Ecosystem

Akash Network:

The Rise of Tokens in Blockchain: Learn about The Rise of Tokens in Blockchain in a blog by Akash CMO Maly Ly.

As the team is getting closer to launching incentivized testnet, they started work on documentation so you can start playing around. Check out the Validator guide:

Dev Update: All major on-chain workflows are successfully migrated to CosmosSDK and the team is now finishing up deployment workflows:

Althea:

March Community Update: In the US, 65% of consumers get their internet from just two cable providers. These providers charge too much for slow service and leave behind many Americans who can’t access the internet due to cost. But what if anyone could start or grow a network? What if we could take back our choice, control, and ownership of the internet? Over the past few months, Althea has helped make that dream of ownership and choice a reality for Americans in rural Oregon, Tacoma Washington, and Denver, Colorado. More Althea networks are in the works as well — in Washington, Oregon, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, and many other areas. Althea’s automatic routing and billing make it easy for anyone to start a network or grow an existing one. Read more>>>

Have you been thinking about learning more about Althea or setting up a small deployment to get started? A pre-configured, ready to go, “mini-mesh” package is now available on their website!

Previously, Althea launched a new android app. Not just that, but it’s got some major user-requested updates that let users transact with other users AND their routers, so you can set up your router to send payments to your neighbor or whatever you need for your individual situation. This is part of their Beta 11 updates, and is a needed and excellent addition to Althea’s capabilities.

BitSong:

Bitsong launched a third testnet, which has well over 40k blocks and 40 active validators. Bitsong continues to test and prepare for a mainnet.

e-Money:

e-Money block explorer at http://e-money.network now fully supports multiple token denominations (currency-backed-tokens and NGM staking token), as well as DEX and Issuance TX types:

Forbole:

Forbole has been working on its Desmos blockchain with a first MVP for a social media application that has live betas now. It’s a Twitter take called Mooncake, and there are a couple of people on it helping test.

Android: https://mooncake.space/download

iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Zh9mWFk

IOV:

IOV is finalizing its starname system. You can preorder names now for €25.00, which seems hefty to me for some of the names that will be in less demand, but could be a steal for names in high demand. There’s some very interesting competition in this space across networks including ENS, Unstoppable Domains, and the recently launched Handshake protocol.

Antoine Herzog was talking about the IOV token economy and the starname network at The garage in Paris:

Starname Network is collecting Cosmos chainIds on the Universal Chain Registry. If you are running a cosmos blockchain on mainnet, please contact Antoine Herzog.

IRISnet:

IRIS continues to contribute to critical updates moving toward IBC and refine their own platform. On March 1st 2019 at 5:30 UTC, IRIS Hub was launched and these weeks, was the first anniversary. In the latest blog post the team reviews what has been done in the first year as well as the plan for the 2nd year.

Team behind IRISnet Open-Sourced its Enterprise Blockchain Product IRITA: On March 6th, the core development team of IRISnet, Bianjie, open-sourced its enterprise blockchain product IRITA (Inter-Realm Industry Trust Alliance).

Powered by Tendermint, Cosmos SDK and IRIS Service (a.k.a. iService), IRITA is the first consortium blockchain product in the Cosmos ecosystem that is ready to go to production.

Combining the advanced Cosmos technology stack with years of experience in providing industry solutions, Bianjie has delivered a slew of exciting features in IRITA: flexible digital asset modeling, highly practical on/off-chain interoperability, privacy-preserving data access authorization, pluggable cryptographic algorithms, not to mention the efficient consensus engine and cutting-edge cross-chain capability that come with Cosmos.

IRITA can be used to build next-generation distributed business applications for various scenarios, such as supply chain financing, digital asset exchange, healthcare data exchange, etc.

IRITA Versions:

IRITA is available in Lite and Professional versions. The open-source version is IRITA Lite, which can get developers started quickly in building PoC application systems.

The Professional version includes more advanced features such as privacy-protecting data sharing with fine-grain authorization, a specialized server that enables edge computing, enterprise-level identity management, and related hardware security support.

