Nervos Community Update: December 2020/January 2021

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Nervos Network

11 min readFeb 5, 2021

Welcome to the monthly newsletter for all things Nervos! Get caught up with the latest updates from the Nervos Foundation, Community, Ecosystem & Development teams.

TD; LR

Updates from December and January include:

🏦 Exchange listing on Binance

🏆 Binance x Nervos trading competition

👕 #NervosSocietee design contest

🏛 Town Hall #4 on Q4 2020

🛠 Launch of Godwoken and improved Polyjuice

🆕 CKB Development Dossier #42 & #43

Binance lists $CKB for trading!

Interoperability deep dive with Cointelegraph

Nervos Town Hall: What it takes to join the Grants Program

After hearing so much positive feedback after our last event on CKLabs and receiving regular inquiries about our Grants Program, we decided to hold a grants-themed Town Hall to not only answer the community’s questions but showcase the important work our grants recipients are doing for the Nervos ecosystem.

Nervos Quarterly Letter: A Look Back at Q3 2020

It has been a busy few months since we ticked off some major milestones in Q2 and we have made big strides in important areas for blockchain, namely DeFi and interoperability.

Read the teaser and download the full report.

Dollar-pegged stablecoin HUSD is coming to Nervos

The Nervos team is excited to announce our plans to support HUSD, a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin from Stable Universal Limited. HUSD will be the first fiat-backed stablecoin available on the Nervos blockchain, marking a major milestone as we continue to build out our DeFi infrastructure for current and future developers. Nervos will also be the first blockchain to support HUSD other than Ethereum.

Find out more.

Users can now swap CKB with 160+ cryptos on Changelly

We are happy to announce Nervos CKByte (CKB), the native token of the Nervos ecosystem, is now available for purchasing and swaps on Changelly! Starting today, Changelly’s two million users can swap more than 160 digital assets for CKB at fixed or floating rates on the Changelly platform. Users can also buy CKB with 48 different fiat currencies using a wide range of flexible payment methods such as credit and debit cards, bank transfers, and Apple Pay.

Find out more about the listing.

Share on Twitter!

India’s Largest Crypto Exchange CoinDCX lists Nervos CKB for Trading

We’re excited to announce CoinDCX, one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has listed CKByte ($CKB), the native token for the Nervos Network. The CKB/USDT and CKB/BTC trading pairs on CoinDCX are now live for trading.

Nervos completes integration with Band Protocol to enable dApps to access oracle data

Nervos x Band Protocol integration completion

We’re pleased to announce our integration with cross-chain data oracle platform Band Protocol to bring third-party data to the Nervos ecosystem is complete! Nervos developers can now access price feeds and other real-world data in real time from external sources to power any type of decentralized application (dApp).

Nervos launches Force Bridge as part of next-gen interoperability solution

Force Bridge, a cross-chain bridge that will initially connect Ethereum to Nervos with plans to integrate other chains in the future, is launching on Nervos in February 2021! With native support for ETH and all ERC-20 tokens, Force Bridge — one of three components of Nervos’ next-gen interoperability solution, the Universal Passport — will enable seamless asset transfers between the two chains, making it easier for Ethereum developers to expand their decentralized applications (dApps) and user base to the Nervos ecosystem.

Share the news!

Nervos welcomes DEX demo project Gliaswap with live demonstration on Dec. 16th

After two months of behind-the-scenes development, we’re proud to announce Gliaswap, a new, cross-chain DEX demo project is coming to the Nervos ecosystem.

An example project built on Layer 2 of the Nervos blockchain, Gliaswap showcases the vast potential of the Nervos ecosystem and our approach to interoperability. This is a huge step forward for Nervos’ DeFi infrastructure and decentralized exchanges, as it enables users to trade and earn cryptocurrencies more easily and efficiently.

Nervos and IOHK Join Forces to Make Smart Contracts Safer

We’re pleased to announce Nervos has entered into a long-term partnership with global blockchain engineering company IOHK aiming to reduce the security risks that smart contracts present to the growing DeFi space. In the first phase of the partnership, the two blockchains will conduct joint research around UTXO ledgers and smart contracts to develop an improved framework for other UTXO-based blockchains, further enhancing the security, scalability alternative to Ethereum’s account model.

