In September, DeFi still attracted most of the industry’s attention. In contrast, the progress of anonymous currency appears to be stable overall, but it is also worthy of attention.
*The ranking of items is based on the data of Coinmarketcap website on September 28, 2020.
Monero (XMR), #16
September progress
The biggest development of Monroe this month is the release of the code for the new version of the mainnet 0.17.0.0 “Oxygen Orion”. The biggest change from 0.17 to 0.16 is the replacement of ring signature technology (MLSAG→CLSAG). CLSAG has two main improvements: ① Reduce transaction volume; ② Improve verification efficiency. Monero’s transaction volume depends on the number of outputs spent in this transaction and the number of new outputs generated. The current volume is about 2.5 KB, which is expected to be reduced to 1.9 KB in 0.17; the efficiency of verifying signatures has increased by 20%. CLSAG has passed the security audit (funds are crowdfunded by the community) and is waiting to go online.
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Monroe’s two-year iterations still follow the technical route, and it is also highly probable in the future. This depends on the team’s philosophy, and the second is because privacy technology really needs to be improved. At present, no anonymous currency can be called perfect. Every technology needs to make trade-offs and trade-offs among privacy, scalability, security, and degree of decentralization. And overall, privacy technology (especially zero-knowledge proof) is quite early. In a review of zero-knowledge proofs by Eli Ben-Sasson, the chief scientist of StarkWare, the term “Cambrian” (the first epoch of the Paleozoic era) is used to describe the stage we are now in. Although several new zero-knowledge proofs have appeared in the past two years, they are only in the first stage as a whole. Therefore, in the future, the fundamentals of anonymous currencies will still depend on which team can develop/adopt better and more appropriate technologies.
October plan
Version 0.17 is scheduled to be launched on the mainnet on October 17. The source code has been released, but the client has not yet been released. As usual, the client is expected to be released within a week before the mainnet upgrade.
Zcash (ZEC), #34
No major progress this month
October plan
1) The next version of the main network (Canopy/heartwood) is expected to be released in mid-November (block height: 1,046,400). The main changes are: block output will be halved, and block reward distribution will be adjusted (miners 80%, ecological fund Will 8%, ECC company 7%, Zcash Foundation 5%)
2) Halo2 (the difference from Halo is that it uses PLONK instead of SONIC as the core component of zero-knowledge proof) is expected to be integrated into the main network in 2021. The agreement has 2 major updates: ①eliminate Trusted Setup ②improve Scalability
Zcoin (XZC), #158
September progress
Zcoin experienced a half-production (25→12.5 XZC/Block) in September. Like Zcash, it also changed the distribution of block rewards: 50% for miners, 35% for Znode, and 15% for development.
Attacks in August:
Result: 20:16:42 UTC on August 14, 2020, block height: 293,526, amount forged out of thin air: 384,400.82 XZC
Reason: Zcoin iterated its own code base on June 3, 2020: replaced the original 0.13 version with Bitcoin core 0.14. But the 0.14 version contains an additional vulnerability. Before version 0.14, Bitcoin was designed to perform a verification before the node broadcasts the block to check whether the transaction with multiple inputs has been spent. In 0.14, the team cancelled this “high cost” verification step because they believed that UTXO’s update logic would automatically detect this situation, and double-spend attacks on the vulnerability would report an error. But in fact there is still the possibility of double spending. The Bitcoin team later modified this in 0.15 and 0.16, but the Zcoin team did not consider these when integrating 0.14, which led to this additional issuance.
Measures: Deploy security patch: 0.14.0.5, and contact mining pools and exchanges to freeze most of the additional currency
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A little bit of revelation: In the open source world, standing on the shoulders of giants is a very good strategy, but quoting and integrating other people’s code requires a very deep understanding of this code. This incident and the last fork of the well-known DeFi The incidents of the project code being attacked are very similar. After the code is fork, it is not the first time to integrate the other party’s patches in subsequent versions. Loopring’s article said very well. Even if you want to fork someone else’s code, you have to rewrite it yourself to deepen your understanding before you know the possible loopholes.
October plan
No news about the progress of October has been received yet.