6 Core Features:

6 Core Features of IRITA

Compared with other permissioned blockchain products such as Hyperledger Fabric, IRITA has many advantages besides the common features such as identity management, storage management, etc. The following are 6 core features of IRITA when addressing enterprise computing requirements:

1) High-Performance Consensus: The Tendermint consensus engine is the first Internet-scale BFT consensus protocol. Tendermint powers more than 40% of the PoS blockchains, which provides a high-performance, consistent, and secure Byzantine consensus engine. Tendermint is very suitable for scaling heterogeneous systems, including public blockchains and permissioned / consortium chains which focus on performance.

2) Cutting edge interchain technology：Cosmos Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) is one of the most anticipated cross-chain technology standards. IBC supports interoperability among heterogeneous chains and was initially designed by Bianjie’s strategic partner Tendermint team. Bianjie team also contributed a key module in the Interchain Standards (ICS) governing the standardization of IBC known as the ICS20 cross-chain transfer module. IRITA is extending IBC’s implementation to iService so the data and computation can be consumed throughout the internet of blockchains.

3）Privacy computing enabled data sharing: Several layers of privacy control is enabled in IRITA. The data owners can conveniently manage the data by accessing it on-chain, and data can only be accessed through authorization by the owner.

4）iService: iService provides a developer-friendly interface to support the entire lifecycle of off-chain services from definition, binding (registration of service provider), and invocation to governance. iService is very powerful in integrating traditional business applications with blockchain solutions.

5) Digital asset modeling and exchange: It supports flexible modeling of the high dimensional structure of digital asset data. IRITA is very suitable for implementing decentralized exchanges (DEX). IRITA supports NFT (non-fungible token) backed tokenization of various scenarios such as supply chain finance, intellectual property, healthcare documents exchange, and record-keeping, etc.

6) Big data support: IRITA’s built-in storage layer supports cloud storage and distributed storage, and supports efficient on-chain data life-cycle query through the combination of analytics oriented datamart together with chained data.

Use Cases:

IRITA can be used for various business scenarios, especially for digital assets registration, verification, and exchange.

IRITA can be used for supply chain financing to help small and medium-sized businesses for a loan application with its digital assets. Users can digitalize real assets to NFTs on-chain and trade them freely with others through DEX. And by using iService, it’s quite efficient and practical for traditional IT systems including ERPs of the supply chain companies to be connected seamlessly to this digitalized assets market.

IRITA can also be used in the healthcare industry. Service providers can exchange privacy-preserving healthcare data for analyzing. These use cases can also be found and extracted from the past business cases of Bianjie including Ningxia provincial healthcare bigdata platform and Fosun healthcloud.link, etc. to forge a better application of IRITA.

For more information, developers may jump-start enterprise applications for industries by visiting https://github.com/bianjieai/irita

Kava:

The Kave team welcomes the BiKi mining pool as its newest validator! Now more KAVA is staked on the network making it more secure.

Kava CEO & Founder Brian Kerr was quoted in the news on the future of payments and how Stablecoins will improve the crypto payment experience:

KAVA trading is now LIVE on Gate.io.

Kava Philippines Twitter Contest:

LikeCoin:

2nd LikeCoin bounty is up on Gitcoin:

Loom Network:

Loom Universe Bi-Weekly Highlights:

LOOM is now available on Kyber Network:

Regen Network:

COSMWASM Kontraŭa Testnet — Plan: The COSMWASM Kontraŭa Testnet will be the first large public validator test of the COSMWASM module running on the Cosmos SDK. This is a ground breaking proof of stake implementation of a web assembly based smart contracting platform. In this testnet the team will be executing smart contracts, and getting ready as a validator pool to participate in Game of Zones, to be able to execute cross chain contracts and transactions.

The focus of this testnet will continue to be testing and upgrading the capacity and capability of validators to manage the upgrades, governance and maintenance of the cosmos SDK based Regen Ledger blockchain. There are six phases to the upcoming Kontraŭa Testnet, and theyexpect this testnet to run from Genesis block march 13th until mid April (estimating the end date of the testnet to be April 17th)

The team has worked with Ethan Frey of Confio as closely as possible to design this testnet in service to the entire community of builders hoping to use Cosmwasm for public blockchain projects.

The following plan was co-designed by Gregory Landua and AnilKumar Kammari with support from Joe Bowman of Chorus One and Chris Remus of Chainflow Validator.

