Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #17
Hey y’all! It’s about that time of the week again. Welcome to another issue of the Stellar Dev Digest, a weekly recap of all things related to the development of the Stellar Network.
What is Stellar? Stellar is a platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.
Have you heard of Meridian? No? Meridian is the first official Stellar conference, hosted by the Stellar Development Foundation in Mexico City.
Most importantly, Meridian is for devs.
Meridian is for everyone — enthusiasts, business leads, builders — but we’re also doing a lot with the agenda to make sure it’s particularly relevant for developers. If you are developing on Stellar, we want you to come. We’re designing a special technical track consisting of workshops, talks, and discussion groups led by experts both from the community and from the SDF. The agenda emphasizes interaction and participation. It’s a chance to ask questions, make suggestions, and roll up your sleeves and try things out.
Some examples of sessions pulled from the agenda are below:
- How to Run and Monitor a Stellar Validator: SCP Configuration
- Public Blockchains need Private Transactions
- Stellar Protocol Next: What new features does the Stellar Protocol need?
- Building a Stablecoin Anchor
- Stellar’s Open Membership: How it works and why we need it
- Stellar Ops: What’s tricky about running Stellar Core, Horizon, etc?
- Private Validator’s Happy Hour
- Unpacking Wallets: Practical Workshop on Wallet SDK
- Stellar for Everything Other than Payments
If this sounds interesting, I have a special discount code to hook you up! Use code STELLARDEV before 10/11 for a $28 ticket! This is almost too good to be true, so grab your ticket here.
Featured Developer Posts and News from the Week
- Have you checked out awesome-stellar yet? — Github Repo
- SDF discusses its proposal to disable inflation — Learn More
- Inspired by the SpaceDrop, a new member to the Stellar Ecosystem details his deep dive — Primer Here
- SDF is participating in Hacktoberfest this year — Full Post
There will be no application of the week this week… I know what you’re thinking, but there’s a good reason. Instead, I would like to make a quick public service announcement:
As this week is the final round of voting for the Stellar Community Fund, instead of highlighting a single application, I would like to remind y’all to go vote!
Helping new, exciting, community-developed projects is an incredibly important part of being an active member of the Stellar developer community — so please, go take a few minutes to read through the various project descriptions and place your vote.
*************************** Vote here! ******************************
Interested in promoting your own project, or another exciting project in the ecosystem? If so, please make a submission here.
Updates to Stellar Protocol (CAPs) and Ecosystem (SEPs)
Core Advancement Proposals (CAP) and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEP) are a formal way of documenting proposed standards to improve various aspects of the Stellar Network. These function similar to EIPs and BIPs from the Ethereum and Bitcoin communities respectively. CAPs and SEPs represent the culmination of many discussions that often take place on the Stellar Developer Google Group.
SEP-0024 [DRAFT]: if you’ve been an avid reader of the digest over the past few weeks, you may have noticed a lot of tweaks to SEP-0006 as various anchors across the network began implementing this SEP, and ran into complications with some of its details. Over the course of these changes, implementors have become confused, and previously complete implementations have become no longer compliant. Thus, msfeldstein has proposed SEP-0024, a cleaned-up version of SEP-0006 that leaves all the non-interactive stuff behind. If you are curious about the differences between SEP-0024 and SEP-0006, I recommend reading the PR, as msfeldstein has a wonderful list of the diffs.
Other highlights from the week include a PR by jonjove, updating CAP-0015 such that it matches the in-progress implementation from stellar/stellar-core#2258. If you are looking forward to fee-bump transactions, as I am, I would recommend giving these changes a look. jonjove expands upon the details of the previous CAP, giving us a better insight into the technical details of implementing this new form of transaction. Really interesting stuff!
All-in-all, three pull requests were merged in the last week.
Updates to Stellar Core
Another BIG week on the stellar-core front as protocol version 12 landed! Congrats to the core team and the ecosystem as a whole! Protocol 12 is jam packed with new features. I recommend you give the full release notes a read, but for those short on time, here are the highlights:
- Some node status monitoring improvements such as: quorum summary on info endpoint now utilizes last SCP round and peers endpoint shows connection duration
- Symmetrical path payments
- Removed bucket shadows
- Disabled inflation
Wait… disabled inflation?!? Hold on a moment here and please take a quick second to re-read the following blog post. TL&DR until the network votes to accept protocol 12, these changes won’t be active on the network, and if protocol 12 is rejected, no sweat, SDF will release protocol 13 for vote (protocol 12 sans disabled inflation). So much voting… I know! It’s almost like this is a decentralized network or something.
Overall, seven pull requests were merged in the last week.
Calls for Participation — Hacktoberfest Week 1
Looking to get your hands dirty and not sure where to begin? The Stellar ecosystem is full of open source projects looking for help. While you’re at it, why not work your ways towards a snazzy Hacktoberfest t-shirt? The following projects have marked isolated, beginner-friendly issues with the Hacktoberfest label:
- Kelp (Go: 9 Open Issues): a free and open-source trading bot for the Stellar universal marketplace.
- Account Viewer (JavaScript: 5 Open Issues): a simple tool to view an account on the Stellar network and make transactions from it.
- JavaScript SDK (JavaScript: 8 Open Issues): a Javascript library for communicating with a Stellar Horizon server. It is used for building Stellar apps either on Node.js or in the browser.
- Js-Stellar-Base (JavaScript: 3 Open Issues): the lowest-level stellar helper library. It consists of classes to read, write, hash, and sign the xdr structures that are used in stellar-core. This is an implementation in JavaScript that can be used on either Node.js or web browsers.
- Go MonoRepo (Go: 13 Open Issues): the home for all of the public go code produced by SDF. In addition to various tools and services, this repository is the SDK from which you may develop your own applications that integrate with the stellar network.
- Laboratory (JavaScript: 6 Open Issues): a suite of tools to help one learn about exploring the Stellar network.
- Vanity Address Generator (Rust: 3 Open Issues): a simple CLI tool to generate Stellar vanity addresses.
This week we have major updates to Stellar Core and Horizon, and another alpha release of the Python SDK (I also would like to speculate on the future release of a .Net update, however I don’t want to put any pressure on elucidsoft). Let’s dive in!
Horizon 0.21.0 brings some really exciting new features:
- An experimental offers endpoint (long awaited!)
- Improvements to the /paths/strict-send and /paths/strict-receive endpoints (related to CAP-0024, symmetric path payments)
- A new flag to apply pending migrations before running horizon, combining what used to be two steps into one
- Improved ingestion speed in experimental ingestion system
- An option to beta test the new ingestion system
Python SDK 2.0.0-alpha5 continues this project’s progression towards a stable 2.0.0 release. Specifically, this update brings protocol 12 support.
Looking to work on Stellar full-time?!? Check out the list of job openings below:
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Did I Miss Something?
Darn, I knew it! If you found that something from this issue is missing or inaccurate, please open an issue here or message me (r_durst) on Keybase and I will get around to it ASAP. Thanks!
