forth between Huobi and Binance.
  • Bittrex has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. and Malta, 3 weeks after it was charged by the SEC for operating an unregistered securities exchange. Both arms have been processing withdrawals since April.
  • Ledger announced an upcoming Ledger Recover service. Recover allows to register your ID (CA, EU, UK, US) and backup the wallet seed at trusted third parties. The seed is split into 3 fragments, the fragments are encrypted with a symmetric key and sent to 3 different backup providers. It can be later rebuilt on another Ledger device by verifying ID and getting 2 out of 3 fragments from the providers. Only Ledger Nano X is supported currently. DCR users may want to evaluate the risks of using Ledger in light of this new feature, which has been added in firmware version 2.2.1 and should be inactive until explicitly enabled.
  • See more detailed coverage in #ecosystem.

New services discovered but not tested by the community yet:

  • DCR payment option has been spotted at fxDreema — a graphical builder of trading bots compatible with MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5.
  • CryptoWallet.com features a mobile app that allows users to buy and sell crypto, supports VISA/MasterCard/SEPA transfers, and plans to launch own card product. The company is licensed in Estonia. Research and testing help is much appreciated.

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

Decred Vanguard has been approved and started its outreach operations. Vanguard has its own Discord server where members coordinate, develop best approaches and evaluate results. Members make use of Midjourney AI to generate advanced art to help get Decred’s message across. Several members acquired Twitter Blue and it seems to be working quite well. Key challenge at this point is recruiting members who are active and productive, this is why the initial monthly stipend is set low at $100. Another challenge is marketing in the bear market. In May no prizes for big/notable engagements have been allocated.

Anyone interested in joining Decred Vanguard should contact @Tivra or @Exitus. If you are new to Decred it’s OKAY — you just need to be willing to learn and help out where you can.

Vanguard really feels like something we needed for years. [@Exitus]
Image: Vanguard’s War Room

Monde PR’s achievements:

  • Pitched 1 commentary opportunity
  • Pitched 7 media opportunities
  • Secured 1 media interview

Secured the following media placements:

  • @jy-p was interviewed by Authority Magazine discussing many aspects of Decred including: Decred’s origin story, Bison Relay’s offering as a sovereign internet, upcoming support for pages and e-commerce stores, Politeia, and Decred’s use in Brazil’s election.

Events

Attended:

  • @arij and @khalidesi attended EMEC EXPO in Casablanca, Morocco, a big 9K people event dedicated to digital technologies. The team had a stand where they explained Decred features to visitors from various fields, interacted with several Moroccan companies, and met some people who were already familiar with the project. See the full report here.

Media

Selected articles:

Decred Magazine engagement stats for May 2023:

  • Total number of articles on DM: 460
  • Newsletter subscribers: 100
  • New DM posts and newsletters sent: 16
  • Active social media campaigns: 57
  • Completed social media campaigns: 41
  • Social media posts: 172
  • Likes: 1,180
  • Re-tweets: 302
  • Social media followers across all platforms and accounts (including @DecredSociety): 1,350

Videos:

Livestream:

Audio:

Art and fun:

Image: Decred shedding the ballast. By @OfficialCryptos.

Translations:

Markets

In May DCR was trading between USDT 15.19–20.59 and BTC 0.00056–0.00075. The average daily rate was $17.13.

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

Image: Odd price wicks on DCR/USD seem to happen during low correlation with BTC/USD price action. Analysis by @saender.
Image: Market Valuations (USD) based on Decred-specific Staked Realised Value metric from @bochinchero
Image: DCR/USD accumulation zones analysis by @saender
Image: DCRDEX monthly volume in USD

Relevant External

Ethereum’s Beacon chain has been experiencing some issues with finality, two episodes where validators mostly stopped proposing attestations for about an hour and nobody is sure why. Transactions on the Ethereum network have been able to continue and so users may have noticed no issues, but behind the scenes the beacon chain which finalizes everything was not working so these transactions were more susceptible to reversion than would have ordinarily been the case. Ethereum core developers released patches for the two clients affected by the issue (Go-based Prysm from Prysmatic Labs and Java-based Teku from ConsenSys), which had been caused by exceptionally high load on the nodes running these clients.

The Dash network and chain stalled on May 22 for 16 hours, due to a glitch caused by the upgrading the BLS threshold cryptography to an industry standard in v19. The core team produced a quick patch (v19.1) to halt deployment of v19 and this allowed the network to resume after 16 hours of downtime. A fix for the issue and another attempt to deploy the changes will be included in v19.2.

Halborn has documented several issues discovered while auditing the Dogecoin codebase, but which also apply to a number of forks of the same Bitcoin lineage, including Litecoin and Zcash. They refer to these as “The Rab13s Vulnerabilities”, and the most exploitable ones would allow attackers to take nodes offline, with others allowing remote code execution but only with valid credentials, making exploiting the issue more difficult.

The new BRC-20 token standard for Bitcoin inscriptions (NFTs) which was launched in March has reached a combined (notional) market valuation of $1 billion. This milestone was reached after ORDI, the first BRC-20 token, was listed on some major exchanges.

