Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #25

Stellar Community Fund voting, Reddit Community Points, Keybase Spacedrop Update.

Published in

Stellar Community

6 min readDec 16, 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

👉 Important Reminder: Voting has begun for the Stellar Community Round 3, which is our quarterly grant that awards 3 million lumens split across 8 projects building on Stellar. If you’re interested in participating in the vote, head over to https://stellarcommunity.fund. — Check out the Round 3 proposals here.
Denelle Dixon dropped by the Money 3.0 Podcast to talk about SDF’s mission to unlock the world’s economic potential.— Listen to it here.
SDF is hosting a meetup on Tuesday, Dec. 17 in San Francisco. Come to catch up on Meridian, latest updates, and plans for 2020. We’ll have drinks and snacks at Cloudflare’s space on Townsend. — RSVP here (p.s. it’s free).
The Keybase Spacedrop is coming to an end. — Read the update here.
Registration for Reddit Stellar Community Points has ended. Distribution of r/Stellar Photons will now be done on the Stellar blockchain. — Find more details here.
Reddit user SpeakoEspanglish, with some help from SDF’s own StellarZac, put together a WordPress plugin that lets you create a stellar.toml file. — Read about it here.
SatoshiPay gives us more details about its new B2B cross-border payment service. — Read the introduction here.
🔥 The Stellar Torch made its way to CoinDesk. — Read the article here.

This week I’m featuring StellarAuth!

In the demo above, Tyler walks you through everything you need to know about StellarAuth.

A quick summary from the documentation:

“StellarAuth is a developer API and user application service for easily and securely assigning Stellar accounts to your users from within your app. Kind of like Authy (2FA) for Stellar, but also a lot like a combination of Sign In with Apple and Apple Card. Essentially it’s a secure way to give your users a Stellar account which you can send requests to and they can accept or decline in an intuitive interface. You won’t store secrets, we don’t have access to secrets and the user won’t have to deal with anything they’re not already familiar with.”

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.

Active Discussions

The hot topic on the dev mailing list this week was the proposal for adding protocol-level mulitplexed (aka muxed) accounts. In case you need a refresher:

Multiplexed accounts are aiming to 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.

We’ve heard from a lot of players in the ecosystem, including Lobstr, Stellarport, Ternio Blockcard, and Coinqvest, and we’d love to hear from you.

As SDF chief scientist David Mazieres puts it in the thread “The question on the table is whether we should accept CAP-0027, which already has an implementation.”

What do you think? Join in on the discussion here.

If these types of conversations interest you, consider joining the Stellar Developer mailing list!

Merged PRs

It’s been a relaxed week as only two PRs have been merged in relation to CAPs and SEPs:

SEP-0010: Remove the jti as a required token field 7 days ago
Clarify CAP-0015 2 days ago

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.

Stellar-Core had a PR merged this week that is worth highlighting and could help Horizon quite a bit: Bug 2226 fast replay streaming txmeta.

Horizon needs transaction information produced by stellar-core in order to properly ingest transactions. The problem is that replaying all transactions via catchup in stellar-core takes a very long time. This PR introduces a special mode that replays all transaction history much quicker (less than a day), and generates necessary metadata for Horizon to use. (Thanks to Marta for explaining this to me).

I also wanted to feature the relatively new Stellar Wallet SDK (js-stellar-wallets). The point of this library is to make it easier to write your own Stellar wallet. Its aim isn’t to replace the current JavaScript Stellar SDK, but to provide a better API and new functionality where possible. The README explains the features specific to the Stellar Wallet SDK:

It provides straightforward APIs for handling these tasks: