Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #29

Denelle Dixon shares growth strategy, New Stellar-core release, Task Force on Financial Technology mentions Stellar.

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, payment systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.

News & Posts of the Week

• Congressman Tom Emmer talked about Stellar during a meeting of the Task Force on Financial Technology, which is a U.S.-government effort to examine issues regarding fintech regulation, consumers, and more. — See the conversation here.
• Denelle Dixon, CEO and Executive Director of SDF, shares the growth strategy for the Stellar network in 2020. — Watch here.
• Stellar Community Podcast Ep. 3 is out! In this episode Tyler and I cover the news highlights from Jan. 13 — Jan. 27. — Listen here.
• Cole Diamond, CEO of Coinsquare (operators of StellarX and StableCoin), won Technopreneur of the Year at @canadian_sme National Business Awards 2019.
• SatoshiPay partners with MoonPay to provide instant XLM purchases in Solar wallet. — Read the press release.
• Litemint now allows users to donate directly to the Tor Project and Lumenthropy. — See it in action.
• SDF is hosting a “Build Your Own Stellar Wallet” workshop in San Francisco on February 19. It’ll cover everything you need to know to build a fully-functional Stellar wallet. — RSVP here.

Application of the Week

This week I’m featuring DSTOQ! — DSTOQ uses Stellar to tokenize real world assets in order to allow users invest peer-to-peer from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world.

Making investing accessible and affordable. For everyone, everywhere.

DSTOQ is a trading facility platform that allows partner banks to issue tokens representing securities. Those securities are held in custody by banks that are regulated and licensed, and DSTOQ users can buy those regardless of how much money they choose to invest.

Additionally, DSTOQ will be offering an end-to-end solution for securities trading. Their API abstracts away the difficulties, regulations, and compliance challenges of financial markets, and makes the process of storing and trading Stellar-based assets easier for integrated businesses.

Releases and Updates

Stellar-core v12.3.0 was released on Thursday, January 30th. I’m going to be completely honest, a lot of the changes go way over my head, but there are some cool improvements and features worth highlighting.

I briefly mentioned it in a previous issue, but this release includes a network topology survey that allows validators to perform analysis on the overall network’s connectivity graph. Knowing more about the network’s topology will allow deeper changes to be made to the P2P networking code. A survey script was also added to illustrate how to use the survey code.

An interesting stability improvement is the removal of the accountbalances index on the account database. When inflation was around, only accounts with balances over 100 XLM were eligible to receive inflation. Stellar-core indexed those accounts to support running the inflation operation at low latency, but since validators voted to remove inflation, there’s really no point to continuing to do that. It’s just extra work. After removing the index, a full replay of the history of the network should take a little less time.

If Stellar-core is your thing, the full list of new features and improvements can be found here!

Active Discussions

💬 A new announcement on the dev mailing list this week: SEP-10 Web Authentication — Important Changes for Multi-Sig.

If you’re unfamiliar with SEP-0010, it is basically a method for proving ownership of a Stellar account ID. Say I want an anchor to deposit $500 to my Stellar account: GDUY7. Before I receive my $500, the anchor must verify that I actually own account GDUY7. To do this, the anchor sends an unsigned, invalid transaction to GDUY7, which I sign and send back to the anchor. The anchor then returns a timestamped JSON web token which can be used to conduct any further API requests for account GDUY7.

In the previous implementation of SEP-0010, it was only a requirement to check for a master key to sign the transaction from the anchor. This wasn’t optimal because some accounts have multi-signature setups with additional signing keys. Sometimes the master key’s weight is even set to 0, making it useless. Now, SEP-0010 requires a check for accounts with multiple signers — making it more robust.

I’d normally put this in the Releases and Updates section, but there will be pending SDK and wallet changes required, and I wanted to direct any questions or suggestions to the discussion thread. — We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new change.

Thanks to Tyler for this SEP-0010 example / explanation.

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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 👍