Issue #8: February 2020
Hello, everyone!
Apologies for this month’s newsletter going out a bit late!
February 14th marked the official launch of Voice Beta. Early invites were limited to US residents, and it seems that not everyone who signed up got access just yet. Only one member of our team got an invite thus far, but we have managed to get a little bit of insight from people in the community.
César Rodríguez took a look at some code and offered a few insights. Peter Keay of LiquidApps shared some screenshots and additional thoughts. There’s also been a fair amount of pushback over both the hurdles required for onboarding and the security of their KYC. This Reddit thread covers both.
Block.one made a massive bet with Voice (they spent $30M on the domain alone), but it very much remains to be seen how well they can compete with legacy players in both the media and social space. It seems the beta is being rolled out very slowly, and the product doesn’t appear to be feature-complete. We’ll continue to offer thoughts and updates as more information is rolled out and more of us have the opportunity to try it!
Now, onto the update!
Team Greymass
EOSIO Ecosystem News
Voice Beta Launches
B1’s social/media network Voice is now live. If you are a US resident, you can apply to be a part of the beta. B1 promises that other territories will be added soon.
The Voice team has also published a few interesting pieces of content, including one on why KYC matters, and another from CEO Salah Zalatimo on the Voice mission.
EOS Mainnet Inflation Reduced to 1%
The inflation on the EOS mainnet has officially been lowered to 1% via a 15/21 BP decision. You can see the on-chain transaction here.
In practice , this doesn’t actually change much. While inflation has been at 5%, 4% of that was going into a savings smart contract that wasn’t being used, as there was no plan in place to allocate it. This savings was previously burned via BP decision, but now the savings faucet has been turned off completely.
Dan Larimer — Blockchains as a Superior Data Structure
Dan wrote an article about his theory on why a blockchain data structure makes sense in a variety of enterprise applications, and why it is superior to existing systems.
Dan Larimer — “All Blockchain Magic Comes with a Price”
Dan released another article outlining his thoughts around the tradeoffs associated with different technical approaches to blockchains.
Scatter Team is Moving to Ultra
The team behind Scatter, one of the most important infrastructure projects in the entire EOSIO ecosystem, is officially moving to the Ultra project. Nathan (the main developer behind Scatter) is still working on several big updates to the product before he joins Ultra, but the team hopes that Scatter will transition to a “community product” maintained by a network of open-source devs.
Ultra, according to its website, is:
Designed to break the market monopoly, Ultra is the next-generation games distribution platform, offering new solutions to both developers and players.
You can learn more here.
B1 Responds to Coinbase
Coinbase reported that they were temporarily halting deposits and withdrawals of EOS due to issues with the network. Block.one responded with an article explaining the source of the issue, claiming that the network was operating normally and that the issue was with Coinbase’s infrastructure. The key quote is below:
Working closely with Coinbase, we have identified scalability issues with the integration between the EOSIO software and their required tools that monitor all economic activity of supported digital assets.
Because the EOS Network is performing an increasingly large number of transactions daily, Coinbase’s integration with the EOSIO software requires an update in order to keep pace with the velocity of the EOS Network transactions. Block.one expects to release an update to the EOSIO software that will allow Coinbase to simplify their integration and better service their requirements to monitor all economic activity of supported digital assets. This update is scheduled to be released in the coming weeks, and in the meantime, Block.one and Coinbase are working together to optimize the configuration and performance of the existing integration solutions.
EOS Nation on Everything EOS
Yves La Rose of EOS Nation and Zack Gall from Everthing EOS reviewed Voice Beta and also discussed recent updates to the EOS mainnet.
Greymass Updates
Using WABT for “push” APIs during the transition to EOS-VM (2.0.x)
You can read the latest technical article from the Greymass team about API performance as it relates to EOS mainnet/EOSIO upgrades.
Anchor Updates
Aaron from our team offered some Anchor updates on Twitter, previewing both the mobile and desktop experience!
Aaron Cox @Jesta187
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We’re getting closer and closer to the 1.0 release of Anchor, which should be very soon. We’re working on some new branding and visual identity features that we’re excited to introduce. You can stay up-to-date by joining our Greymass Telegram channel and our Anchor Telegram channel.
Migrating from eos-voter to Anchor
We also released an in-depth article on migrating from eos-voter (the existing version of our desktop wallet) to Anchor (the new and improved version).
We highly recommend that all eos-voter users migrate over to Anchor, which will have an improved UI, more regular updates, and a host of awesome new features.
You can read the article here, and download the latest version of Anchor at this link.
We’re Producing on TELOS
We are officially a registered block producer on Telos. You can see our account here and vote for us at teamgreymass .