Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #30

A new Stellar.org, Blockchain-based retail payments, and more.

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

• 🔥 Stellar.org has a new look! Read all about it here. The new site has a fresh new set of colors, illustrations, and resources, including a new directory of projects built on Stellar and a new page outlining the SDF mandate. —Have a look around.
• Stellar Community Podcast Ep. 4 is out! This week Tyler is joined by Hans Woppmann of Blue Orion to discuss recurring payments on Stellar. — Listen here.
• Danny Tamez, Founder/CEO of Ilmatic, hopped on the Inside Stellar podcast to discuss the future of blockchain-based retail payments. — Listen here.
• CoinFlip adds support for Stellar lumens to Its 450 Crypto ATMs. — Read more here.
• Public Node, an open-membership organization featuring Stellar validators run by and for the community, spins up their third node and shares some of the lessons they’ve learned over the past few months. — Read more here.
• 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 RealtyBits! —A marketplace for digitized private real estate offerings.

RealtyBits is the first blockchain-based marketplace that makes it possible to use digital currencies to buy and sell real estate assets anywhere in the world. It is specifically created to make the entire real estate buying experience less painful and more efficient.

A quick overview: RealtyBits issues ownership rights in the form of Stellar-network tokens, and issues a USD stablecoin called USDR. Users can access the Realtybits platform to buy and sell property shares, and can use USDR as a network on/off ramp. Say a home is for sale for $100,000: Realtybits issues 100,000 tokens on Stellar, each of which represents 0.0001% ownership. Users can deposit (and later withdraw) USD at a 1:1 value for USDR, then buy those ownership tokens using USDR — making payments near instant and super cheap.

You can read more about RealtyBits here.

Releases and Updates

The Beta version of Horizon 1.0.0 came out this week. We also deployed it to the SDF testnet Horizon instances. It’s more stable than the Alpha release, and while we still don’t recommend it for production deployments, it is ready for testing setups, staging servers, and developer use. In fact, we encourage you to try it out so you can see how it handles, get familiar with Horizon’s new features, and report any issues you come across so we can fix them before the production release.

In case you missed it, the new Horizon relies on a new ingestion engine that enables some sweet new features including:

• A set of new endpoints, many of which were impossible under the previous ingestion architecture. The full list is in the release notes.
• An in-memory order book graph for rapid querying.
• The ability to run parallel ingestion over multiple Horizon hosts, which improves service availability for production deployments.

You can find the full release notes here.

Version 4.0.0 of the JavaScript Stellar SDK and version 4.0 of the Dotnet (.NET)—both of which support Horizon 1.0—came out this week, too. You can find the full release notes for the JavaScript SDK here and for the .NET SDK here.

Over the next few weeks, the rest of the Stellar SDKs will roll out new versions that support Horizon 1.0, so stayed tuned.

Active Discussions

💬 The dev mailing list is still focused on the same thing as last week: the Account Memo Requirements SEP

The goal is to provide a standard way to define transaction memo requirements for incoming payments so that customers sending funds to exchanges and other services that map a single Stellar account to multiple internal accounts can’t forget required memos.

The interesting thing about the problem is that it’s difficult to predict whether exchanges and other custodial services will choose to implement the new solution — so the path forward is not an obvious one.

The discussion this week focused on whether we should start with a simple solution to test the waters, then iterate on it over time or whether we should release a fully specified standard from the get go.

Pros of the iterative approach: it doesn’t require a big change, and is relatively simple to implement. The con: iterating standards over time can cause confusion and result in fragmented implementations.

The pro of the standard-from-the-get-go approach: everything is fully specified so there’s no fragmentation. The cons: it will take longer to implement, requires more work across the ecosystem, and may never never achieve widespread adoption.

👉 What do you see as the best path forward? Follow along or hop in to the conversation here.

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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 👍