Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #60

Stablecoins: The Future of Digital Money, more Meridian speakers announced, and a new Polaris release.

Hey everyone! 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, payment systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.

News & Posts of the Week

• Join us at Meridian 2020! Registration is now live and last week we announced some very special speakers including the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee.— Register here.
• Tyler and I get asked all the time: what makes a prize winning entry in the SCF? Last week Tyler put out a blog post that answers this very question. He goes into detail about his experience winning SCF and what to focus on after submitting your project. — Read it here.
• Submissions are now closed for this round’s SCF Lab Fund. Of the 19 entrants, ~12 will be chosen by a panel of SDF and Stellar community members, and their final prizes will be voted on by the community. — Check out this round’s submissions.
• We (SDF) put out a blog post last week — Stablecoins: The Future of Digital Money — that details what stablecoins are, how they’re used, and why Stellar is built for them. — Read it here.
• Sam Conner and the Public Node Podcast hosted Nikhil Saraf, Software Engineer at SDF, to discuss the Kelp trading bot and its ongoing Stellar Battle. — Listen here.

Application of the Week

This week I’m featuring Polaris — an extendable Django app for Stellar Ecosystem Proposal implementations maintained by the Stellar Development Foundation.

I’ve featured Polaris in the past, but this time it’s to celebrate the project’s first stable release! SDF’s integration team has been working directly with existing anchors using earlier versions of Polaris since late 2019 to ensure it provides the features necessary to develop, deploy, and maintain compliant anchor services on the public network, and this release represents the culmination of those efforts.

Polaris implements the APIs defined in each integrated SEP, the processes needed for periodic tasks, and the core data model used to facilitate the implemented protocols. Polaris also provides an integration interface — or set of classes and functions — that allow anchors to implement logic specific to their organization and business needs. In short, it makes setting up an anchor service a whole lot easier. You can find the full 1.0 release notes here.

Releases and Updates

A Horizon patch, Horizon 1.8.2, has been released to fix a bug that prevented Horizon from accepting TLS connections. Download it here.

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Active Discussions

💬 Protocol 14 is around the corner! To celebrate I wanted to highlight some of the CAPs included in this upcoming release.

CAP-0023: Two part payment with Claimable balance entry — This proposal introduces new operations that separate sending a payment from receiving the payment. The introduction of a claimable balance entry helps anchors get around the chicken/egg trustline conundrum. You can read some of the conversations around CAP-0023 here.

CAP-0033: Sponsored Reserve — This proposal makes it possible to pay reserves for another account. Additionally, this implementation allows the account sponsor to retain control over the funds used to sponsor an account. You can read the conversations around CAP-0033 here (where it started as CAP-0031).

CAP-0034: Preserve Transaction-Set/Close-Time Affinity During Nomination (consensus) — This proposal makes the nomination protocol select the close time from the single candidate whose transaction set it selects (rather than the current protocol’s selection of the maximum close time of all candidates), and preserve the signature of the chosen <close time, transaction set> pair. CAP-0034 is a bit in the weeds, but you can find the conversations around it here.

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Did I Miss Something?

If you found that something from this issue is missing or inaccurate reach out to me (kolten) on Keybase and I’ll make sure to fix it 👍