Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #19
Protocol 12 on the Horizon, VPNbot wins IDEO Hackathon, and more.
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.
This is the last Dev Digest before the Protocol 12 vote. You’ll find almost everything you need to prepare yourself below!
Final reminders:
❗❗ On Monday, 10/28, at 1600 UTC validators will vote 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. The old versions will not work if the network switches to Protocol 12.
👉 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.
Featured Developer Posts and News from the Week
- The network upgrades to Protocol 12 on Monday, 10/28. If you run Horizon or Stellar core, make sure to upgrade before then or suffer the consequences! The dire, dire consequences!— Learn More
- Understanding Stellar Smart Contracts: explaining the differences between an Ethereum smart contract and a Stellar smart contract— Read it here
- Community member PickingUnicorns started the Stellar Content Battle. If you’re interested in contributing informational content to the Stellar ecosystem read about it here.
This week I’m highlighting the VPNbot by Toni Gemayel and Daniel Fernandez!
VPNbot allows you to securely provision Wireguard VPNs through a Keybase bot and pay for them with Stellar.
“Our goal with VPNbot is to onboard new users to crypto, by introducing them to Stellar + Keybase ecosystem. Our mission is to combine privacy, security, and distributed trust with a great user experience.”
🏆 VPNbot is also the winner of the Stellar category in the IDEO CoLab / Coinlist hackathon. To try it out head over to https://vpnbot.netlify.com.
As a bonus, they’ve also put together https://keybasebots.com/ which is a directory for the Keybase bot ecosystem.
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.
People must be prepping presentations for Meridian, because it was a pretty slow week on the proposal side of things. One pull request was merged to update SEP-0010 and SEP-0024’s Cross-Origin Headers section.
In order for browsers-based wallets to validate the CORS headers, as specified by W3C, the preflight request (OPTIONS request) must be implemented in all the endpoints that support Cross-Origin.
Updates to Stellar Core
There was, however, a new Stellar-Core release: version 12.1.0 came out on 10/24. It includes a number of stability improvements, one new feature, and no breaking changes. It’s a lot like version 12.0.0, but it runs a little cleaner.
❗❗ Three days left until the Protocol 12 vote. If you maintain a node, you should make sure you’re running Stellar-Core v12.0.0 or above. If the network upgrades, a couple of interesting things will happen:
- There will be a new operation that makes path payments symmetrical
- Inflation will end
You can find the full release notes here.
Calls for Participation — Hacktoberfest Week 4
🎃 Hacktoberfest is coming to an end! This upcoming week is your last chance to knock out some PRs and get your hands on a 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: 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: 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.
As I mentioned last week, everyone has been hard at work getting everything prepared for Protocol 12. Horizon and the SDK’s have been updated to support the upcoming changes, so make sure you have the latest releases!
Upgrade to Horizon 0.21.1 if you haven’t already. It was released a couple of weeks ago and includes support for Protocol 12.
Download the latest SDK releases below:
- Horizon v0.22.1
- Stellar-core v12.0.0
- Go SDK
- Javascript SDK
- Python SDK
- C# .NET SDK
- Java SDK
- Scala SDK
- iOS SDK
- Ruby SDK
Upcoming events
- Oct 29: Stellar and nTokens — B. Reznikov, T. Teixeira, V. Oliveira
- Nov 1: Jed McCaleb & Denelle Dixon Fireside Chat @ SF Blockchain Week
- Nov 4–5: Stellar Meridian Conference, which has a whole track of dev-focused content
- Nov 13–14: North American Blockchain Expo (Lisa Nestor will give a talk)
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 reach out to me (kolten) on Keybase if something is missing or inaccurate and I’ll make sure to fix it 👍