Dates: 13th March — 17th Apr, 2020.

Regen Network Announced Rockefeller Food System Vision Prize Semi-Finalist: The Rockefeller Food System Vision Prize invites organizations from around the world to create compelling and progressive visions of the world’s system by 2050. The prize invites organizations, universities, institutions, companies, cooperatives, and partnerships from around the world to create and realize concrete and actionable Visions of food systems that deliver sustainable, nourishing diets by 2050.

Out of 1319 international submissions, Regen Network is one of 79 semi-finalists in the Rockefeller Food System Vision Prize! Up to 10 finalists will be announced in May 2020, will progress to an Accelerator, and on September 13, 2020, Top Visionaries will be announced. A prize of $2 million will be distributed among the winners. Regen Network and its partners are humbled to be a part of this community of food system visions! Check out the Rockefeller Food System Vision Prize on their website.

Regen continue to move their project forward and are releasing a number of podcast transcripts. Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 6: Delton Chen: This blog is a transcription of the sixth episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.

Postmortem of algradigon-1: Regen network recently concluded the 1st incentivized testnet slated for Q1 of 2020 named algradigon-1. This testnet was designed to help onboard new validators who would like to join an already strong set of validators, get handy with upgrades and ensure emergency upgrades of the network can be undertaken smoothly. These upgrade tests were undertaken by having a whopping 4 upgrades spaced in the span of two weeks. For a look at the original testnet announcement check out this medium blog. For a look at the official instructions check out the github repo here.

In Regen next testnet (estimated to launch between March 9th and March 13th depending on the devnet results), the team will be battle testing the new Cosmwasm smart contracting platform built on the Cosmossdk now in demo:

Sentinel:

The SENT dVPN network has reached a new all-time-high in bandwidth consumption within a time frame of 1 week, crossing over 6.1 TB of usage between the 22nd of Feb and the 29th of Feb.

The previous timelines for the release of the new iOS and desktop app have been extended.

The new standalone Tendermint based wallet is going through it’s testing phase and will soon be released.

Terra:

February 2020 Community Update:

Terra validator KysenPool launches Harvest wallet & crypto finance platform Harubank offers 15% returns on KRT

KysenPool launches Harvest wallet

Kysen Technologies has launched Harvest Wallet, a “Crypto Financing Platform integrated with different lending and borrowing providers to enable you to easily earn High Interest on Terra network and manage cryptocurrencies.”

Read Kysen’s announcement here.

It’s important to note that Harvest ships with a strong focus on DeFi use cases around Terra stablecoins. Harvest is integrated with Trinito, and Harubank, which offers 7% and 15% annualized returns on KRT deposits respectively. Via the Harvest launch, KRT has now become the highest interest yielding stablecoin.

Harubank launches 15% deposit product on KRT

Looking forward, the team sees Harvest becoming the leading gateway to many DeFi products to launch on Terra. They are looking deeply into leveraging staking derivatives to offer users a principal protected staking option, where users can stake Terra with service providers that swap user’s deposits to Luna to stake to the network and earn a delegation commission. The team thinks this product can build an interesting new line of business for validators, where they can offer volatility protection for the staking token to court delegations, and give the community a new staking option with lower risk and volatility. They are looking to showcase this new product through Harvest.

2. Many exchange staking services launch for Luna

Several exchanges have launched in-exchange staking services for Luna in Feburary. While there are criticisms around exchange staking (e.g. what happened to Steem), they ship with interesting advantages over the vanilla version. For example, GDAC GROW and Node offers fast withdrawals (1 day vs vanilla staking’s 21 days) by maintaining a reserve of Luna tokens.

Coinone launches luna daily staking: http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=41118

Kucoin launches Luna staking: https://www.kucoin.com/news/en-luna-soft-staking-official-rules

GDAC GROW launch: https://medium.com/terra-money/announcing-gdac-grow-staking-with-luna-7725ba51d539

3. Jigu SDK has launched for Terra

The team launched Jigu, a new Python library for Terra. Jigu enables you to write software that integrates with the Terra blockchain and its ecosystem, providing input validation, error handling, and automated marshalling / unmarshalling of blockchain data into objects that play alongside with native Python types.

