Welcome to Nebulas Weekly Report #31, delivering the latest 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

Rapid recap of last week:

We launched the Nebulas NAS Nano wallet. The Champion prize of Nebulas Incentive Program Week 2 was awarded to blockchain-based sandbox strategy game called “Cell Evolution.” Nebulas participated in four meetings a hackathon in separate meetings in San Francisco and Hangzhou, and held a live broadcast with TRON. For more details, please see the following:

NAS Nano, the official Nebulas mobile wallet, launches on Android and iOS

On May 25th, Beijing time, we launched NAS Nano, the official cryptocurrency wallet developed by Nebulas, on Android and iOS. NAS Nano has an easy-to-use, beautiful interface, and implements all the features of a robust cryptocurrency wallet, including multiple layers of security, to let users easily manage their NAS assets.

Blockchain gaming app crowned champion of Nebulas Incentive Program Week 2

The second week of the Nebulas Incentive Program (NIP) ended at midnight (Beijing Time) on Sunday, May 20, block height 296,807. We received 813 decentralized app (DApp) submissions during this period, 135 of which passed review to win NAS rewards. Altogether, 226 developers and referrers won NAS rewards, and our weekly prize pool totaled nearly $300,000 USD. Congratulations to all our winners!

The Weekly Champion of last week’s Nebulas Incentive Program was “Cell Evolution,” which we believe is the first strategy and sandbox game application developed on blockchain. This game was created in 10 days by an experienced independent game developer who previously led a team of four people to develop a 2048-type mobile game and was selected in the Top 100 of the App Store, and also developed the Cryptopokemon game on Ethereum. Congratulations on the Weekly Champion for winning the 10,000 NAS prize.

The quality of DApps submitted last week was significantly higher than that of Week 1. We expect this trend to continue, which is very exciting. As of writing, the review for DApps submitted to Week 3 of Nebulas Incentive Program is ongoing.

Number of DApps on Nebulas surpasses Ethereum’s

Season 1 of the Nebulas Incentive Program has been remarkable in mobilizing the enthusiasm of developers. So far, more than 2,000 DApps have been deployed on the Nebulas mainnet, and we’re just two weeks into the eight-week program.

This milestone means the Nebulas blockchain now has most DApps of any blockchain platform in the world. (Ethereum currently has about 1,500 DApps.) We will continue to execute on our vision and strive to build a developer- and user-friendly blockchain platform. We invite all developers and users to join us on our journey, and contribute to the development of the ecosystem.

Hitters Xu Attends Blockchain Application Summit for Blockchain Application

On May 28th, Nebulas founder and CEO Hitters Xu attended the “Blockchain Application Forum & Demo Day” held at the Guiyang National Digital Expo. Hitters met with Liu Xiaodong, president of Huicong.com, and Lu Yang, the co-founder of CD-Link. In a conversation on stage with the founders of VeChain, Qtum, Ontology, and Huicong, Hitters talked about how to discover and develop excellent blockchain applications. During the talk, Hitters mentioned that blockchains are essentially give users the right to their own data. Some blockchain projects focus purely on financial securities-like products, and do not specifically focus on real developers and users. For blockchain to be truly transformational, its applications must be crafted by developers with users in mind.

The Nebulas ecosystem is developed in according with this philosophy. In recognition of the value of data and decentralized applications, we are developing Nebulas Rank, Nebulas Incentive, and the self-evolving capabilities of Nebulas Force. With these three pillars, we hope to foster the creation and discovery of more interesting, more useful DApps.

Aero Wang delivers keynote at China International Big Data Industry Expo

On May 27th, 2018, Nebulas attended the “Consensus Night” meeting of the China International Big Data Industry Expo, in which our co-founder and COO Aero Wang delivered a keynote speech. In his speech, Aero mentioned that blockchain consensus systems provide a vital function for the information age. In particular, he described how that blockchains can “feed” AI. In the future, AI may be able to design blockchain consensus, and this could be like the DNA of a computer.

Nebulas DApps win top two awards at Beijing Blockathon

On May 27th, the two-day blockchain hackathon “Blockathon 2018 Beijing” wrapped up. More than 400 projects applied, and around 100 from such places as Singapore, Australia, South Korea, and other cities in China, were accepted into the hackathon.

At the hackathon in Beijing, these projects compete to develop the best blockchain project within 48 hours. From 10 blockchain apps produced during the hackathon, the two projects developed on the Nebulas blockchain — a decentralized app store for decentralized apps, “DApp World,” and an e-learning DApp, “Super X School — were the Champions and Runners-up of the hackathons.

Hitters Xu delivered a speech at the start of the hackathon. In this speech, Hitters spoke about blockchain as a major opportunity for younger developers born in the 90s and later, similar to how the internet, and P2P and mobile technologies has unleashed a wave of innovation for an earlier generation of developers.

Nebulas conducts a live stream with TRON on the future of public chains

On May 26th, Aero Wang held a joint livestream with a TRON sponsor to discuss the future of public blockchains, and in particular the topic of a truly friendly, symbiotic and fair community-driven ecosystem. A total of 710,000 people tuned into the broadcast.

