Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #20
Protocol 12 is LIVE, a simplified SCP explainer, and Lumenaut inflation pool stats.
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.
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
- Marta Lokhava, a software engineer who works on Stellar core, published Intuitive Stellar Consensus, a blog post outlining a simplified version of the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). It uses concrete examples to explain how the Stellar Network achieves agreement via SCP, and it’s probably the clearest SCP explainer written to date. Catch her talk at Meridian next week!
- The end of inflation also means the end of the Lumenaut inflation pool. To mark the occasion, B1tcc shared a fond farewell and some awesome distribution and voting stats— Read them here
- Anupam put together Stellar.Casa — a site where he is hosting his Stellar tools and utilities. It currently hosts Go Stellar IPFS and Go Stellar Validate along with their documentation.
- 😔 Inbot shut down the InToken wallet and ended their token-based platform and service offering, effective Oct. 31, 2019. They also maintained the Kotlin SDK, so its further development is on hold for now. It’s a sad but telling story, and we appreciate all the hard work they put in over the years.—Read more here
- Solar Wallet released v0.21.0 which includes a new UI, new asset management and account settings, and editable SDEX trade order prices.
- The Stellar Content Battle now has as $125 prize pool!
This week I’m highlighting Litemint — a Stellar wallet combined with a gaming and collectibles app!
Litemint is open-source and cross-platform, available on Google Play, the App Store, Linux, Windows, and Mac. It can also be launched as a web app on desktop browsers (tested in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Edge).
Other features:
- 24-word mnemonic (BIP39, SLIP10, SEP05).
- Comprehensive access to the Stellar DEX and trading of any asset pairs.
- Multiple languages (English, French, German, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Greek, more to come).
- Federated addresses to send and receive money, also used as gamer ID for universal syncs.
- Path payments.
- Multi-account management.
- Upcoming Deep-Links for content sharing and indexing.
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.
This week, a whole new SEP (SEP-0025: New account deposit) was added to the fold by msfeldstein. Some background: right now, there’s a bit of a chicken/egg problem that makes it hard to use fiat anchors as onramps. Before you can hold a fiat token, you first need to fund a Stellar account with enough XLM to cover the network minimum balance + a trustline to that token. That means you have to find a way to acquire XLM before using an anchor as an onramp. Sure, we can help you figure out how to do that, but wouldn’t it be easier if you could just deposit USD with an anchor and have a wallet full of USD tokens, no muss, no fuss?
SEP-0025 attempts to make that dream a reality by specifying a method for anchors and other businesses to allow users to accept assets even if those users don’t have Stellar accounts (and by extension enough XLM to cover minimum balance and trustline requirements).
Sound interesting? Have something to say about how new account funding can or should work on Stellar? Join the discussion on Github. That’s where we hash things out.
Also this week: SEP-0007 got updated to include a mechanism for URIs to request replacement of any pre-specified field in a transaction, such as the source account — add support for mutable URI requests.
SEP-0024 continues to see improvements with 1 PR merged this week — Add fee_minimum, clarify fees.
Additionally, a conversation has started about a backwards-compatible migration path from SEP-0006 to SEP-0024 — catch up here.
Calls for Participation
Want to contribute to Stellar but don’t know where to start? The repositories below have a handful of beginner friendly PRs for you to take on!
- 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 you learn about exploring the Stellar network.
- Vanity Address Generator (Rust: 3 Open Issues): a simple CLI tool to generate Stellar vanity addresses.
The network upgraded to Protocol 12 without a hitch — path payments are now symmetrical, inflation is now disabled, and node monitoring is now improved 🎉
Protocol version 12.1.0 was also released, and it includes a number of stability improvements such as:
- Avoid creating a big publish backlog when performing command line catchup
- Improve computation of quorum intersection
- Improve how we compute hashes for hash tables
- Make it possible to stop running tests
Get the full release notes and downloads here.
Both the Python SDK and the .NET SDK put out new releases this week so be sure to check them out!
Download the latest SDK releases below:
- Horizon v0.22.1
- Stellar-core v12.1.0
- Go SDK
- Javascript SDK
- Python SDK
- C# .NET SDK
- Java SDK
- Scala SDK
- iOS SDK
- Ruby SDK
Side note: I quickly threw together a Python script to get the above info, feel free to steal it or make adjustments to it if something seems off!
Upcoming events
- 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:
Not Yet Signed Up?
Want to get the Stellar Dev Digest and other developer updates directly to your inbox? Sign up for the developer newsletter today!
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 👍
