Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #23

Anchor UX Guidelines, Big StellarExpert update, and Multiplexed Accounts.

Published in

Stellar Community

7 min readNov 25, 2019

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

📡 StellarExpert shares what they’ve been working on for the past 3 months! In addition to launching their own blog, they’ve built the most comprehensive Stellar markets dashboard ever made, and expanded the info available on their interface. Now, you can see which assets support which SEPs, easily discover how many funded trustlines a token has, and use a completely reworked search engine to find out pretty much anything you want to find out about Stellar tokens, accounts, and integrations. — Read the full update post here.
If you’re an anchor or interested in becoming one: SDF’s Lead Product Architect, Bruno Müller, has put together some Anchor UX Guidelines to consider in order to provide the best experience for your users. — Check them out here.
Public node, a community initiative conceived at Meridian to provide individuals and small businesses a low-cost way to support the health and resilience of the Stellar network by pooling resources to run full validator nodes, is now up, running, and accepting memberships. — Read the announcement here.
Stellar开发摘要: Issue #22! A community member, Yun, has translated the last issue of Dev Digest in to Mandarin and plans to continue doing so for future issues. You can find the translations at https://stellarnews.cn/.
SDF Frontend Developer, Jeesun, put together a guide for our Korean community on how to use Keybase. — Check out the full guide here.
🏆 Reminder: If you’re interested in participating in the Stellar Community Fund Round 3 make sure to submit your project by December 14 @ 12:00PM PST. SCF supports independent developers by awarding lumen grants to projects based on a community vote. This round, 3 million lumens will be split proportionally among 8 winners — find the submission guidelines here.

This week I’m highlighting Leaf Global Fintech!

Leaf is developing a mobile application platform to facilitate cash to virtual currency conversion through the Stellar network.

But the real reason to highlight leaf is why they are building their product:

“As families are forced to flee persecution around the world, they have little time to grab limited cash and valuables before leaving their homes. During the long and dangerous journey, refugees face peril at every step. Violence, theft, and natural disasters claim family fortunes and diminish hope. Outside of forfeiting value, carrying cash is often the only option. On top of being inconvenient and expensive to exchange across borders, this exposes families to additional risk.

Leaf converts mobile money through blockchain technology into stable investments. Value is not stored in cryptocurrency so that refugees are hedged against volatility. The platform is accessible through a mobile device — no smartphone required. Friends and family abroad can also contribute into a refugee’s account, creating bridges within networks dispersed by trauma.”

Want to know more? Check out this video.

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 SEP-0024 got the most attention with two merged PRs:

SEP-24 passing the JWT into the interactive url — after some discussion around this issue, it was decided that adding JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to interactive URLs seems like a strange practice.
[SEP24] Send PII over POST instead of GET —this updates the protocol to send personal information via POST at the initial /deposit or /withdraw endpoints to mitigate security risks.

If you’ve built a custodial wallet, your input may be useful to the ongoing conversation around SEP-0010: SEP-10 doesn’t support custodial wallets.

Other ongoing conversations about making user onboarding easier include:

This week only one CAP related PR was merged:

Updated CAP-0015

Additionally, David Mazières proposed the rationale and implementation of a CAP to handle Multiplexed Accounts. Handling multiplexed accounts at the protocol level could solve two problems:

Users forget memo IDs, leading to increased support costs and/or
lost customer funds for custodial services.
Memos are per-transaction, not per operation or source, making it
impossible do to things like have one transaction with payments to
two different multiplexed accounts, or include a multiplexing
identifier in a source account so that funds can be
returned.

The idea is to solve these issues by replacing all sources and destinations of payments with a new MuxedAccount type. The MuxedAccount type can either be a Ed25519 key or a pair of an Ed25519 and an unsigned 64-bit integer id. The id is ignored by stellar-core, kind of like a per-AccountID memo ID.

Implementing MuxedAccounts would require changing stellar-core, which means before it happens, there will likely be a lot of debate and conversation. To follow along — or take part — make sure to join the Stellar Developers mailing list.

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: 12 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.

This week we released Horizon v0.23.1! It adds a bunch of features to the experimental ingestion engine and addresses a few small bugs. You can read more about it here.

If you keep up with the Go monorepo, you may have noticed quite a few other releases in the past couple of days. In addition to Horizon v0.23.1, we also released Ticker v1.2.0, Friendbot v0.0.2, Federation v0.3.0, Bridge v0.0.33, and Compliance v0.0.33, all of which patch a low severity security bug. If you use one of those, you should probably upgrade to the latest version.

Additionally, Stellar-core merged 5 PRs this week: