Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #66
Meridian Hackathon countdown, custodial vs non-custodial apps, and SDF at the IMF-World Bank annual meetings.
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
- 💻 Reminder: The Meridian Hackathon is live, and you have 7 days left to submit your entry! There’s $12,000 in XLM prizes up for grabs. If you’re a developer looking to flex your creativity and get rewarded, join the hackathon today! — Sign up here.
- 🚀 Stellar Quest: Challenge #7 is live with a 12,500 XLM prize pool and as always, a sweet collectible badge! — Test your Stellar skills here.
- Last week, we hosted an Ecosystem Round Table to discuss custodial vs. non-custodial apps on Stellar featuring DSTOQ, Saldo, and SatoshiPay. — Watch the replay here.
- SDF’s CEO, Denelle Dixon, joined the Leaders in Payments podcast to discuss how Stellar aims to make make money more fluid. — Listen here.
- Denelle also had the opportunity to speak at the International Monetary Fund’s World-Bank Annual Meetings on the panel “Cross-Border Payments — The Private Sector Steps Up.” — Read her summary of the panel here.
- Sam Conner hosted SDF’s Ecosystem Evangelist, Tyler van der Hoeven, on the Stellar Discussions podcast to discuss the current state of the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) and the launch of Stellar Quest. — Listen here.
- DSTOQ Bootcamp is offering demo accounts on their app and free eLearning courses on investing. So far, they have two free courses available. — Check them out here.
Application of the Week
This week I’m getting a little abstract with the Application of the Week. Instead of an app — I want to feature the new, community-run Stellar Global Discord server!
Like many other communities, Stellar Global realized that Discord has has a large blockchain and crypto following and ton of user friendly tools to better connect. Inside the server, there’s channels available for developers and non-developers alike. There’s also support for regions such as Africa, Austria, the Caribbean, Europe, Ireland, Korea, Turkey, and a Spanish speaking channel.
If you’re looking for a place to discuss all things Stellar with like minded individuals — Join the Stellar Global Discord today.
Releases and Updates
📢 Protocol reminder: In advance of the validator vote to upgrade the public network to Protocol 15, anyone running Stellar Core should install v15.0.0 and anyone running Horizon should install v1.10.1.
An important update was recently made to SEP-10, the Stellar Web Authentication protocol. SEP-10 v2.1 has been implemented in all the Stellar SDKs, and we urge you to install up-to-date versions of any SDKs you use as soon as possible. You can find links to the latest SDK releases here.
SEP-10 v2.1 allows greater flexibility than SEP-10 v2.0, which required wallets to verify the homeDomain value included in the SEP-10 challenge transaction’s Manage Data operation and caused upgraded wallets to reject challenges from un-upgraded anchors.
By removing that requirement, SEP-10 v2.1 gets rid of the possibility of wallet-server incompatibility. It also allows for more than one Manage Data operation to be included in the challenge.
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Active Discussions
💬 This week I’m highlighting an older discussion that’s picking up steam again — a draft SEP for user-friendly asset addresses.
On Stellar, assets issued by a specific entity can be tricky to find and reason about within applications. For example: If you wanted to find NGNT issued by Cowrie, you’d have to know that their issuing address is: GAWODAROMJ33V5YDFY3NPYTHVYQG7MJXVJ2ND3AOGIHYRWINES6ACCPD. If you wanted to get data from Horizon about this asset/issuer, you’d have to send a GET request to: https://horizon.stellar.org/assets?asset_code=NGNT&asset_issuer=GAWODAROMJ33V5YDFY3NPYTHVYQG7MJXVJ2ND3AOGIHYRWINES6ACCPD. Then you’d use the response to provide information about the asset and the issuer (via the account’s home domain) to users.
Ultimately, this proposal wants to define a common format to define user-friendly asset addresses that resolve to the issuer address — similar to federated addresses! So instead of searching for NGNT issued by GAWODAROMJ33V5YDFY3NPYTHVYQG7MJXVJ2ND3AOGIHYRWINES6ACCPD; I can search for NGNT issued by cowrie.exchange — much better!
Taken from the Abstract of the SEP:
This proposal defines a format for specifying memorable addresses that contains a domain (e.g. `example.org`) instead of a Stellar address for the issuing account. The domain hosts a `stellar.toml` containing information about the asset which is already a common practice of asset issuers. A client parses the `stellar.toml` of the domain in the asset address and retrieves from the file the issuer address for the asset.
Reverse verification of an asset issuer address and domain can be performed by comparing the home domain of the issuer address with the issuer address in the domains `stellar.toml` file to confirm that the domain and issuer both claim to issue the asset.
👉 If this is a solution that interests you, don’t hesitate to hop in to the discussion 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 👍
