Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #7
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 Development Foundation CEO, Denelle Dixon, recaps her recent trip to Washington DC — Full Story
- Two exciting, new mobile wallet releases: Smartlands, and StellarX iOS!
- OrbitLens dropped another interesting blockchain analysis post on Reddit, this time on the efficiency of the Blockchain.com giveaway — Read More
- Stellar Community Fund Round 2 guidelines have been posted and discussion has started — GalacticTalk Thread
- Solar Wallet v0.20.1 update — Announcement
Have you heard of Kelp?
As my internship has progressed into some work with the Stellar Decentralized Exchange and the internals of the order book, I have a new found interest in exploring the Stellar trading ecosystem. So, I figured I would highlight, in my opinion, one of the most overlooked tools of the ecosystem, Kelp. The Kelp team also conveniently posted a wonderful blog post explaining what they build and why this week, definitely worth a read.
Now, at this point, you may be thinking, wait Rob… I don’t stare at terminals and pretend I’m in the matrix all day like you. I don’t think this app is for me.
Well hold on! Alas, the Kelp team is releasing a GUI! Yep, I have actually had a sneak peak and all I can say is wow!
Application of the Week
Go-Stellar-IPFS, a bridge between Stellar and IPFS, developed by aanupam23 is this week’s featured application. Congratulations! The main contribution of this project is a library called StellarShell, which “helps you use premade functions for sending any sort of data to IPFS using stellar transaction, memo, manage data and also allows reading of that data.” I do not have experience with IPFS, so I cannot really comment on my own impressions of the project, however this is certainly something everyone should check out, given just a few weeks ago, SEP-0022, a proposal for standardizing the IPFS-Stellar relationship, was accepted as a draft. I would be interested in hearing the opinions of those in the know, how/if this library follows the spec.
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.
A pretty quiet week on the protocol front, with just some small improvements to previous SEPs and of course lots of work to implement accepted SEPs and CAPs going on in the background.
All in all, four pull requests were merged in the last week.
Updates from Stellar Core
While it may seem like core took the week off, with just two doc PR’s this week, there was actually lots of exciting work going on in the background. A couple open PR’s I am most excited for include an implementation of CAP-0025, an implementation of CAP-0024 (still pretty early), and a new feature to allow setting upgrades by ledger number instead of time.
🎉🎉🎉 Oh, and 11.3.0 was released! 🎉🎉🎉
Stellar-core 11.3.0, full release notes here, is primarily a bug fix release, most notably introducing a tool for predicting future quorum intersection problems, a few new metrics, and some bucket list work (lots of improvements coming here as of late!).
The two docs pull requests 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
- Add prefixing functionality (WIP, thanks charlie-wasp!!!)
State of the Developer Ecosystem
An incredibly exciting week on the ecosystem library front! Along with the release of Stellar-core 11.3.0, as described above, Horizon, the Stellar Ticker, the JavaScript SDK, the Python SDK, the Kotilin SDK, AND the .Net SDK all released an update this week. A brief one liner on the most exciting thing each of these updates bring:
- Horizon (only rc, don’t use in production): experimental accounts-for-signer endpoint
- Stellar Ticker: testnet support
- JavaScript SDK: SEP-0010 transaction challenge builder
- Python SDK: BREAKING CHANGE — SSE returns dict instead of string
- Kotlin SDK: upgrade to comply with Java SDK 0.9.0 release
- .Net SDK: fix for XDR parsing from transaction result
Upcoming Events and Days of Note
- July 25: Stellar Mexico City Meetup
- 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:
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.
