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Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #26

Stellar Community Fund winners, Denelle Dixon Looks Back at 2019, Litemint Acquires Stellarport.

Kolten
Stellar Community
6 min readJan 13, 2020

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Hey everyone, we are back to our regularly scheduled program! 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, payment systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.

Featured Developer Posts and News from the Week

  • 🎆 Denelle Dixon put out her year-end blog post covering SDF’s organizational development, ecosystem development, and product and technology development. — A Look Back and A Look Forward: Our Momentum for 2020
  • I also released a year-end post covering the highlights of 2019 from around the ecosystem. — A Stellar 2019 — The Dev Digest Year in Review
  • 🎉 The Stellar Community Fund: Round 3 result are in! We’ll cover it more later but you can find the blog post here.
  • We released the new Stellar Development Foundation mandate. It explains everything we’re doing with our lumen allocations, and details exactly which ledger addresses hold what funds. You can check it out to see up-to-date balances and watch us make progress toward our goals. — Read it here.
  • Litemint, an app combining mobile games and the Stellar network, acquired Stellarport. — Read more here.
  • BitGo announced support for Stellar-based assets.

This week I’m featuring the winners of the Stellar Community Fund: Round 3!

Congrats to all who won 🏆

I have harped on the Stellar Community Fund quite a bit in this newsletter, but in case you missed all that here’s a brief explainer:

Every three months, the broader Stellar community is given the opportunity to vote for their favorite project proposals. The winners split a pool of 3,000,000 lumens based on the percentage of the final vote they received.

Now that the first year of SCF has ended, we will be taking a brief hiatus to refine the structure based on community and project feedback. I’m excited to see where it goes in 2020.

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 a new SEP titled Account Memo Requirements. The goal of this proposal is to provide a standard way to define transaction memo requirements for incoming payments.

Custodial exchanges tend to use a single Stellar wallet for deposits and withdrawals, and to rely on memos to differentiate users. This setup is great until a user forgets to input their unique memo and their deposit gets lost.

Recently, there was a proposal to tackle this problem by introducing multiplexed accounts, which I discussed at length in a previous dev digest. Adding muxed accounts requires a change to Stellar-core, so it may be a while before we see them live on the network. The Account Memo Requirements proposal is a temporary fix while we wait.

Here’s how it works: an account owner submits a transaction with MANAGE_DATA operation that adds a data entry with the name interop.memo_required and a value containing the expected memo type (MEMO_TEXT, MEMO_ID, MEMO_HASH, or MEMO_RETURN). SDK’s can then fetch a destination account’s information, perform checks, and throw an error if the transaction doesn’t meet the requirements.

It seems that a few people like the solution so far! What do you think? Join in on the discussion here.

Merged PRs

Because of the holidays, it’s been a while since I’ve written a proper Dev Digest. Here are all of the PRs that were merged while I was drinking egg nog:

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.

Since the last issue of the digest, Stellar-core has had 7 PRs merged:

One that I personally thought was pretty cool: the Overlay topology survey message PR. This PR allows a node to request connection information from another node on the network by flooding the request. The goal is to make it easier to understand the current overlay topology of the network.

Horizon v0.24.1 was released on December 16 and includes several fixes to the new experimental ingestion engine. — Read the full release notes.

Reminder: Horizon v0.25.0 will be ready for release soon(ish). Stay tuned for more info.

Looking to work on Stellar full-time? Check out the list of job openings below:

  • SDF Senior Software Engineer (Core) (San Francisco) Apply
  • SDF Senior Software Engineer (Platform) (San Francisco) Apply
  • SDF Site Reliability Engineer (Asia-Pacific) Apply
  • SDF Software Engineer (Integration) (San Francisco) Apply
  • SDF Software Engineer (Platform) (San Francisco) Apply
  • SDF Software Engineer (Platform (New York City) Apply

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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 and I’ll make sure to fix it 👍

Blockchain
Stellar
Fintech

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Kolten
Stellar Community

Written by Kolten

323 Followers

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