Beam (BEAM), #327
September progress
Beam released a new version of Eager Electron 5.1.9763 on the test network. The main updates of this version are: ①Add offline addresses in offline transactions without waiting for the recipient to go online; ②Significantly reduce atomic swap transaction fees; ③Fix a lot of bugs . In the EE 5.1 wallet, there will be a limit of 10 offline transfers after each round of communication. That is to say, you can send 10 transactions to the other party without being online. When the quota is used up, the wallet will automatically request a new quota of 10 transactions from the other party through SBBS. If the other party has not been online or responding, you need to wait all the time or communicate through an external channel. The drop in transaction fees for atomic swaps is due to the adoption of segregated witness.
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Compared with Grin, Beam has higher iteration efficiency, especially in the experience of transfer. This is an advantage of the centralized team. Decentralization, although the power of governance is decentralized, the responsibilities are also more decentralized. At the same time, because it is a voluntary developer, it is inevitable that there will be a mentality of “in theory, I can do nothing, and there is no need to explain/promise anything to you”. The loss of strong constraints, obligations and economic incentives will test the charm of the project/founder. Only a very small number of projects can maintain efficient development and operation in a decentralized manner. But in the long run, blockchain projects should maintain a high degree of decentralization. After laying the foundation, corporate projects can adopt a transitional method to gradually withdraw and gradually hand over governance to the community. Community-based projects must work hard to retain outstanding talents while constantly replenishing fresh blood.
October plan
Beam’s next roadmap is shown above. It can be seen that in addition to the improvement of the transfer level, DeFi has become the highlight of the next six months. In October, the team will conduct a conceptual proof of two functions: ①Beam Script; ②Bridge between Beam and Ethereum. The latter is more significant. We are currently not optimistic about most projects that want to build a DeFi ecosystem on their own, because it is too difficult. The bridge between Beam and Ethereum means that it chooses to participate in the Ethereum ecosystem first, which is a more sensible choice. After the bridge is realized, perhaps we can use Beam and confidential assets to participate in financial activities such as Ethereum DeFi liquidity mining or mortgage lending. The degree of decentralization of the bridge also determines how safe our locked Beam assets are. It is worth looking forward to.
Grin (GRIN), #372
September progress
Grin’s ASIC mining machine finally came out. In Grin’s initial mining plan, the final route to the ASIC mining machine was preset. I don’t know if it is because the currency price has been falling all the way, the willingness of mining machine manufacturers to develop and produce Grin mining machine is low, and several mining machine manufacturers have postponed or abandoned the development of Grin mining machine. Now the Grin mining machine is finally out. The mining machine is called Pineapple G1, produced by Zhejiang ipollo, with an average 24-hour computing power of 40 G/s, a power of about 2800w, and a power consumption ratio of 70w/G[1].
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Generally speaking, for pro-ASIC algorithms, the advantages of ASIC miners over general-purpose miners such as CPU/GPU are absolute. As the proportion of C29 decreases, it is expected that ASIC miners will gradually occupy the market. What does this mean for the Grin network? The first and most direct positive result is the improvement of safety. As long as the first batch of ASIC mining machines are proven to be sufficiently profitable and stable, ASICs will continue to replace GPU mining machines, the absolute value of the entire network’s computing power will continue to rise, and the computing power cost of launching 51% attacks will also increase. Increased account book security. Of course, the monopoly of the production/sales of ASIC mining machines may result in the majority of mining machines being controlled by an organization, making it easier to launch attacks, but based on long-term interest considerations, the possibility of doing so is very small. .
Secondly, the threshold of ownership of ASIC miners is still higher than that of GPUs, so it is foreseeable that the number of miners will decrease and block rewards will be more concentrated. In the longer term, Grin’s price determines the scale and diversification of its mining industry. If the price of the currency rises, the price of the mining machine will rise, and other developers will enter the field. After all, a mine that never reduces production (when the currency price is stable) is difficult for miners to refuse. If the price of the currency is high enough, the network will have heavy assets like Bitcoin mining (of course a few orders of magnitude smaller) “supporting” (at least the psychological price/cost anchoring effect). If the currency price keeps falling, then the network will not be able to support too large-scale mining.
October plan
Lehnberg said in September that the current Grin team and governance structure had many improprieties, such as the lack of checks and balances, and conflicts with community members, and proposed to disband and reorganize the team. This move triggered widespread discussion in the community. He and @paouky wrote a new simplified governance structure proposal, predicting that the governance plan will receive more discussions and iterations in the future.
to sum up
The progress of the anonymous currency project is relatively fixed. As long as it focuses on four aspects: privacy technology iteration, mining algorithm, block reward distribution, and development sustainability, projects that do better in these aspects in the future will win.
