Hello everyone welcome to a new Decred bi-weekly news Update for August 2020. We’ve been seeing lots of development updates, Politeia activity, and plenty of community involvement.
We’ll start today with development updates which are arguably the most important and interesting because we get to see the Decred ecosystem evolve and improve every single week, with the big 1.6.0 release drawing ever so closer which will include Private staking, private transactions, decentralizing the treasury, and possibly even the finalized Decred Dex, among other additions.
A video of the new unreleased desktop Wallet called GoDCR from RaeDah Group has been published showing off how the wallet will look and feel. Having more wallet variants will only help strengthen the Decred ecosystem.
There are a number of updates to the Contractor Management System including
- admins searching contractors by domain or type
- displaying proposal names instead of tokens in invoice line items
- assigning proposal ownership via a graphical user interface
- admin review of proposal spending summary and details
- A new tab for proposal owners to review billing details
- and highlighting for illegal characters in invoice line items
As shown in this photo privacy wallets are now being tested on testnet. Decred’s privacy on Decredition draws ever so closer.
https://twitter.com/marco_peereboom/status/1293364590399512577
The Decred Treasury has no more bugs to work out and in the near future will be going up to vote to be fully implemented.
JZ says $DCR's treasury will have more original code than many top 10 coins do.
Decred DEX Updates include:
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smart fee rate handling
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improved wallet locking of coins that fund orders
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additional server administration functions like ban, unban, notify, and notify all or orders with revoked (failed) matches, the order is automatically unbooked and the clients are notified
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the client now automatically resubscribes to the order book feed after a reconnection with the server
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the client now automatically resubscribes to the order book feed after a reconnection with the server client browser interface polish
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And numerous bug fixes and optimizations
Get Stakey says Seeing the dex screenshots does it no justice. Doing atomic swaps with other people on testnet is just too freakin cool.
There have been many updates to Decred’s lightning network including
- Updates to use the latest dcrwallet and dcrd
- new chainscan package that uses committed filters to detect transactions relevant for the LN node more efficiently and can also operate in SPV mode.
- switched the main dcrlnd package to use the new wallet-backed drivers.
- enable and test SPV mode for remote wallets
- ported upstream lnd changes among other improvements
Once again I’d highly recommend subscribing to the Decred Journal on Medium to see every single Dev update.
There was also lots of community activity.
Pablito has created a video showing Decred’s Git history starting from 2016 visualizing just how much work has gone into the project.
Decred has been added to the bitciontoyou application where it can be bought and sold with the brasilian real fiat currency.
The YouTube channel LiteLiger published a video called Top 5 Bullish Signals for Decred
The 5 signals he lists are:
- Arkinvest who has been endorsed by Elon Musk is carefully looking at Decred
- Coinbase head of listings picked decred as one of his top coins
- The Decred DEX development
- Privacy in the GUI wallet
- And the Decentralization of the treasury.
I really couldn’t agree more with these signals, they are all super bullish and should have everyone excited about what is in store for the Decred Project.
Decred Latin America was Live talking about commerce and cryptocurrencies in Venezuela with Jose Manuel Da Silva from criptolugares.com
LATAM also published an activity report available to see on Reddit of everything they have been up to.
Decred Brasil also released a new 30 minute explainer video which has proven to be quite popular and educational.
Michael2xl of the brazilian community was on the BItcointoYou YouTube channel’s Livestream where he presented Decred for nearly 1 hour.
OfficialCryptos is has created a set of Decred stickers now available to order.
Checkmate published some of his research work to Our Network issue 34 where his research was first on the list.
He details some on-chain metrics like miner pulse, daily transactions, Treasury voting power, among other metrics.
https://medium.com/@permabullnino/decred-on-chain-mini-pub-3-difficulty-ribbon-price-d644e470b989
PermabullNino released his 3rd mini publication about the Difficulty Ribbon Price. The difficulty ribbon is an on-chain tool created by Willy Woo in order to track distress among miners.
