The Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #4

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.

We have quite a lot of exciting news this week!

Grab a ☕, find your reading 👓, and enjoy!

Featured Developer Posts and News from the Week

• A great explanation of why quorum sets matter (certainly clarified quite a few things for me!) — Full Article
• New Stellar.org website goes beta TODAY! — Read More Here
• An exciting demo of an internet-less Stellar transaction — Must See Video
• SDF’s monthly roundup for June — What happened last month?
• Lisa Nestor drops the mic with a fantastic speech at the Crypto Valley Conference — Transcript
• The Stellar Torch is lit — Details Here
• The Protocol Working Group met this week — Meeting Notes
• Croupier, a Keybase XLM gambling bot, was released — Blog Post
• A straightforward tutorial of how to explore Stellar Addresses and the DEX with Python — Full Post
• The Scala SDK released a roadmap for the rest of the year — Roadmap

Application of the Week

The featured application of the week is Equilibre.io, developed by MisterTicot. Congratulations!

Equilibre.io is a portfolio balancer for assets found on the Stellar DEX, letting you spread your positions over several anchors, for better fund safety. For anyone interested in getting involved, they are looking for translators!

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.

Another week, another new CAP/SEP. I think that makes four weeks in a row… we are on 🔥!

CAP-0023 [DRAFT]: written by Jonathan Jove, CAP-0023 continues the trend of addressing failed transaction issues (see also David Mazieres’s CAP-0022) and roadblocks to safe, simple, payment channel implementations. Specifically, this CAP “introduces new operations that separate sending a payment from receiving the payment. Then the success of sending depends only on the state of the sending account and success of receiving depends only on the state of the receiving account.” This CAP introduces a new ledger entry,BalanceEntry, along with two new operations: CreateBalance and ClaimBalance. To get the low down on how all this works along with the rationale for this change, checkout the CAP in its entirety.

We also saw a CAP move from Draft →Accepted!

CAP-0015 [ACCEPTED]: CAP-0015, authored by OrbitLens, introduces the concept of the “Fee Bump Transaction” (BFE) to allow paying transaction fees by an arbitrary account. This is especially useful in cases where a third-party may want to cover the fees of a client (wallets/exchanges) or a pre-signed transaction, signed before a base_fee increase, needs to increase its fee to become valid again. Read the finer details here.

All in all, four pull requests were merged in the last week.

• Update CAPs for week of 06/27/2019.
• Move SEP-0020 to Active.
• Initial draft for CAP-0023
• Move CAP-0015 to FCP: Acceptance.,

Updates from Stellar Core

Besides the exciting release of 11.2.0, detailed in the Developer Ecosystem section below, it was a normal week of bug fixes and subtle improvements on the core front.

Overall, six pull requests were merged in the last week.

• Fix tests
• herder: order qmap before hashing, reduce spurious recalculation.
• fix catchup current/0 error on very up-to-date databases
• Rebuild db and replay buckets with differing logic
• Update admin.md
• add ‘parallel’ to packages, re #2025,

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

• Prettier Logs
• If short of assets, friendlier error message

Stellar-core (C++): the backbone of the Stellar network

• Update docs for recent deprecated command line removal

Stellar Go Monorepo (Go): Stellar’s public monorepo of go code

• Create docs for Horizon command line usage
• Horizon: add circulating supply to asset stats

Stellar Vanity Wallet Generator (Rust): generate Stellar vanity wallets

• Add prefixing functionality

State of the Developer Ecosystem

Another exciting week with three version updates. The most notable release was Stellar-core 11.2.0 — highly recommend checking out the release notes… however for the lazy, I will list some of my favorite features:

• Quorum intersection monitoring: allows administrators to set up monitoring via the logs when the overall network is not configured properly for quorum intersection.
• Automatic Quorum Set generation: allows administrators to automatically configure their quorum set according to best practices. This is now the preferred way for admins to configure their quorum sets (largely motivated by May’s outages).

Also, TAKE NOTE of the following BREAKING changes:

• The info endpoint changed in a breaking way (specifically, the quorum section - see observing consensus).
• The old style command line syntax has been removed after being deprecated since November 2018 (aka drop the “- -” preface to commands)

Besides core, there were a couple minor releases: the Java SDK bumped to version 8.1.0 and the JavaScript SDK bumped to 2.0.0-beta.9 (pre-release) with a 1.0.5 LTS release.

Upcoming Events and Days of Note

• 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.