[At Stake] — Highlighting Everything PoS
With the PoS space steadily growing week in and out, we tend to see great writers and various entities cover projects on a large scope with interests in some shape or form aligned to their own. No matter how great we are at continuously expanding our perspective either via social media or social groups we sometimes create echo chambers. This series is our small effort to combat such and help expand our personal views as well as our community’s on the greater blockchain space.
Project Updates
Chainlink
FinScore will be integrating with Chainlink in the near future. FinScore is an alternative credit-scoring company based in Southeast Asia. Pairing together with Chainlink the company will be able to provide “smart contract-based lending protocols as well as the wider DeFi ecosystem with alternative credit scoring powered by advanced analytics.” Lenders will be given access to real-world data through the FinScore Social Presence Score, a fraud prevention product. To read more about the upcoming integration see FinScore’s website.
Status
Status is encouraging participation in their ambassador program. The program is open to creators, teachers, developers, and really anyone that is interested in spreading the word about Status. Their mission is to create the next set of tools and infrastructure for the next generation of the internet to have access to a private, secure, open, and fair network. Think you’ve got what it takes to be an ambassador? Check out their site for more details on how you too can contribute to an awesome platform.
Ren
WBTC cafe is up and running, users will just have to send in real BTC to receive WBTC in exchange. The project was produced by three DeFi projects: RenVM, Curve Liquidity Pool, and WBTC. The ren team will be running the cafe. To read more about the project for contribution ideas check out their recent writeup!
Elrond
Elrond’s token is being integrated as a payment option by blockchain-based travel booking firms Travala.com and TravelByBit. $ERD tokens can be used to pay for airfare and accommodations through the two sites, this opens up over 600 airlines and 2 million hotels to users. Travala and TravelByBit have recently merged to form one of the largest firms, they have changed the game by directly applying cryptocurrency payments into their system. The surge in demand for the travel company has set Elrond up for serious exposure.
Urbit
Urbit put out their updates on June 15. First and foremost the first-ever results for Urbit Hackathon are in. The competition was only open to Hoon School graduates but Urbit hopes to open another one later this year that will be open to everyone. Speaking of Hoon School the curriculum has a new home at Hooniversity and is being led by Urbit community members. The fifth session is already up and running but users can sign up for the sixth session set to start on August 3. Urbit has also announced two lines of work, “Ford Fusion” the next evolution step in their set-up, and the new set-up of their runtime daemon which will be implemented in Haskell.
Tezos
As a celebration of the 1,000,000th block in Tezos, Blockwatch is launching TzStats v2, a Tezos Block Explorer. To experience the new TzStats you can visit their staging site which will roll over into the official URL in the coming future. The new version is focused on being mobile-friendly and will be rolling out new community-requested features in the coming weeks.
Decred
In an interview with Coin Telegraph DCR co-founder Jake Yocom-Piatt said that Central Bank Digital Currencies take away from the transparency of the banking system and would create an ‘asymmetry’ of information and inhibit what he called crony capitalism. The read more see Coin Telegraph’s article, Decred Co-Founder: CBDCs Can Facilitate Crony Capitalism.
QTUM
In April 2020 Trail of Bits completed a security audit of QTUM’s offline staking smart contract. In an attestation letter from CEO Dan Guido, the company had one engineer perform a three-day audit of the system. They found that there were no major security issues but they made six code recommendations and found that there were two informational-severity issues.
Ethereum
Reddit is looking for proposals from users to scale Ethereum after the announcement of a new crypto-project. Reddit announced in May that they were launching an Ethereum based project for Reddit and Fortnite users. Ethereum’s limited throughput is causing concerns that it will not be able to keep up with the growing popularity of the project, on June 18 Reddit put out a post on the Ethereum subreddit “The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-off”, users have until July 31 to put in their proposals for Ethereum scaling technology that can keep up with Reddit’s scale. For more information see the post on Reddit.
Polkadot
Polkadot announced winners for “Build Polkadot”. The company received 15 submissions and judges Joshy Onrdorff and Bill Laboon picked out three submissions for each of the three categories: User Tools, Visualization, and a Surprise Us category. The list of the winners is provided by Polkadot.
Visualization
1st place: Network2network built by milonite — a very cool visualisation tool that maps every Kusama address to a static anime face, maps Polkadot addresses to a human face and visualizes block heights with an ageing man.
2nd place: FlappyTips built by ltfschoen — a cute game that allows you to fly the DOT character through block gaps. The game also incentivises users to create an on-chain account and deposit sufficient funds to cover the transaction costs required to share their game results.
3rd place: Polka Pulse built by mariopino — a visualization tool that currently uses the Kusama network and shows block time, session progress, era progress and day progress as well as the current block height and last finalized block.
User Tools
1st place: Dotvanity built by hukkinj1 — a CLI tool for generating Substrate (or Polkadot) vanity addresses. It comes with a few neat features!
2nd place: Polkadot Telegram Query Bot built by ayobuenavista — this tool is a Telegram bot that queries data from Polkadot and other Substrate-based chains. There are a total of 20 commands that you can run, including returning account balances, election information, council information and many others.
3rd place: Stakers payout kubernetes cronjob built by nicolasochem — a good validator pays its nominators every era. This tool is a cronjob to pay stakers every three hours for the immediately preceding era, making it an essential part of a good Polkadot validator solution.
Surprise Us
1st place: Substrate Identity Module built by dvc94c — keybase-like identity system for Substrate using a small embeddable IPFS implementation
2nd place: Kusama Automated Registry Identity built by yangwao — a great tool for an automatic identity judgement process using common services such as telegram and phone numbers.
3rd place: Shoot your old validator built by branciard — this tool was built to prevent double signing of multiple running validators, using sms and the Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH) algorithm.
Solana
Solana is up against Cartesi in the Gate.io Listing Vote #12. On June 22 the project will be put up for a 1 v 1 vote for a chance to be listed on Gate.io, one of the most active trading platforms in China. In order to vote you need to log in to your gate id, hold a Gatechain Token, and visit the gate.io website to vote for SOL. Solana is also running an educational airdrop campaign. Solana is offering a SOL airdrop for users who complete a quiz, follow their twitter, join their telegram group, and refer new users. To read more about voting and the airdrop campaign see Solana’s Medium.
Summary
These project updates were researched from git repos and project blogs. With the greater PoS realm growing at an insane rate we try to take various accomplishments and updates from all over. In no way shape or form is this series sponsored, or biased towards any project listed above. We look forward to seeing more exciting projects and updates as this series grows, along with finding ways we can round up as many projects as possible here without dragging content.
Until next time.
Author: Jordan Darling
