Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #32

Horizon 1.0, the return of the Stellar Community Fund, live episode of the Stellar Community Podcast, tokenized bonds on 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

• Out now: Horizon 1.0! It includes some breaking changes, specifically to the way fee stats work, so please consult the changelog to see how to adapt your code. The is the first major Horizon release, and we wrote a blog post explaining what that means and why it’s a big deal—Check it out.
• 🔥 The Stellar Community Fund (Season 2) is now open! A new set of guidelines and structural improvements have been introduced, and the dates have been set. Submissions open on Feb. 24, so get your proposals ready for a chance to win a portion of the 3 million lumen prize! — Read the announcement here.
• SDF’s CEO and Executive Director, Denelle Dixon, will be speaking at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit taking place from March 31 to April 1. — Get more info here.
• Stellar Community Podcast Ep. 6 is out! Tyler sits down with the CTO of BidCoins.io, Nick Papillon, to discuss smart auctions, data storage, the efficiencies of Stellar, and more! — Listen here.
• OrbitLens, creator of Stellar.Expert, released a blog post discussing a tool for facilitating multi-sig discovery. Stellar provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to multi-signature account setups, and it can be quite tricky to determine if a given set of multi-sig requirements are met before submitting a transaction. OrbitLens’ tool, StellarTxSignersInspector, hopes to make this process easier. — Read more here.
• For our Spanish speaking community, Blockchain Academy Mexico has released a blog post highlighting the new changes to Stellar.org. — You can read it here.

Application of the Week

This week I’m featuring Bitbond! — A compliant platform for tokenizing debt securities.

Bitbond provides a white-label solution that uses Stellar to digitize and streamline the bond issuance process. A bond is a debt security: the issuer owes holders a debt, and generally pays them interest or repays the principal at a later date. Here’s a short explainer video.

Tokenizing bonds on Stellar reduces intermediaries, makes tracking ownership easier, speeds up the issuance process, and saves costs. Radoslav Albrecht, founder of Bitbond, explains these benefits in more detail on the Inside Stellar podcast.

You can learn more about Bitbond and the team on their website.

Releases and Updates

👉 Horizon 1.0 is out! Read the blog post. On March 2, we will be upgrading the horizon.stellar.org cluster to Horizon v1.0.0, so if you’re using that, make sure to prepare. It contains some breaking changes, which you can check out in the changelog. Please make sure to update your code! We created a temporary beta public network server running v1.0.0-beta to help with that.

👉 I’d also like to echo a reminder from last week: upgrade your SDK of choice to avoid any issues when Horizon v1.0.0 gets deployed to the public network. These SDKs that are ready to go: Go, Javascript, Python, Qt, .NET, iOS, Scala.

Starting a full stellar core validator from scratch can take a while because the node needs to download and process a lot of data during the “Catch up” phase. Lobstr has released a script to make that process significantly shorter by allowing a node to perform the catch up of multiple ledger blocks in parallel. You can find it here.

Active Discussions

💬 The discussion I’m highlighting is not on the dev mailing list for a change!

Tyler and I will be hosting a live Stellar Community Podcast session on Thursday, Feb 27 @ 3PM EST. We’re looking to discuss anything and everything related to Stellar — the ecosystem, community initiatives, building… you name it.

You can register for the live event here: https://meetinglab.zoho.com/meeting/register?sessionId=1076143114

We’re asking for input from the community to help guide the conversation, and collecting it on this Reddit thread. Feel free to share topics of interest there in advance, and if you tune in to the live stream, to ask questions or share your opinion in real time.

We are looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts, and we’ll talk to you Thursday!

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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 👍