Development Update 009 — February 5, 2019
Good day, fellow Spankers!
Last week the team was on an incredible adventure in Vegas for our second AVN expo and awards show. Now that we’re back and settled in, we wanted to share some updates from the last few months. We’ve been busy! Here’s the highlight reel:
- The ReBooty on Spank.Live
- The SpankBank and BOOTY Growth
- A Technical Review of Our Payment Channel Upgrades
- Highlights from XBIZ Los Angeles and the AVNs
The ReBooty on Spank.Live
We’re thrilled to announce that after some much needed A&R (audits and reviews), BOOTY got its groove back. Back in October, BOOTY got spanked… and not in a good way. Our token was just so sexy, a hacker couldn’t help but capitalize on a “reentrancy bug.” Fortunately, we were able to work with the hacker to repair our smart contract and reimburse any lost funds. It became our mission to whip BOOTY back into shape, and shortly before Christmas, we shipped.
From now on, BOOTY will be used to pay the fees (e.g. our 5% take on Spank.Live) for all current and future SpankChain services. We’ve also embraced BOOTY maximalism on the user side, and all tips will be in BOOTY as well. And just like before, SpankChain will always credit one BOOTY as one dollar, endowing the token with the necessary stability for people who just want to pay for their porn.
In order to get BOOTY as a viewer, all you need to do is deposit ETH in your SpankPay account. You can deposit as much ETH as you want, but you will only receive a maximum of 69 BOOTY at a time. If you have extra ETH in your account after you blow your load, so to speak, and spend all 69 BOOTY, you’ll automatically buy more, so you can keep going… and going. The exchange takes place offchain, so it’s instant — the fastest refractory period ever!
If you’re already staking in the SpankBank and earning BOOTY as it gets minted, you can send it directly to your SpankPay account and start tipping. Just make sure to send at least a few dollars of ETH to your account to pay the Ethereum network transaction fees to top off your BOOTY balance. P.S. it doesn’t matter which order you send ETH / BOOTY, your account will be credited either way.
BOOTY means big things if you’re one of our performers too. Now that you’ll be receiving tips in BOOTY, you’ll never have to worry about the value of your earnings fluctuating before you cash out. We’ve also updated the performer dashboard to allow you to withdraw your BOOTY earnings into ETH at your pleasure.
The SpankBank and BOOTY growth:
Last period, in order to increase the total BOOTY in circulation, we sent 979.85 BOOTY to the SpankBank to be burned as fees. This increased the BOOTY supply from 10,069 to 19,597. The newly minted BOOTY was distributed to all stakers who checked in for period three during period two. This is probably a good time to remind our stakers — don’t forget to check in to the SpankBank every month!
It’s important to note that this was a special occasion. We burned BOOTY in excess of what we should have — the actual value of BOOTY fees generated by the camsite would have been 118.85 USD (closer to 200 USD if you count fees from our uniswap liquidity pool). We only did this because the BOOTY reserves on our SpankPay contract were running low, and it was preventing us from selling BOOTY to viewers they could use to tip.
While we can’t say with 100% confidence that we won’t do this again to boot(y)strap liquidity, we’ve taken steps to avoid having to do so. We’ve completed scripts to reclaim idle BOOTY in SpankChain’s payment channel balances, so it can be recirculated. We’re also moving away from collateralizing performer’s channels with BOOTY upfront (more on that later). With these two upgrades we anticipate quickly reaching equilibrium, and from here on out we will be able to strictly follow the protocol of only burning our fees.
A Technical Review of our Payment Channel Upgrades:
The ReBOOTY gave us and our partners at Connext the opportunity to upgrade our SpankPay payment channels smart contract and we added a number of helpful features.
For starters, a single “approved” ERC20 token (BOOTY, in our case) is immutably selected at contract deployment to provide security against users depositing malicious ERC20 tokens.
Further, there’s no more “opening” or “closing” channels, just depositing and withdrawing. Partial withdrawals no longer need an additional on-chain transaction to “re-open” the channel with the remaining funds. They work in the exact same way as full withdrawals.
Speaking of withdrawals, they can go directly to any desired recipient address. In the past, withdrawals had to go to the SpankPay wallet address first, ultimately saving users and performers a transaction.
But wait, there’s more! Pending a signature from the user, the SpankChain hub can now initiate “authorized” updates including deposits, withdrawals, and exchanges in a single transaction. The user only needs to pay gas for their initial deposit of ETH, all other transaction fees are paid for by the SpankChain hub.
We also added a feature where the hub can hold ETH/BOOTY reserves on the contract directly to make rebalancing between channels much easier.
