Welcome to Nebulas Weekly Report #30, 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

We announced the winners for Week 1 of NIP and awarded nearly $350,000 USD in NAS

The first week of the Nebulas Incentive Program ended on May 13th, 4:00 pm Beijing time, Nebulas block height 256,506. The response from developers was overwhelming positive. In total, 822 applications were submitted to the program, and 231 were approved to receive NAS rewards. Counting both developers and affiliates (those who referred developers to the Incentive Program), 290 rewards were granted, amounting to nearly $350,000 USD. These rewards began distributing on May 15th.

For more information, see the “Week #1 Winners of Nebulas Incentive Program” announcement.

Two 90s kids won the Weekly Champion prize with their submission of a NAS Red Envelope DApp

Out of the 231 DApps submitted to NIP last week, the top prize was awarded to a NAS Red Envelope DApp that mimics the functionality of red envelopes (or red packets) in Alipay and WeChat. As we understand, this DApp was developed in just 10 days by a team of two people born in the mid-1990s. Congratulations to our Week 1 Champions for their creative app and winning the 10,000 NAS reward!

Nebulas and CertiK announced a strategic partnership at Consensus 2018

Nebulas, the startup incubator of the next generation public blockchain Nebulas, and CertiK, a formal verification framework to ensure smart contract and blockchain security, announced a strategic partnership at the Consensus 2018 conference in New York City. CertiK offers a formal verification framework to mathematically prove that smart contracts and blockchain ecosystems are bug-free and hacker-resistant. As part of this partnership, CertiK will provide technology to Nebulas to ensure DApps and smart contracts on the blockchain ecosystem are secure, reliable and resistant to hacking. Thanks to Certik’s technology, developers on Nebulas will be able to receive real-time and interactive verification feedback when building DApps and smart contracts, helping to free up time and effort previously spent on debugging and auditing code.

Recap of Nebulas at Consensus 2018 and the NAS Night cocktail party

Consensus, the global blockchain conference hosted by Coindesk, was held in New York City from May 14th to May 16th. Nebulas was one of the sponsors of the event, which gathered more than 250 speakers and 4,000 participants. Nebulas co-founder Robin Zhong attended the event, accompanying members of the Nebulas tech and business teams, and Nebulas community members from San Francisco, New York, Boston and Salt Lake City. Nebulas had a standalone conference room at Consensus to introduce our project to the public and discuss potential cooperation initiatives with blockchain practitioners from around the world.

We also hosted a cocktail party on the evening of the 15th to thank the community for their long-term support, and to promote communication among developers, investors, and enthusiasts of Nebulas. Altogether, Consensus was a great time and allowed us to showcase our technology and vision to some of the top people in the blockchain space. Many also expressed their intent to participate in our Nebulas Incentive Program.

Hitters Xu hosts a private get together for xGooglers at the Nebulas office in Beijing

On May 18th, the GBA (xGoogler Blockchain Alliance) held an intimate meetup at the Nebulas office in Beijing. A group of former Google engineers who are now work in blockchain, or intend to move into this space, came together for the event. Nebulas founder, and former Google engineer, Hitters Xu shared his experience as a blockchain entrepreneur and his philosophy for “thinking in blockchain” with guests. Hitters also explained the Nebulas Incentive Program as an initiative to kickstart a thriving DApp ecosystem. The atmosphere was lively and gregarious. Attending guests bonded and talked in depth about both the potential and visible applications of blockchain technology.

GBA was founded by former Google employees Hitters Xu (founder of Nebulas and Antshares/NEO), Daniel Wang (founder of Loopring), and Andy Tian (founder of Gifto). The mission of the alliance is to bring together past and present Google employees who are interested in working together to bring about their visions for blockchain technology.