Bitcoin has set a new record in daily transactions. The trend of minting fungible tokens with the BRC-20 standard is spreading to Litecoin and Dogecoin chains, similarly raising their transaction activity levels.

There has been some criticism of the inefficiency of storage of the BRC-20 data on-chain, suggestions that not spending the time to encode data as binary is costing 4x as much in transaction fees. The choice was apparently made due to a desire to have the on chain data be human-readable, but there are suggestions that using a lot more block space may have been deliberate on the part of the designers.

Taproot Assets v0.2 was released, adding a set of tools that developers can use on testnet to issue, transfer and discover assets on the Taproot Assets Protocol (formerly Taro). Taproot Assets Protocol is aiming to provide a more scalable way to handle assets on the bitcoin chain by handling most transactions off-chain, as opposed to Ordinal inscriptions which use block space in an inefficient manner and cause a material increase in fees for all users of the network. Version 0.2 adds support for “virtual Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions” (vPSBTs), which will allow developers to more easily handle Taproot Assets. Lightning network support for assets and stablecoins is one of the big targets for a future release, geared towards use in emerging markets.

Richard Heart’s Pulsechain (an Ethereum fork), which is a long anticipated part of the HEX ecosystem, launched, along with “PulseX” decentralized exchange (a Uniswap fork). These launches have been much anticipated by the HEX community, since years before they pivoted to become forks of Ethereum software. However the aim of lowering fees for HEX users does not seem to have been met, because of the lengthy sequence of transactions required to bridge assets to and from Pulsechain. Furthermore, significant liquidity issues made it difficult for users to obtain PLS that they could use to pay gas fees, resulting in many users being stuck without the right kind of tokens to use the network at all and these only being available at extortionate mark-ups. The prices for all the related tokens have been in a steep decline.

DeFi lending protocol AAVE approved and deployed a change to its smart contracts on Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche networks, the change was intended to adjust interest rate calculations but, due to a function formatting error, broke the protocol on the Polygon chain. User funds worth around $120M were unavailable while a proposal to fix the error worked its way through the governance process, taking around a week to resolve the issue.

The DAO for development of OFAC-sanctioned ETH mixing service Tornado Cash was taken over by a hacker who granted themselves 1.2 million TORN tokens and used these to approve spends from the DAO’s Treasury fund. The code to allow the hack was recently passed within a legitimate-looking proposal which was approved by the usual Tornado DAO governance process. The hack did not affect the Tornado Cash mixer itself, but rather the smart contracts associated with the DAO. After a few days the attacker made a proposal to reset the changes they had made and return the unspent tokens they had granted themselves, returning control to the DAO after pocketing around $900,000 of ETH mixed through Tornado Cash.

Binance has been compiling lists of “no-progress projects” which it has listed for trade, and has started adding them to the “Innovation Zone”, on a pathway to delisting if they don’t start demonstrating some progress. CZ has already realized that this may necessitate a re-naming of the “Innovation Zone”.

Bittrex filed for bankruptcy in Delaware but with a plan to reimburse all customer asset deposits, with the global Bittrex entity seemingly unaffected.

Silvergate Capital has been delisted from NYSE and gone into liquidation. It is the parent company of Silvergate Bank, once the largest crypto banking partner. Silvergate bank was wound down in March after a rush of customer withdrawals following the collapse of FTX meant they made a loss of $1 billion in the last quarter of 2022.

Ledger hardware wallet has been recovering from a PR fail of the messaging around a new seed backup feature, Ledger Recover. The ex-CEO added fuel to the fire when he addressed concerns about seeds being exported by the new firmware by stating that users were already trusting Ledger to not deploy this kind of backdoor seed-exporting firmware, so he couldn’t see the big deal.

The finance ministers of the EU’s Council have signed off on the Markets in Crypto Assets regulation (MiCA), meaning that its provisions will come into force in June or July 2024. MiCA will require crypto firms to seek licenses to operate in the EU, and sets requirements like reserve holdings for stablecoins. Alongside MiCA some new measures were agreed to mandate sharing of information about crypto holdings of EU citizens with tax authorities.

A supply chain attack from 2022 with a tampered Trezor device has been documented. The user bought the device from an online marketplace and their crypto disappeared about a month after they started using it. Upon inspection some dodgy firmware had been installed which would cycle between 20 pre-set seeds rather than generating a random seed, and would only use the first character of any password set — so that the device could only generate 1,280 different private keys, a manageable number for the attackers to watch.

Ishan Wahi, the Coinbase manager accused of insider trading to profit from new listings was sentenced to 2 years in prison after pleading guilty. Wahi provided the information to his brother and another man, who made over $1 million trading on the information. Wahi’s brother pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

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

About

This is issue 59 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, l1ndseymm, phoenixgreen, richardred, zippycorners
  • reviews and feedback: davecgh
  • title image: Exitus
  • funding: Decred stakeholders

Decred Journal — May 2023 was originally published in Decred on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]>