Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #5
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
- In the past week, discussion on the Stellar Developer Group around off-chain data storage has opened back up — Catch up Here
- [Drum Roll] Stellar Community Fund (SCF) round one winners announced! Congrats to all! — See Results
- SatoshiPay’s SolarWallet is SEP-0006 compliant — Learn More
- StellarX released its Android wallet — Announcement Here
Application(s) of the Week — SCF Top 3
In light of the SCF results being announced, I will honor the top 3 project here. Congrats to:
Astrograph is a framework that lowers the entry threshold to the Stellar ecosystem and makes it possible to develop Stellar-based applications in hours, not weeks — significantly reducing Stellar application development costs and time-to-market.
Instead of doing complex requests using old-school APIs and writing own tooling, developers can use Astrograph to search the ledger using a single GraphQL interface and Astrograph’s own Stellar core data ingester. With Astrograph, it is also possible to work with the Stellar network state in real-time.
2. StellarGuard
Why spend $100 or more on a hardware wallet just so you can feel safe with your XLM when you can use the built-in multisignature capabilities of the Stellar network and StellarGuard for free? StellarGuard works with your existing Stellar wallet to keep your account safe by adding 2 factor authentication to your transactions. Even if your secret key is compromised your coins will stay safe. Lobstr, StellarTerm, Stellarport, Interstellar.Exchange, Stargazer and even the Stellar Account viewer: StellarGuard protects them all from hackers, thieves, and scams.
Lumenaut made the first fee-free community pool, one of the current most used services on Stellar network. While inflation is included in the Stellar protocol and supported by validators, Lumenaut fairly distributes it globally through the community by allowing people or community projects to weekly sustain themselves.
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.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Two New CAPS Dropped Within 24 Hours 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
CAP-0024 [DRAFT]: short and to the point, Jed McCaleb introduces in this CAP, “a new Operation PathPayment2 that works almost identically to PathPayment except that you set the send amount rather than the destination amount.” This CAP is an effort to make the PathPayment operation symmetrical, allowing users to “specify how much is sent and vary how much is received.” The semantics, naming, and even a debate of payments in general is actively being discussed here.
CAP-0025 [DRAFT]: in CAP-0025, Marta Lokhava proposes the simplification of removing shadows from the Bucket List data structure in Stellar-core. As brilliantly described here, Stellar-core stores two copies of the current ledger state, one in a SQL database and one on disk, called the Bucket List. This LSM data structure is utilized for efficient diffing and hashing of the current state. TL;DR these shadows aren’t really as useful/necessary as initially thought, and take up quite a bit of space, so CAP-0025 proposes removing them. I probably oversimplified this one a bit, so if you are interested and have a second to spare, I recommend giving the CAP a full read.
All-in-all, three pull requests were merged in the last week.
Updates from Stellar Core
It was business as usual this week as a few bug fixes, testing improvements, and documentation updates were merged.
Oh and by the way, my first PR as an intern landed in core today 🎉🎉
Yep, self promotion at its finest.
Overall, six pull requests were merged in the last week.
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
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
State of the Developer Ecosystem
This week we had a few small releases around the ecosystem. To kick it off, Horizon updated to v0.18.1. As noted here, this release mostly brings some minor fixes. On the SDK front, the Go, Qt, and Js SDK’s all had a release this week. The Go update comes with some improvements to txnbuild, the Qt update introduces ManageBuyOffer and ManageSellOffer responses to coincide with the previous week’s Horizon v0.18.0 improvements, and the Js update is mostly just some small fixes and bug squashing.
Upcoming Events and Days of Note
- July 17: An Evening with Stellar and CoinSquare (Toronto, ON)
- July 31: Test Network Reset
- Nov 4–5: Stellar Meridian Conference
Jobs
Looking to work on Stellar full-time?!? Check out the list of job openings below:
- SDF Frontend Engineer (New York) Apply
- SDF Platform Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
- SDF Senior Core Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
- SDF Senior Platform Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
- SDF Senior Core Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
Not Yet Signed Up?
I now have a publication, how cool! While I will still advertise posts on the typical Stellar developer mediums (Reddit, Keybase, Google Group, etc) you can now 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.