NIP Week 1 Champion and Hitters share the stage at Hangzhou Station Meetup

On May 26th, the third Nebulas Incentive Program Community Meetup was held in Hangzhou. In conjunction with the “Blockchain Entrepreneurship Camp,” Nebulas invited the Week 1 Champions of the Nebulas Incentive Program, Jiqiang Xu and Luo Zengyu, to the meetup, Therefore, Nebulas founder Hitters Xu and co-founder Aero Wang, along with Zengyu and Jiqiang, together with the participants on the site, shared their experiences in innovation and development of blockchain. Among them, Jiqiang specifically mentioned that he is optimistic about the prospect of mobile Dapps, and he is currently stepping up efforts to develop such a DApp.

Hitters Xu attends YOCSEF 20th Anniversary Celebration and 2018 Youth Elite Conference

On May 25th, the YOCSEF 20th Anniversary Celebration and 2018 Youth Elite Conference, hosted by the Chinese Computer Society, was held in Beijing. Hitters Xu was invited to attend the forum and, with Wu Qinghong, Yang Dong, Yu Jianing, Guo Xiaochuan and other guests, discussed the topic of “Blockchain’s future: value explosion or bubble burst.”

The consensus was that if blockchain is a matter of hype, then it is unfavorable for projects and the industry as a whole to maintain confidence in the future of blockchain technology. However, in spite of this, fostering developer ecosystem from the bottom-up can ensure that the real value and true applications of blockchain can be realized.

NAS Center hosts a developer’s meetup for the Nebulas Incentive prize

On May 22, the United States, Nebulas’ outstanding community developer Brandon hosted a weekly dev meetup at the NAS Center in San Francisco. There, he answered questions from other developers attending the event.

Attending the meetup up were Shrikar, the second runner-up of Nebulas Incentive Week 1 and Weekly Excellence Award winner in Week 2 winner, Alan, who also won a Weekly Excellence Award in Week 2 and is a member of GBA (xGoogler Blockchain Alliance), as well as the meetup’s host, Brandon, who himself was the second runner-up in Week 2 of Nebulas Incentive Program.

Alan said at the exchange meeting that the environment around Nebulas is particularly good, and that developers are helping each other in a way rarely seen in Slack channels of other blockchain projects. Talking about the Nebulas Incentive Program, Alan said at that in Week 1, to have a successful application, it may have been sufficient to port copy an existing Ethereum DApp onto Nebulas. However, last week’s NAS prizewinners on the Nebulas platform were all very innovative. Moving forward, the most creative DApps will be the most successful in the Nebulas Incentive Program.

Robhin Zhong gives a speech at the launch of TGO KunPeng’s Nanjing Branch

On May 21st, Nebula co-founder and CTO Robin Zhong attended the launch ceremony of the Nanjing Branch of the TGO KunPeng club. The TGO KunPeng was established in 2015 and is a high-end group of geeks and global technology leaders. Nebulas co-founder and CTO Robin attended the inauguration ceremony of the Nanjing branch and delivered a keynote speech titled “New dimension based on blockchain technology and New World” in the post-meeting learning session.

In his speech, Robin mentioned that the blockchain is a pure technology that represents a new direction. The new industry is both a living entity and the various blockchain applications that the economy has adopted from Bitcoin to Ethereum and later. In his opinion, blockchains are essentially data servers that can only be controlled and managed by data holders. Yet there are three pain points in the current blockchain, lack of value scale, lack of consensus-based upgrading and upgrading capabilities, and lack of search functionalities for smart contracts and blockchain applications. Not coincidentally, Nebulas is working on solutions on all three of these issues in blockchain.

LAST WEEK’S Top Commits

Mainnet Development Progress

Version 1.0.5 recently added a lot of optimization work. Lib compatibility program, bignum upgrade optimization across boundaries, support for the most recent 128-height block hash. Support to query account balance. And record events when transfer fails.

This version is expected to be released to the community next week.

V8 stack overflow problem, Linux has found a solution, multi-correlation problem on the Mac to continue positioning.

Tools

DApp debugging tool

In view of the strong demand from the Incentive Program participants, the Nebulas team is accelerating the development of debugging tools. This week, engineers have tuned the NVM simulation execution engine and it is in the testing phase.

Multi-language SDK

In order to meet the needs of community developers on different platforms, the current team is stepping up development of SDKs such as PHP/Python/Android/iOS.

The PHP version has completed the implementation of algorithms such as wallets. The transaction and bignum implementations are being studied.

The Python version has completed the elliptic curve encryption algorithm.

The Android version SDK is basically completed and is in the process of being finalized.

iOS version SDK is being implemented.

Documentation

Updated question list

https://github.com/nebulasio/wiki/blob/master/FAQ_nebulas_development_ch.md

https://github.com/nebulasio/wiki/blob/master/FAQ_nebulas_development_en.md