Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #10
Hey y’all! It’s about that time of the week again. 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, payments systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.
Featured Developer Posts and News from the Week
- Stellar’s new website is officially LIVE!!!
- Informative Stellar developer workshop hosted by Tomer Weller — Video
- Someone made some really cool Stellar art — See Here
- Orbitlens released some exciting new features for stellar.expert including: embeddable widgets and an account demolisher tool — Announcement
Application of the Week
Well, since I am all out of applicants for app of the week, I get to choose whatever project I want. Time for some blatant self-promotion 😈
This week’s featured application is the Stellar Vanity Address Generator, a project written in rust by robertDurst, charlie-wasp, and termhn, that allows users to generate Stellar vanity addresses, or public keys with a selected prefix or postfix.
Take the following as an example:
cargo run -- --postfix=PIZZAOutput:
SUCCESS!Public Key: "GBLOMQ5YSRJ7RA5LL2GHMJEXIPUSYI4RXVI736ZSEWE5MWH6VEBPIZZA"Secret Key: "SCMMV7VCRL2UJNRKCNYSIDSYPKPHMFICWWG2NXID42SFFAGSIQJH6B6E"
Cool right!?!?
Interested in writing rust with me? Want to make this thing faster? Want a shout out in the next Stellar Dev Digest? Then consider checking out one of the open issues.
Interested in promoting your own project, or another exciting project in the ecosystem? If so, please make a submission here.
Stellar Protocol (CAPs) and Ecosystem (SEPs) Updates
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.
CAP-0026 [DRAFT]: this CAP has been coming for quite a while now as discussions have been rumbling around various Stellar forums for the past year (or two or more?). In this CAP, Orbitlens proposes the disabling of inflation. As he points out, inflation was “originally planned as a simple way for users to support important ecosystem projects and keep the overall XLM supply slightly inflationary.” His reasoning is basically that inflation does not serve its purpose, it creates an unnecessary weekly load on the network, and as base fees increase, it becomes more expensive for inflation pools to operate. Orbitlens does not really propose a solution to solve the original goal of inflation, Orbitlens does however comment that this: “opens new possibilities for the more effective targeted reward distributions that require complex logic, like stimulating DEX liquidity providers.”
Also as more and more SEP-0010 implementations emerge, we have been seeing a lot of small tweaks to the standard.
And finally, it should be noted that SEP-0012 has officially been marked as deprecated in favor of SEP-0006.
All-in-all, six pull requests were merged in the last week.
Updates from Stellar Core
Core was back at it this week, full steam ahead working on the finishing touches for an 11.4.0 release coming next week. Mostly small improvements, bug squashing, and performance tweaking.
Overall, eight pull requests were merged in the last week.
- Use ConditionalWork for history replay in catchup
- Refactor publish-related work to avoid races
- fix max size of base64 encoded columns
- Squash db schema version 10
- add missing <algorithm> include
- Fail loadgen when load is too high, remove Simulation dependency
- XDR: fsync on close (also bucket dir), with option to disable.
- Do not run all tests on travis
Calls for Participation
Looking to get your hands dirty and not sure where to begin? The Stellar ecosystem is full of open source projects looking for help. The following projects are interested in some help and are very likely willing to offer mentorship in exchange:
js-stellar-sdk (JavaScript): Stellar’s main Stellar client library for Javascript
- FetchTimebounds Bug
- Simplified start/end date checking in Trade Aggregations leads to unexpected Horizon Error
Kelp (Go): a free and open-source trading bot for the Stellar universal marketplace
Stellar Go Monorepo (Go): Stellar’s public monorepo of go code
Stellar Vanity Wallet Generator (Rust): generate Stellar vanity wallets
awesome-stellar (Markdown): A curated list of Stellar applications, blog posts, educational resources, tools, and more
- Add more projects to the developer: useful tools section 👈 (Easy one!!!)
State of the Developer Ecosystem
This week we have some exciting SDK updates! First, on the Go front, we have an update to the Go SDK. This update brings SEP-0010 compliance, some useful new transaction building functionality, and support for some of the new Horizon 0.19.0 features. Read more about it here. The Python SDK is working its way to a 2.0.0 release. While it is still alpha, I’d like to give the SDK maintainers here a brief GIF round of applause:
This 2.0.0-alpha release is BREAKING and NOT PRODUCTION READY. However, if you want to give it a test run, it comes fully packed and loaded with a new API and asynchronous support. Here are the v2 docs.
Upcoming Events and Days of Note
Jobs
Looking to work on Stellar full-time?!? Check out the list of job openings below:
Not Yet Signed Up?
I have a publication, how cool! While I will still advertise posts on the typical Stellar developer mediums (Reddit, Keybase, Google Group, etc) you can also follow this publication.
Did I Miss Something?
Darn, I knew it! If you found that something from this issue is missing or inaccurate, please open an issue here or message me (r_durst) on Keybase and I will get around to it ASAP. Thanks!
Disclaimer: this is entirely an endeavor of my own, in no way, shape or form endorsed by or a result of my employment with the Stellar Development Foundation.