Aero Wang, Nebulas co-founder, was invited to speak at the Global Solutions Conference at Tsinghua University

On May 18th, The Global Solutions Festival (GSF) was held at Tsinghua University. GSF is an annual gathering of young professionals and students to work on solutions for some of the most pressing issues of today. Nebulas co-founder Aero Wang was invited to participate and shared his insights on the blockchain in China, as well the technology and vision behind Nebulas. Over three days, more than 200 participants from around the world came together to discuss and develop solutions across five main themes, Digital Revolution and the Future of Jobs, Poverty Alleviation, Improving Healthcare, Inspiring Healthcare, Inspiring Education, and Environment.

Hitters Xu delivers a speech at the Tongji University 111th Anniversary Celebration

On May 20th, Hitters Xu, founder of Nebulas returned to his alma mater at Tongji University to attend its 111th anniversary and participate in the Tongji University Alumni Innovation and Business Conference. At the conference, Hitters delivered a keynote speech on “The journey to entrepreneurship in blockchain.” Notable academics including Zhong Zhihua of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and academics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as influential alumni across various industries in China and overseas, also participated in the conference.

NAS Center hosts a DApp development workshop hosted by a Nebulas community member

On May 19th, Nebulas community developer Brandon co-organized developer workshops and hackathons with the Nebulas team at the NAS Center in San Francisco. The event aimed to give guidance on how to develop a DApp on Nebulas, to enable participants to win rewards on the Nebulas Incentive Program. The event began with an explanation of the process of developing a DApp on the Nebulas mainnet, with the remainder of the event being dedicated to actual DApp development.

Around 40 local engineers attended the event. Brandon got in touch with a local club of JavaScript developers, and these club members made up a large portion of the attendees. Those who participated in the event said they learned a lot. One engineer did not leave until 8PM, and he said he would recommend the Nebulas Incentive Program to all engineers he knew.

Because of the positive response of the event, Brandon plans to hold development workshops on a regular basis. Every Tuesday, workshops centering on the Nebulas Incentive Program will be held at the NAS Center.

LAST WEEK’S Top Commits

Mainnet Development Progress

Go-nebulas 1.1.0 has been tested for some time, and is nearly ready to be released.

Call between contracts

Multiple code reviews have been done for making APIs for calling between contracts more semantically concise and user-friendly. We also continued to test the function from four aspects: functionality, performance, stability and security.

Persistent Cache

To provide a more reliable data cache, we designed a new persistent component for data cache and development is done. Testing is now about to start.

Nebulas Incentive

We received over 800 DApps in the first week of Nebulas Incentive and more than 290 developers and referrers got rewarded. The competition for NAS rewards is sure to get more intense as the Incentive Program continues and the quality of submitted DApps improves.

In addition, we released a DAppBoard

https://incentive.nebulas.io/dapps-board.html

Tools

DApp debugging tool

In view of the strong demand for a DApp debugging tool, the engineering team is stepping up development to produce this solution. Last week, we focused on improvement of simulation execution engine. Further testing is ongoing now.

Multi-language SDK

To meet the need of different development platforms. PHP/Python/Android/iOS SDKs are being prepared. Certainly, all volunteers are welcome to take part in this work and to benefit the community.

Documentation

Thanks to the help from Nebulas community, we corrected a number of mistakes in wiki last week. We will continue to focus on feedback voiced by our community and do our best to help everyone understand blockchain and Nebulas.

Meanwhile, some hot FAQs feedback during the Nebulas Incentive Program are documented here:

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

Community

We are going to migrate to StackExchange in the near future. You are welcome to follow us and contribute to the growth of this new forum:

https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/117966/nebulas

Hot FAQ

How can I debug my smart contract faster?

A: The Nebulas tech team is working to introduce more convenient debugging tools. In addition, community enthusiasts can also try to build their private chains and modify the configurations in their local network. Notifications can be found here: https://github.com/nebulasio/go-nebulas/issues/109

2. Do Nebulas smart contracts now support the use of oracles?

A: Very good question. In the latest weekly report of the Nebulas, calls between different smart contracts have been completed and will soon be launched on the testnet and mainnet. We believe there will soon be a Nebulas oracle. Stay tuned.