From his research, Permabull says ASIC introduction has had a massive impact on Decred price action, and likely caused it to have a particularly tough bear market recovery and Mining profitability will likely never return to early ASIC levels, which likely means that less bleed-out will be required to put in Decred’s next bear market bottom. Decred society has a new video about BlockChain Data Health:
Two new excellent podcasts were published.
Ammar Naseer was on Decred in depth to talk, Hyperinflation, Sound Money and DCR’s Role
Rough Consensus’s Episode was about the emergence of an early Bull market
Rough Consensus will soon be releasing an episode done with altcoin guru notsofast so stay tuned for that.
Now lets briefly go over some network stats for the month of July In July the Treasury received 13,050 DCR and spent 16,073 DCR. This is $197K received and $243K spent. As of Aug 17th, the Treasury balance is 637,423 DCR or 11.3 Million USD
Staking: The 30-day average ticket price was 144.3 DCR (+4.9 from last month) with the circulating DCR staked still hovering around 50% of the total available supply. Throughout July there was an average of 134 public listening nodes and 241 total nodes per dcr.farm If you’d like to spin up your own node on a raspberry pi be sure to check out the guide on this channel, it is geared towards new users.
We had several new Politeia Proposals published for discussion. Soon These proposals will go up for vote so make you have your tickets already purchased so you won’t miss out on casting your vote and having a voice in the direction of the project.
Marketing Decred - Twitter/Social Media, Educational Videos, Ads --- by fst_nml
This proposal requests $10,000 USD payable in DCR to fund a number of marketing strategies to drive traffic to Decred and generate new user interest.
Strategies include Twitter and social media paid ads, endorsements, and promotional content.
The creation of marketing materials like graphics and gifs from freelance websites like Upwork.
And creating general crypto educational videos, among other potential ideas that would generate a good return on investment.
FST says all all of the funds requested will go towards marketing expenses and any administrative work will be voluntary
FST makes the argument that Every $1 that DCR raises in price, would increase the treasury funds by approximately $600k. By dedicating an amount of the treasury towards marketing, we have a great opportunity to increase our treasury value for future projects by investing a small portion into marketing.
He plans to move forward with the proposal by resting a Decred Marketing Workgroup shall it pass.
Commenters were happy with the direction of the proposal but would like to see samples and tests of these ideas to see if they would be worth funding.
Next is the Decred Poker Series from darthcrypto.
This proposal requests $4,500 per month payable in Decred to fund a Poker series with free entry played online.
Darthcrypto says Decred lacks the attention it deserves and says Poker tournaments would be a good way to increase chatter about DCR in a fun manner.
The tournaments would be held weekly on Saturdays with 10 seats available and a final tournament at the end of the month. He says participants could be selected randomly via hashtags on twitter. This would create buzz on social media and draw more interest into the Decred ecosystem.
Darthcrypto is still looking into potential poker services to utilize, as 888poker does not allow registration from certain states.
Commenters were appreciative of the creativity and uniqueness of the proposal, though they expressed concerns over using 3rd party sites and questioned if this would bring about enough awareness to justify the budget.
Next is the Design domain budgets proposal from linnutee of EETER
This proposal formalizes all expenditures associated with on-going design work from current Decred contractors working in that domain.
The total ask is capped at $65,000 USD payable in Decred for work involving User interface and user experience, brand identity, and visual communications.
Simply put, this work funds the continued design of all Decred’s assets like Decredition, Politeia and its interface, Decred.org, the Decred DEX, the mobile wallet, and much more.
Graphical Assets are also continually produced, including upcoming motion graphics to help onboard users when staking.
The EETER team is the original designers of the entire Decred visual brand, having been with the project for years.
If you’d like to get a closer look at their work I would check out the dcr design Repo on Github:
https://github.com/decred/dcrdesign
Commenting has just started so if you have any questions you can sign up by visiting proposals.decred.org
This proposal is part of the process to have all contractor billing explicitly approved by Stakeholders on Politeia, so look forward to other proposals to fund work that has been already on-going.
Thanks for tuning in to this weeks bi-weekly news update, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything published to the channel, and be sure to check out decred.org to learn more about the project.