Find out more about the partnership.

Share the news on Twitter!

Town Hall: What you missed during Q4

In our latest Town Hall, we took a look back at some of the major announcements and updates to the Nervos ecosystem with a Q4 review on Friday, January 29th at 9:00 am EST. To help the community better understand what these updates mean for the larger ecosystem, Nervos architect and researcher Jan Xie was on hand to explain some of the major updates that have taken place over the last few months.

Introducing Godwoken and the re-launch of Polyjuice

We know many of you have been wondering what a layer 2 solution will be like on CKB, so it is our great pleasure here, to present 2 complementary projects to you: the initial release of Godwoken, and a complete overhaul of Polyjuice.

Find out more about Godwoken and Polyjuice.

Share the news on Twitter!

Nervos developers can benefit from Arweave storage by joining Boost program

We’re excited to announce an offering for Nervos developers from Arweave, a new type of storage that enables users to store documents and applications forever. In addition to gaining access to Arweave’s storage solution, developers, startups, and other projects building on the Nervos network will have the opportunity to apply for Arweave Boost and receive up to $50,000 worth of permanent data storage, as well as other resources.

Find out more.

Nervos attends Rust Conference 2020 in China

Nervos participated in the Rust China Conference 2020, the biggest Rust event in China. Team members from Nervos and several other blockchain projects took the stage to discuss the latest Rust developments with attendees.

Read the recap.

Other News

We announced the #NervosSocietee design competition.

Morpheus Labs listed many of Nervos’ solutions like Muta Framework and Portal Wallet in the Morpheus Labs App Library V2.0!

Binance and Nervos launched a trading competition with $50,000 in CKB up for grabs.

More Ecosystem & Community Content

We published more great content from the community this month. Make sure to share and mention @NervosNetwork to have your content included!

Crypto YouTuber @Voskcoin talked to our community manager Matt Quinn and members of Insight Fellows about crypto miners and Stratum V2.

Co-founder Kevin Wang talked to BSN’s Chief Architect Henry Ma about the new Open Permissioned Blockchain initiative during an AMA.

Nervos hosted a Beyond Consensus meetup in Wuhan on December 5th.

Nervos co-founder Daniel Lv spoke at the Blocklike x DoraHacks “DeFi Fever” event

IOHK CTO Romain Pellerin & Nervos co-founder Kevin Wang talk to Decrypt Media’s Matthew Diemer about their plans to improve the UTXO model via joint research

Nervos held a workshop with the theme of Rust in blockchain development, sharing with developers the development practice of Rust in blockchain field on December 27th 2020

Community manager Matt Quinn, community lead Eduardo Garza, and Rust developer Ernest Kissiedu discussed the latest updates to the Nervos ecosystem & more during episode 01 of “Hashing It Out”

Nervos held a panel discussing DeFi accessibility with team members from DODO, dForce, Chainlink, and Aave.

Nervos designers Ahrom and Echo held a live design session on Figma to showcase the new Nervos branding and provide some inspiration for the #NervosSocietee contest.

Nervos co-founder Kevin Wang appeared on the Untold Stories podcast with Charlie Shrem to discuss consensus models, permissionless systems & more.

Nervos co-founder Daniel Lv spoke to the Chinese Wechat community about Nervos’ 2021 roadmap on Jan 16, 2021.
Nervos co-founder Daniel Lv spoke at the Mars Finance event about crypto industry development on Jan 20, 2021.
Nervos co-founder Daniel Lv spoke at Baihua Blockchain about what Nervos is doing to solve crypto industry challenges on Jan 21, 2021.
Nervos community manager Matt Quinn fielded questions from the CoinDCX community about the listing and trading of $CKB.

Nervos co-founder Daniel Lv spoke at “See+The future of Conference 2020 ”hosted by TanLian Value on Jan 25th 2021
Crypto Wendy O released a video on Nervos’ ecosystem and Binance listing.

Professor Crypto released a video on Nervos’ approach to blockchain interoperability, $CKB’s listing on Binance & more

Korean community lead Jinho helped publish articles on the Binance listing with 14 Korean media outlets. The news was featured on Naver, Investing.com, and other major local publications.

Grant and Project Updates

SECBIT presented a milestone review during a Grant Review call on January 7th.