They will be launching SDKs in different languages, starting with Javascript. Props to their Developer Relations Engineer that spearheads this effort, William Chen!

4. Chai updates

Chai sits at 1.2 million users.

Chai has integrated with Market Kurly on 3/3, the market leader for on-demand fresh grocery in South Korea. With COVID limitting accessibility to offline grocery stores, Kurly has proven to be important infrastructure relied on by millions of users in safely getting access to food and supplies. The integration could not have been better timed, and the team is thrilled to be working with Kurly going forward.

THORChain:

Monthly Treasury Report: THORChain Monthly Expenses, Budget and Runway Report for February 2020. The treasury has been increased to $1.5m USD, sufficient for an 24 month Runway. OTC Sales were completed in the preceding month. There are no large expenses on the horizon, and the audit expenses are appropriately budgeted for. The Community Reserve is fully-allocated to RUNEVault, which will be capped at 1m per week.

Update to Operational Emission Schedule: THORChain team to reduce the Operational Emission schedule to increase runway to 24 months. Every RUNE on the market today has been sold at market price or exchanged fairly for efforts. Circulating supply has been burnt, emissions have been reduced, stakers have gained the most. By the time the mainnet has launched, RUNE would have been distributed maximally.

THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 03–09 Mar 2020:

Previously, THORChain released a Beta wallet to prepare for its mainnet launch. They are continuing to work on the testnet and have ramped up their bounties program.

TruStory:

TruStory has open-sourced its entire codebase:

and improved its explorer: https://github.com/TruStory/explorer

Other updates:

Band Protocol February 2020 Update: Releasing Wenchang Testnet, Community Outreach, Upcoming Hackathons. With the development of BandChain Wenchang accelerating quickly, the team looks forward to their early-stage block validation testnet early next week as they bring Mainnet one step closer.

In the upcoming weeks, they will also be announcing more virtual hackathons in partnership with some of the leading decentralized finance projects in the space!

Cosmostation Wallet partnered with MoonPay to provide users a fiat-to-crypto gateway:

Introducing Anthem: A Multi-Network Staking Platform: The Chorus One team unveiled Anthem: a web application to track and manage your portfolio of Proof-of-Stake assets they have been working on for the past couple of months. The beta version of Anthem focuses on staking on the Cosmos Hub.

Congratulations to the team at Chorus One, who successfully executed the largest attack in Tour de SOL yet! Last week they managed to identify an attack vector allowing them to steal 500 million SOL tokens from the Tour de SOL test network.

33 Oasis: Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts with Andrew Miller and Vishwanath Raman: One of the major factors hampering blockchain adoption is that current decentralized applications only function when all associated data is public. Many real world use cases are only possible when participating parties can be assured that their information is kept private. Oasis is a network that is focused on enabling privacy-preserving smart contracts through the use of secure enclaves.

In this podcast episode, Meher and Brendan are joined by Andrew Miller and Vishwanath Raman, who are part of the Oasis Labs team working in product marketing (Andrew) and engineering (Vishwanath). The four start with a discussion of how Oasis got started and the connection to UC Berkeley. Then, in the first part of the interview, an overview of the Oasis protocol and key target markets follows. The episode discusses how the Oasis privacy protocol works technically and how it compares to other privacy-enhancing solutions. Specifically, Andrew and Vishwanath walk through a voting example and go through other use cases, features of the Oasis blockchain, the project’s go-to-market strategy, as well as the roadmap including the ongoing incentivized testnet “The Quest”. Finally, the four discuss implications of Intel security vulnerabilities and the developer experience of writing privacy-preserving smart contracts.

Cosmic Compass will launch on 13th March:

Enigma Community Update: March 6, 2020: Enigma community update is out.

March 6 Agoric Weekly Update 5/5:

Offer Safety: Partitioning Risk in Smart Contracts.

Commercio network welcomes Spazio Professionista as a new member.

The Commerc.io Consortium welcomes its new partner Corvallis S.p.A.

Commercio network with the support of ICF, launches a support center for Cosmos blockchain for corporate and public sector: C3 Cosmos Competence Center: http://cosmosenterprise.org