Issue #1: Welcome to the Greymass Newsletter
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the new newsletter from Team Greymass! This will serve as a way for us to offer periodic updates on our organization, discuss projects we’re building, and give our perspective on major happenings within the EOSIO and blockchain ecosystem.
Thanks for subscribing, and feel free to share your feedback with us as we get this thing off the ground! You can find us on Twitter and Telegram, or you can respond directly to this post.
Best,
Myles Snider and the Greymass Team
EOSIO Ecosystem Updates
EOSIO V1.8.0
Block.one announced the release of a stable version of EOSIO 1.8.0— a new protocol upgrade that requires a coordinated hard fork from consensus nodes. Recently, BPs agreed through an on-chain vote to execute the hard fork on September 23, 2019 . If you’d like more frequent updates on the entire process, EOS Authority has you covered here. They also offer a really useful breakdown of the new features that will be enabled by 1.8.
We’ve signaled our support for this upgrade on-chain, and we’re currently busy prepping our nodes and APIs for the upgrade. Our Greymass Limited History EOSIO branch is already updated and ready. You can read more about the specific changes in 1.8 on Github.
EOSIO regproducer Update
EOS42 released a proposed update to the regproducer Ricardian contract. The initiative is now being put to an on-chain vote for elected BPs. In this article, EOS42 expands upon their proposed changes and the reasoning for each.
Block.one EOSIO Updates— Scaling Plan and History Tools
B1 released two major articles as part of their EOSIO Labs initiative. The first article expands upon the EOSIO strategic vision and specifically discusses the scaling plans for EOSIO. It’s the first of a four-part series, and it’s worth a read. It provides a high-level overview of the various strategies that B1 (in conjunction with other EOS community members working on solutions) will explore to help EOSIO software scale to handle mass-adoption and enterprise-grade use cases.
The second article released by B1 discussed some recent history tools they’ve been working on. As many of you know, chain history is part of our bread and butter here at Greymass, and we’ve been working on some interesting improvements in parallel to B1’s work. You can expect to hear more from us on that front after we’ve gotten the 1.0 release of Anchor out the door.
Trezor for EOS
If you’re a Trezor user who has been waiting for EOS support, wait no longer! EOS Cafe Block officially announced that they now support Trezor through their Bloks.io wallet (the first EOS wallet to do so). You can follow the instructions in their latest blog post to get your Trezor account set up.
Greymass Updates
WAX
We recently announced our guild candidacy on the WAX blockchain. If you’re a WAX user, you can support us by voting for teamgreymass there. This is the first EOSIO blockchain outside of the mainnet where we’ve launched a BP, and we’re excited to bring some of our existing tooling to the WAX ecosystem. We just launched support for WAX in eos-voter, and the chain will be supported in Anchor’s 1.0 launch.
If you’d like to explore the WAX blockchain a bit, you can now do so through Bloks.io.
Delphi Oracle
We’re now contributing to the EOS Titan Delphi Oracle. The Delphi Oracle is a multi-sig on-chain price feed operated by a group of BPs that currently includes EOS Titan, Greymass, Aloha EOS, EOS Rio, EOS DAC, and EOS Nairobi.
Delphi takes a unique approach to the so-called “oracle problem” in blockchains. It leverages the pre-existing trust and public standing of BPs, but also utilizes a multi-party structure to make sure that no single member can manipulate the oracle. Currently Delphi is serving on-chain price data for cryptoassets, but EOS Titan is working on plans to add a number of other types of data feeds. They are also working on some really interesting improvements to the structure of the oracle that will help compensate BPs who participate.
You can learn more about the Delphi project on Github. If you’re building a project that could utilize on-chain price feeds, feel free to get in touch!
eos-voter
The latest eos-voter update includes support for the WAX blockchain, as well as some small updates for BEOS and Insights Network.
While you should still be using eos-voter as your primary wallet, we invite all eos-voter users to check out the Anchor beta. It will not overwrite or interact with your eos-voter installation , so feel free to play around and test things out! If you want to learn more or ask specific questions, please join our Anchor Telegram group, or our Anchor developers group.
Anchor
Speaking of Anchor— we’ve been working hard to get it ready for the upcoming 1.0 release. The first release of Anchor will have all of the existing features of eos-voter, plus a number of awesome new features and a much-improved user interface. Once we’ve gotten the 1.0 release out, we’ll continue adding new features as requested by the community. This week we’re working on completely revamping the resource management interface in a way that will allow users to easily stake for bandwidth, buy and sell RAM, and interact with REX. We can’t wait to share it with you!
The EOS Podcast
Myles and Aaron (aka Jesta) recorded a podcast episode with Brandon Parker from The EOS Podcast this week. Look out for that episode to drop very soon! We discussed our current thoughts around governance, Voice, the upgrade to EOSIO 1.8, and much more.
Cool Stuff
- If you haven’t checked out Decentium yet, do so. It’s a decentralized, fully on-chain alternative to publishing websites like Medium. Unlike some of the other attempts at censorship-resistant and creator-owned content sites, Decentium really distinguishes itself with an awesome interface. Johan, one of the Decentium leads, is on the Greymass team. We’re really excited about a lot of what’s planned for Decentium this year, as well as tools we’re building internally that will help Decentium and other dApps on the network.
- Equilibrium is a stablecoin project on EOS that uses a similar stability mechanism to that which powers both BitShares bitUSD and Maker Dai. The team just released a video showing how to generate EOSDT easily using their interface.
- We’re really excited about some of the research initiatives that the Equilibrium team is working on, especially their exploration of Dan Larimer’s proposed PEX stablecoin model.
- DAC Factory is a new out-of-the-box DAC toolkit from the team at eosDAC. They’ve created a product that will allow anyone to easily spin up a DAC, customize the governance parameters, host the governance interface, and much more. The project and all of the tools are fully open-source, but the team is also offering this as a paid product for users who don’t want to go through all of the technical hurdles required to build a DAC from scratch. We’re really excited to see some cool projects come out of this!
- Developers using dfuse now have a bunch of tools at their disposal to seamlessly update their applications with the upcoming mainnet hard fork. If you’re a developer using dfuse, check out the linked article for more info.