Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #18
Hey everyone! Welcome to another issue of the Stellar Dev Digest, a weekly recap of all things related to the development of the Stellar Network.
Rob is a little busy so I’ll be guest writing in the meantime to keep everyone up to date. Unfortunately, we missed last week so we have some catching up to do. There’s a lot going on these days with the conclusion of SCF, the pending protocol upgrade, and the approach of Meridian. Exciting times, exciting times.
Before we get started, a few crucial reminders:
👉On Monday, 10/28, at 1600 UTC validators will vote on on whether to upgrade the public network to Stellar-core v12.0.0. If you run Stellar-core or Horizon, you should upgrade right now. Seriously. Old versions will not work correctly after the network upgrades.
👉On Wednesday, 10/30, at 0900 UTC there will be a testnet reset, which means everything will get wiped from the testnet ledger. If you are in the middle of something, make a plan to recreate any ledger entries you need, including accounts and balances. Read here for best practices when using the testnet.
And now, on to the digest…
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.
Meridian, the first official Stellar conference, has an entire track of programming dedicated to developers. It’s your chance to ask questions, make suggestions, and roll up your sleeves and try things out. If you’re developing on Stellar, we want you there!
You can find the full agenda here.
It’s taking place November 4–5, so if you’re interested in attending grab your ticket now!
Featured Developer Posts and News from the Week
- To reiterate: the network upgrades to protocol 12 on 10/28. If you run Horizon or Stellar core, make sure to upgrade before then or stuff’s going to stop working. — Learn More
- Stellar Community Fund #2: The Results — Full Post
- A Guide to Trustlines on Stellar — Full Post
- MouseBelt Launches Blockchain Education Alliance with Stellar and 10 Other Top Crypto Projects — Learn More
- The Stellar Monthly Roundup is out — Read it here
Instead of one application this week we have 8! The votes have been tallied and the final results of the Stellar Community Fund #2 are in. Your champions are:
#1 Lobstr
#2 StellarPay
#3 GetBlockCard
#4 Stellarport
#5 StellarAuth
#6 City States: Medieval
#7 Centaurus
#8 Astrocore — rusted Stellar-core
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: SEP-0024 has gone from DRAFT to ACTIVE to replace the now-deprecated SEP-0006. If you are curious about the differences between SEP-0024 and SEP-0006, msfeldstein breaks them down here.
All in all, six SEP-0024 PRs were merged in the last two weeks.
- Make optional fields required
- Add recommendation for encoding phone numbers in federated addresses
- Change NATIVE to native
- Add email as an example of sep9
- Make more_info_url non-optional
- Remove email_address from /deposit params
Updates to Stellar Core
In case you missed it, Protocol 12 made its way into the world recently. If you run a node, you should install it now in advance of the network upgrade. It has a few big changes including:
- Node status monitoring improvements
- The introduction of a new operation that makes path payments symmetrical
- The removal of bucket shadows
- The end of inflation as we know it
Check out the full release notes here.
Overall, nine Stellar-core pull requests were merged in the last two weeks.
- Fixes Windows build
- Publish throttles catchup
- Fix multiple keys referencing the same merge
- change test cases to intercept signal handler and exit on SIGINT
- Reset shared_future in FutureBucket when it’s ready
- Add non-serializing XDR hashers for SHA256 and ShortHash.
- Check apply-state validity only once per bucket-apply.
- Simplify best offers cache
- Remove per-key prefetch metrics
Calls for Participation — Hacktoberfest Week 3
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: 2 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: 14 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: 2 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.
Since Dev Digest #17, there’s been a crucial update to Horizon, and Stellar SDK developers have been hard at work getting their SDK’s ready for Protocol 12!
Horizon 0.21.1 was just released on Thursday, 10/10. The big change: it includes support for Stellar-core v12.0.0! If you run Horizon, make sure and upgrade now.
On Monday, 10/14, the testnet upgraded to Stellar-core v12.0.0.
All SDK’s below now support Protocol 12, so be sure to download the newest versions:
- Horizon v0.22.1
- Stellar-core v12.0.0
- Javascript SDK
- Go SDK
- Java SDK
- Python SDK
- Ruby SDK
- Scala SDK
- C# .NET SDK
- iOS SDK
To celebrate everyone gets a 🎉 this week!
Looking to work on Stellar full-time?!? Check out the list of job openings below:
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Did I Miss Something?
If you found that something from this issue is missing or inaccurate, please open an issue here or message (r_durst) on Keybase and he’ll get around to it ASAP.
Just kidding, I’ll take the blame for it this week. Reach out to me (kolten) on Keybase if something is missing or inaccurate and I’ll make sure to fix it 👍
