The Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #3
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
- What’s better than zero-knowledge proofs, smart contracts, and virtual machines? A zero-knowledge, smart contract, virtual machine written in Rust! Check out this interesting and accessible talk discussing the basics of ZkVM given by Oleg Andreev and Cathie Yun at ZCon — Video Here
- Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation, discusses her first six weeks — Blog Post
- StellarGuard explains, What’s in Your Wallet, a fabulous insight into where Lumens actually exist — Full Article
- How SatoshiPay is “transforming online publishing” — Video Here
- Wirex Federation explainer — Read More
Application of the Week
In order to not unintentionally promote any project during the final round of the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) voting, I have decided to withhold this section for the week… so go vote!
Like actually though, please vote! This is the Stellar Community Fund and presumably if you are reading this, you are a member of the community.
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-0022 [DRAFT]: This week David Mazieres introduced CAP-0022, titled Invalid Transactions must have no effects. Currently, as detailed in the CAP, certain, invalid transactions are included in transaction sets to be executed following consensus. These invalid transactions fail — as expected — however, they still produce effects on the ledger, charged fees and increased transaction numbers. While it certainly makes sense to penalize the user for attempting to (intentionally or not) execute an invalid transaction, such effects on the ledger can lead to less deterministic/predictable states, a serious complication for second layer protocol designers. To learn more, check out the CAP in its entirety here.
Overall, 4 pull requests were merged in the last week.
Updates from Stellar Core
With the release of 11.2.0rc3, the core team spent the majority of the week in bug fix mode and/or polishing up in-progress PR’s.
All-in-all, 9 pull requests were merged in the last week.
- Remove redundant — one might say “straggling” — copy of straggler metric.
- Added v11.0.0 changes to release notes
- overlay: cache metrics so we don’t keep looking them up.
- Add missing dependency for running tests on mac
- Improve error messages when an exception is thrown
- Bug 2152 move quorum intersection checker
- remove deprecated command line handler
- Travis: provide some values to ccache
- Fix Travis ccache integration
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:
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 was a big week for SDK releases as the JavaScript, .Net, Python, and Java all pushed a version update! We also saw Stellar-core push a third release candidate, gearing up for the 11.2.0 release. If you are curious about what this will bring, check out the pre-release notes here. Finally, the Go Monorepo, which, as the name hints at, supports more than just Horizon, pushed a release of 0.0.32 of the Compliance Server. This is a minor release for the Compliance Server, dropping MySQL support, improving test coverage, and utilizing the new Go SDK.
Upcoming Events and Days of Note
- June 28: Stellar Munich Cluster Meetup with Lisa Nestor and Kori Higgins
- June 30: Stellar Community Fund: Round 1 Voting Ends
- Nov 4–5: Stellar Meridian Conference
Jobs
Looking to work on Stellar fulltime?!? 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.