Keep in mind, all these benefits didn’t come without some trade offs. There are still a few challenges to overcome. The contract is gassy. Depositing and withdrawing from open channels costs between $0.50-$2, depending on the gas price used. While we found it elegant to combine all on-chain channel updates for deposits, withdraws, and exchanges into a single function, this made the update function more expensive to call than if we had separated the different logic into their own functions. Thankfully, the user only ever pays this fee once, when they initially deposit.
There’s also the fact that collateralizing performer channels is capital-intensive and burdensome. In order to pay performers in real-time, we need to deposit BOOTY collateral into their channels before any tips are made. The total BOOTY collateral required depends on the value of the tips we expect the performer to receive over a short period of time.
Collateralization
Managing the BOOTY supply has been a struggle. On a couple of occasions, we ran out of reserves, which left us unable to collateralize performer channels, which meant performers couldn’t get their tips.
Collateralization and tipping just don’t mix. Sometimes, tippers need to wait while channels are re-collateralized, and the collateral limit imposes a seemingly arbitrary upper limit on tip size. After much discussion, we decided that since we already have the trust of our performers, it makes more sense to hold custody of tips and pay performers when they cash out.
This decision will make for a better experience for all parties involved. Users can tip as much as they want without delays or failures, and performers still get all the advantages of having stable BOOTY earnings.
Audits
Following the hack, we had to redesign our smart contracts. We also decided to enlist third party experts to audit our work objectively, and we will continue to do so moving forward. Here are the the smart contract audits we underwent to make sure BOOTY was ready to twerk… we mean work, again:
The auditors didn’t find any critical bugs in our contracts, but the PATH team (lead by an ex-LulzSec guy who rekt PSN that one time) went above and beyond and decided to hack our website too. They took down or main site and replaced the body with video player with the song “Bad and Boujee” while we were all dyeing our hair pink for Devcon. Turns out that even if you have trustless payment channels, if your site gets hacked, you’ll just end up trustlessly sending payments to the hacker—yikes!
If you’re interested in reviewing or contributing to our payment channels work, check out the open-source Connext repos (contracts, js-client, hub).
We’d like to take a minute here to thank the Ethereum Foundation for their generous $420K grant to fund our payment channels work.
Highlights from XBIZ Los Angeles and the AVNs:
XBIZ
The Xbiz 2019 Los Angeles convention focuses on the business side of the adult industry, with many site owners, operators, visionaries, performers and models coming together to connect. There are a lot of panels on topics from finding success in the business, to performer marketing, to adult billing trends. Our goal at XBIZ was to demonstrate SpankPay as an additional payment option to camsites such as Flirt4Free, and to payment processors such as SegPay.
Also at XBIZ, our very own Allie Knox hosted the the “Clipsite College” panel, a free university-level introduction to the best and newest techniques for creating and marketing DIY video content from some of the most experienced players in the game. From the top niches to the creators catering to the cutting edge, this session gave participants the keys to success in the clips market. Allie wasn’t the only Spanker making moves at XBIZ. SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani and Intimate Co-founder Leah Callon-Butleron lead the “Crypto: How Today’s Sites Use Tomorrow’s Currency” panel.
It was a both a privilege and pleasure to connect with Intimate, even though many see us as competitors. Nonetheless, it was great to be able to share war stories, as the two dominant adult crypto projects in the space.
SpankChain also walked away with some impressive nominations. Ameen was nominated for the Executive Award and the Progressive Leadership Award. SpankChain itself was also nominated for three awards; Innovative Web Product of the Year, Emerging Web Brand of the Year, and Marketing Campaign of the Year.
AVN
In comparison to XBIZ, AVN is more about the fans and after-hours networking. We had a booth where our industry friends stopped by. It was a place to hang, not least because we had 12 Spank.Live performers camming from the booth. Ameen did as Ameen does and danced around, adding some signature SpankChain flair to the conference. Advisor Brenna Sparks was nominated for two awards: Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene & Best Virtual Reality Sex Scene.
All in all AVN was a great week for TeamSpank, meeting and further connecting with future partners and showing off SpankPay, while we danced around the Hardrock Hotel. We can’t divulge all the details, but AVN paid off big time and we look forward to working with some industry heavy hitters. Stay tuned for big moves in 2019!
In the News
- Ameen made an appearance on Shitcoin.com to talk all things SpankChain. Check it out here!
- February 9–11th, Decrypt Media will be paying us a visit to do an in-depth spotlight piece on both SpankChain’s tech and lifestyle. It’s the first time they’ve ever done this kind of write-up, and we couldn’t be more grateful as their subject.
Where to find us next:
- ETHDenver (February 15th–17th)
- Xbiz Miami (May 28th–31st)
Connect with SpankChain
For more information about the SpankChain project:
- Sign up for our beta camsite
- Check out our white paper
- Watch our introduction video
- Follow us on Twitter
- Join us on Discord
- Subscribe to our subreddit