CKB Development Dossier #42

Covering Nov 9 to Nov 22, 2020

Every two weeks we like to update the community on what our core dev team has been working on across the Nervos Network.

In the last two weeks, the CKB core team has:

Started to design the fork activation architecture and user-activated soft forks mechanism.
Completed the acceptance test of the freezer.
Been evaluating fee estimation algorithms.
Been surveying the testnet transaction submission issues.
Been setting up the benchmark dashboard.
Been working on the channel network engineering design and light client demo.

Fork Mechanism

A Fork is a tool to upgrade the chain with incompatible changes and a neccissary mechanism in the growth of an open sourced blockchain.

Ian Yang, one of the CKB developers focused on system design and official client implementation, has started to survey how to implement forks in the code and how to design an on-chain user-activated forks voting mechanism.

Freezer

Dingwei Zhang, a Blockchain engineer at Cryptape, has delivered the Chain Freezer and the PR has passed the code review, as well as the acceptance test.

Chain Freezer separates the database into two parts: recent blocks and ancient history. The recent blocks are hot data and can be placed on an SSD drive to improve performance.

These advances mean the Chain Freezer will be released soon.

Fee Estimator

Boyu and Dingwei are working on the fee estimator. They have implemented one algorithm and are evaluating the precision of the algorithm.

Testnet Transaction Submission Issues submission

Guozhen, a blockchain and distributed storage system engineer, Yulong and Boyu are investigating the following testnet issues:

The uncle rate is high. We moved miners to the same area to lower the relay latency and now it is better.
The block interval is about 40 seconds, which is too long compared to the mainnet.
The transactions are not relayed to miners and stuck in users’ transaction pool.

Misc

Guozhen and Yulong are working on the benchmark dashboard.
Chao is working on the channel network engineering design.
Quake, a CKB developer, and Owen are working on the light client demo.

In the last two weeks, the MAKE team has been working on:

DEX

Added more tests in Deal Maker CLI, 100% coverage
Refactored order matching in Deal Maker CLI

Neuron

Updated Neuron UI and APIs for migration of ACP
Investigated sync issues in Neuron v0.33
Added functional tests and regression tests for hardware wallet & offline signing
Released Neuron v0.34.0-rc1

SDKs and Integrations

Released ckb-sdk-js@v0.38.0
Redesigned Exchange integration middleware with approve cell #784

Nervos Citizen

Released Nervos Citizen Android App v0.1.0

CKB Development Dossier #43

Covering Nov 23 to Dec 6, 2020

In the last two weeks, the CKB core team has:

Tested and verified the first fee estimate model.
Proposed the User Activated Soft Forks (UASF) mechanism.
Started to replace failure.
Proposed a new async style Tentacle interface.
Improved the WASM compatibility of all the CKB components.
Added some metrics in ckb-analyzer.
Been adding more integration test cases.
Been working on Channel Network and Light Client.

Fee Estimator

Boyu has improved the fee estimator with assistance of Dingwei Zhang, a Blockchain engineer at Cryptape. There have also been multiple tests and verifications.

User Activated Soft Forks Proposal

Ian Yang, one of the CKB developers focused on system design and official client implementation, has migrated Bitcoin BIP8 to CKB to allow for parallel soft forking deployments based on miner signaling via the block version field. See the PR for more details.

Replacing failure

As alerted in RUSTSEC-2020–0036, failure is officially deprecated/unmaintained. Boyu has replaced them with thiserror and anyhow.

Tentacle Spawn Interface

Chao has proposed a new async interface in the p2p library tentacle.

Tentacle used to read messages from peers in the framework and pass the read packets to the application via callbacks.

The new async interface added a new trait ProtocolStream where application developers can use async function to schedule the read part. Since the write part already supports async, this new interface gives application developers full power to schedule all the P2P I/O via async.

Misc

Quake, a CKB developer, submitted several PRs to improve the WASM compatibility of all the CKB components, since the light client prototype will run in the browser. Owen has been testing and debugging the GCS (client side filter) for the light client.

Guozhen, a blockchain and distributed storage system engineer, added some new metrics in ckb-analyzer, an agent to collect advanced CKB metrics.

Yulong has been reviewing Bitcoin integration test cases to get inspired to add more test cases for CKB.

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