Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #38
SDF quarterly update, online Stellar events, and improving SDEX liquidity.
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
- We hosted our first quarterly results webinar looking back at the progress SDF and the Stellar network made in Q1 2020. — You can watch it in full here.
- SDF’s Co-founder and Chief Architect, Jed McCaleb, joined the The Bad Crypto Podcast to discuss the latest updates in the Stellar ecosystem. — Listen to it here.
- SDF’s Vice President of Engineering, Tom Quisel, released a blog post titled Fixing Memo-less Payments. It details how exchanges and wallets can require memos for Stellar payments by setting an account-level flag in just a few clicks or a few lines of code. — Read it here.
- Tyler and I hosted the 13th episode of The Stellar Podcast live on YouTube! We discussed the current stage of the Stellar Community Fund, previewed some upcoming online events, gave a presentation about assets on Stellar, and wrapped it up with some listener Q&A. — You can watch the replay here.
- We also hosted our first Engineering Talk, the beginning of a bi-weekly series. Every other Friday, we’ll live stream a 10–15 minute talk by an engineer at SDF about the deep, dark secrets of Stellar. In this first installment, Tyler gave a presentation called Practical Path Payments where he explored use-cases arising from Stellar’s most unique feature. — Watch the replay here.
- Have you ever wanted to quickly look up the number of contributors and commits on Stellar’s open-source Github repos? Now you can! GitGitLog has added Stellar to its list of tracked repositories. — View the stats here.
Application of the Week
This week I’m featuring Apay’s new market making bot!
Bootstrapping liquidity is tough, and it’s generally a problem tackled by specialists with market making expertise. Apay, however, wanted to make it easier for more people to get involved in improving liquidity on the Stellar decentralized exchange, so they created a market making bot inspired by an Ethereum DEX, Uniswap.
The way it works: users deposit funds into a market making bot in return for an Apay-issued token that represents percentage ownership in the liquidity (or total balance) of the bot. The bot then calculates the price of a given pair as ratio between its balances (described below).
Here’s an example:
Let’s say a bot is running a BTC / USDT pair. It holds a balance of 1 BTC and 7,000 USDT and the bot sets the price of BTC at 7,000 USDT / BTC. There are also 100 APAYBTC tokens issued to users who have deposited funds in to the bot, each representing a percentage ownership in the liquidity. The bot starts trading around the 7,000/1 median price.
Say Alice is one of those users and she made an initial deposit of 0.1 BTC and 700 USDT. Since the value of each APAYBTC token is 0.01 BTC + 70 USD, Alice owns 10 of the APAYBTC tokens.
Now let’s say BTC’s price slowly rises to 14,000/1, and after trading back and forth, the bot ends up with a balance of 0.76 BTC and 10,650 USDT. At this point, if Alice decides to redeem her 10 APAYBTC tokens, she receives 0.076 BTC + 1,065 USDT. You’ll notice that Alice received 0.024 less BTC than she deposited, but 365 USDT more — which is higher than her original deposit. Interestingly, the result would be similar if the BTC price dropped to 3,500/1: she would get more BTC and less USDT, but the total output value would exceed the value of her initial deposit.
If you want to learn more about Apay’s new market making bot, check out their recent blog post here.
Warning: Trading is risky regardless of whether it’s done by a bot or a human. You shouldn’t make decisions about using this bot without doing your own research first and understanding the risks involved.
Releases and Updates
Horizon v1.1.0 is out! It includes changes that pave the way for some major improvements that will be released soon in Stellar Protocol 13. To find out more about what’s going to be in Protocol 13, check Issue #34.
You can download the update and read the full Horizon release notes here:
https://github.com/stellar/go/releases/tag/horizon-v1.1.0
This version includes a significant database migration that will run for a long time, especially if you have a Horizon database with full history. It’s a good idea to get the migration out of the way now so you’ll be prepared when Stellar Protocol 13 arrives.
Active Discussions
💬 This week I wanted to feature a discussion that will take place this Thursday, April 16: Creating a Stellar Ecosystem Standard for Send / Receive Transactions.
This will be our first-ever live round-table discussion! The goal is to get feedback on a new Stellar Ecosystem Proposal (SEP) that defines a standard for seamless Send / Receive Transactions over Stellar.
Right now, there’s a widely used ecosystem standard for Deposit / Withdrawal transactions — SEP-24 — that Stellar anchors and wallets implement to allow users to obtain and redeem Stellar-network tokens in exchange for fiat currencies using their interface of choice.
However, many traditional remittance and business-to-business payments require a different kind of interaction: money moves from a sender’s bank account to a recipient’s, or from cash on the counter to cash out the door. These Send / Receive transactions skip the deposit and withdrawal steps that underpin SEP-24, and by doing so, present their own set of opportunities and challenges. Currently, there’s no standard way to execute them on Stellar; the goal of this experiment is to start to hammer one out live and in public.
Over the course of an hour, listen as representatives from Cowrie, Tempo, SatoshiPay, and the Stellar Development Foundation work to create a new Send / Receive SEP. There’s a live Q&A at the end, so bring your best questions!
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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 👍
