Welcome to Nebulas Weekly Report #25, delivering updates and developments on the Nebulas project. This report is maintained by the Nebulas team. Please send feedback to contact@nebulas.io, or tweet us @nebulasio.

LAST WEEK’S News and Reports

We released important news regarding our Token Unlock Program. Hitters spoke at the Yale Alumni Association, while Robin landed in the UK and is set to give a speech at the 2018 LLVM Meeting. Learn more details:

1.Important Announcement on Nebulas Lock Up Bonus Programm

We ran a preliminary test for the Nebulas Lock Up Bonus program. Participants must check they have received sample NAS ERC20 tokens in their addresses.

Nebulas Unlock Program participants are responsible for verifying that they have received the test sample of NAS ERC20 tokens in their address. Please contact us immediately if you have not received the sample NAS ERC20 tokens. Participants will have until April 20, 23:59 PM (UTC+08:00), to contact us regarding issues with their token receiving address.

Learn more about the preliminary test for the Nebulas Lock Up Bonus program here.

2. Nebulas founder Hitters Xu was a guest speaker at a blockchain meetup sponsored by Yale alumni association in Beijing.

Hitters was giving speech.

On Thursday, Nebulas founder Hitters Xu was invited to speak as a panelist at the “Blockchain Meetup” organized by the Association of Yale Alumni in Beijing. Among the topics discussed were blockchain use cases and applications, and the disruption awaiting traditional industries. Hitters shared his insights about the space, and was characteristically enthusiastic about blockchain’s future.

“The future of blockchain will be an upward spiral, when blockchain technology reaches its tipping point — by combining with AI or discovering a killer app — it will be everywhere.” — Hitters Xu at Yale Alumni Association’s “Blockchain Meetup”

3. Nebulas co-founder Robin Zhong will give a keynote speech at the 2018 LLVM Meeting.

Robin is at the LLVM meeting.

This week, Nebulas is attending the 2018 European LLVM Developers’ Meeting (April 16–17), where our co-founder and CTO Robin Zhong will give a keynote speech titled: “LLVM x Blockchain, A New Ecosystem of Decentralized Applications” on the second day of the conference.

In his talk, Robin will introduce the concept and technology powering Nebulas, including how Nebulas’ technical team has used LLVM to build a smart contract execution engine. Robin will also propose several open and important problems in blockchain that may be solvable with LLVM tools.

LAST WEEK’S Top Commits

This week the team had in-depth discussions about how to design the incentives for our developer ecosystem. Our aim is to structure the ecosystem’s incentives in a way that promotes innovative development for the long term. Once this structure is finalized, a specific developer incentive plan will be released.

In terms of the team’s latest development activity, we are pursuing higher requirements for the functionality, performance and security of our mainnet. We completed this v1.0.1 development update on the go-nebulas testnet last week.

Meanwhile, our web wallet tests are going well. We released related documents and two release candidate (RC) versions this week, in preparation of the wallet’s official launch. Moreover, we are continuously optimizing our Wiki page.

The details for these updates is as follows:

Go-Nebulas V1.0.1

1) Added transaction timeout rules. 2) For better performance and safety, we replaced the implementation of ECC (Elliptic curve cryptography) from golang to C language. 3) To improve our encryption mechanism, we increased the number of data elements that MAC computation covers. In the previous implementation, MAC is computed over ciphertext only, while the decryption process itself used both ciphertext and the 16-byte IV; if the IV is modified but the ciphertext isn’t, the resulting plaintext is altered, while the MAC value still matches. In our newest implementation, we improve MAC computation to cover every data element that impacts the resulting plaintext, which makes attackers unable to alter encrypted data without being detected by the MAC. The alteration on plaintext cannot be fully controlled by attackers, but may be sufficient to induce undesirable outcomes, such as computing incorrect signature values if the altered data is a private key. 4) Strengthened the restriction of the require path in the smart contract to ensure that the smart contract cannot access any file on the mining node disk through requiring illegal path.

We have conducted multiple rounds of integration testing for Go-Nebulas v1.0.1 in our internal testnet and have now deployed it to the external testnet. We welcome everyone to participate in the test.

2. How to build a DApp on Nebulas

The quality and innovation of DApps determine the vitality of a blockchain ecosystem. To help developers get started building on Nebulas, we published a series a series of blogs on how to build a DApp on Nebulas. With these articles, we aim to make it easier and faster for developers to make their own contributions to blockchain.

“How to build a DApp on Nebulas (Part 1)” on Medium

3. Web Wallet

The work of the web wallet is advancing steadily. Two RC versions (0.5 and 0.6) were released this week. We also published web wallet tutorial articles on our official Medium account. These articles can serve as a user manual for the web wallet, including a tutorial on how to download and install the web wallet, and explainers its features and functionality.

Learn more here about Web Wallet tutorial

4. Wiki update

Last week we sorted out the structure of the Github wiki and developed our wiki for block synchronization. We welcome community members to help us expand our wiki.

You can read the Nebulas wiki here.