Jan 24, 2020
8 min read
Weekly Shortcuts: Cardano, Constellation, Decentraland, Elrond, Matic, OneLedger, Perlin, Ren
17 January — 24 January
Welcome to the second edition of Weekly Shortcuts! We are ready to provide you with updates on crypto projects “you should know about in Q1 2020”. Enjoy!
Cardano
- Shelley Testnet: Your weekly rollout rollup. Week 30: W/E 17th January 2020 — Each week, this is where they’ll share a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on in the Shelley Testnet program. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in Jormungandr GitHub.
- Cardano Community Newsletter — January 24, 2020
- The Incentivized Testnet, Adrestia, and Daedalus are now on regular release cadences.
- Launch requirements are being discussed for Goguen.
- The OBFT hard fork will likely occur in February along with the release of the Ouroboros Hydra paper.
- Monthly updates from product managers will soon begin through Youtube videos.
- A conversation has begun about the inclusion of punitive measures to reduce bad behavior on the incentivized testnet.
- The Cardano Foundation’s delegation — led by Chairperson Nathan Kaiser — is in Davos during the World Economic Forum. Davos diaries:
- 20 January 2020 — Besides promoting the benefits of adoption of Cardano among the planet’s most influential individuals, the Foundation is forging new partnerships, educational initiatives and innovative ways of ada integration.
- 21 January 2020 — They accepted an offer to implement a Proof-of-Concept integration with ScanTrust, a smart packaging services company, to co-develop Cardano Connector, blockchain-enabled product provenance, and authenticity tool.
- 22 January 2020 — The Cardano Foundation’s Council has approved to sign an initial letter of intent with LO3energy a US-based provider of local energy solutions platform.
- 23 January 2020 — They made a first step towards bringing an ada-denominated structured finance product. Early talks with GenTwoAG on a potential securitization structure led to an initial commitment to set up a foundational infrastructure.
- Cardanos commercial arm to help Uzbekistan form-blockchain task force. The Cardano blockchain’s commercial arm, Emurgo, has partnered with the government of Uzbekistan to form a blockchain task force to develop regulations for security token offerings (STOs) and exchanges (STXs).
Constellation
Decentraland
- Back to the polls. Two new Agora votes! — They’re launching a brand new marketplace which, among other cool items, will include wearable NFTs for you to make your Avatar truly stand out in Decentraland. This vote is to determine the platform fee, an increase bringing them in line with other marketplaces.
- Technical updates — 20 Jan, 2020
Here’s what you can expect when the virtual world opens to everyone on 20.02.2020 (or Day 0 as some in the team are calling it):
- Establishment of the Decentraland DAO
- Full decentralization of the world’s infrastructure (communications between users and the serving of content)
- No single agent will have the power to modify the rules of the software, curate LAND content, modify the economics of MANA, upgrade the LAND smart contract unilaterally, or prevent others from accessing the world
- A host of other decentralization features to be announced
In the meantime, here are some smaller, but no less important, updates from the team:
- Reportedly “heavy development” of services required for Public Launch. Enough said!
- Greatly improved mouse sensitivity to allow for easier pointing at small things
- In Builder you can now multi-select various items to move/rotate/scale them together
- More configurable properties for pointer-events: maximum distance, button type, on-hover text
- Various bugs related to stability now fixed
- Development of the first implementation of playing avatar animations
- Avatar UI now indicates when a player owns several of the same wearable
Elrond
- Binance will support the Elrond bootstrapping process with an easy interface available on one of their existing products. Periodic deposits from Binance will then be made into the Prestaking Smart Contract.
The 500 million $ERD staked through Binance will soon be deposited into the premainnet smart contract, for 2.3 billion $ERD staked in total.
- Staking Rewards reported: ElrondNetwork is currently running a pre-staking program to earn up to 31.9% annualized rewards until the mainnet launch. 17.92% of all eligible tokens are already participating.
- Last week in summary
- Bootstrapping Phase 1: 21% of circulating supply already locked
- Elrond cryptography upgrade with kyber to mcl library change
- Arwen Virtual Machine prepped for asynchronous SC-to-SC calls
Matic
- Welcoming stake.fish as an Official Staking Partner — Matic Network — As well as contributing to network security and providing staking services for the community, they will also be collaborating closely with Official Staking Partners to utilize their expertise on staking economics, work with them on testnet event stages, and conduct outreach to spread awareness of Matic’s staking program.
- TradeStarsOK launched its next-gen fantasy sports platform on Matic’s β-Mainnet! You can now join 7700+ users to own, create & trade NFTs representing cricket players’ performance & get rewarded for your sport knowledge. This launch comes after many long months of development, testing, and a lot of changes driven mainly by the outstanding feedback from the community.
OneLedger
- OneLedger Founder, David Cao, giving a talk about their vision and goals. See post.
Perlin
- ICC joins Singapore Government and major industry partners to launch TradeTrust developed with Perlin Network. This public-private partnership between global organizations will be a significant leap forward to shift international trade from a paper-based system to digitally-enabled trade. It will create enormous potential value based on time and operational cost savings combined with the greatly reduced incidence of fraud and human error.
Ren
{RenVM}
- RenJS was completed and released. It is a low-level library for third-party developers to use when building user-interfaces, command-line tools, and bots to interact with RenVM.
- GatewayJS has been completed, and they are gathering feedback on its UX from different people throughout the DeFi community before its release. This will allow third-party developers to quickly build safe user-interfaces that offer a fully integrated and native BTC experience for their users..
- The first draft of the RZL sMPC paper is now at a stage where it is ready for auditing and they are beginning the scoping for this audit. When the Hyperdrive audit is completed, the team will hand this over for formal auditing. Once publicly verified by the auditors, it will give them and those who plan on utilizing RenVM full confidence in the correctness of the core execution engine within RenVM.
- Began the development of the next major version of Lotan: a chaos testing framework for RenVM. This new version of Lotan uses the RenJS library to run fuzz tests, load tests, crash tests, and backwards compatibility tests against RenVM. By using RenJS, it also helps them find any bugs that might exist in the RenJS library. Lotan can run tests against local and remote deployments of RenVM, making the testing cycles faster and more comprehensive. This is the final stage of testing for RenVM before Mainnet SubZero.
{Smart contracts}
- Added the new Protocol smart contract. It offers easy lookup and configuration of the on-chain smart contracts that are used by RenVM. This makes deploying different versions of RenVM to different networks easier, faster, and less error-prone.
{Other}
- Migrating the project management to GitHub in preparation for more open-source contributions to Ren project, and a more transparent development issues/milestones.
- Released more detailed documentation on Wiki and encourage everyone to give their ideas/feedback/criticisms on GitHub Issues (a new place for long-form and persistent discussions about the design of RenVM).
- Started to refactor some of the codebase into smaller open-source repositories. This makes more of the codebase available to the public, and breaks them down into smaller, easier to understand, components.
- Released surge (simple and efficient binary marshaling) and bound (collections that prevent accidental memory leaks).
- Continuing to gather members of the Ren Alliance, and participants for the semi-decentralised core that will secure RenVM during Mainnet SubZero and Zero while it gains adoption and achieves economic stability.Come join the alliance!
That’s all for today! Feel free to share your feedback about the format!
