June Newsletter

Greetings from the Agoric crew, normally centered at Palm House in Belmont, but geographically decentralized for the time being.

Many things unite us at Agoric. There’s our shared language of JavaScript. There’s our belief in the power of smart contracts to bring the world’s global economy online. And there’s chocolate. The latter brought us together in the form of a sheltering-in-place tasting session this month, with treats from the Swiss chocolatier Sweet 55 from Half Moon Bay, California.

We hope this note finds you and yours well in these challenging times.

. . .

Updates: What’s Happening at Agoric

Engineering Updates

  • We’ve been accumulating changes to Zoe based on feedback from the recent Gitcoin hackathon. We’ve added a wallet UI to simplify dapp integration and to enable users to send and receive payments from other users in the REPL. Those changes will be released soon.
  • In Zoe, we split the opera ticket example contract into multiple reusable contracts to make them reusable for multiple dapps: a generic contract to sell items and a generic contract that mints the items and launches instances of the sales contract. These can easily be used now to build other dapps.
  • The agoric-sdk has been updated to use the modern SES shim, improving programming safety across the system.
  • For Game of Zones phase 3, Agoric put together a proof-of-concept Smart Relayer. It combines the Agoric JavaScript programming model with Iqlusion’s relayer to enable simple JavaScript programs to inspect, analyze, and manipulate packets being relayed. These relay “policies” can run standalone or be controlled by smart contracts on an agoric-based “commander” zone. They also should work for any IBC chain that the iqlusion relayer can support. Like fancy routers for TCP networks, the Smart Relayer enables better management of IBC networks.
  • To better support dynamic IBC, we proposed ADR 025, which specifies how smart contracts on chains can communicate with relayers so they can automatically relay dynamically created channels. ADR 025 has been integrated into the IBC standard.

Follow Agoric technical updates at https://agoric.com/weekly-updates/

Who’s Afraid of Ethereum?

Agoric was featured by Crypto Briefing among the top 12 smart contract platforms. https://cryptobriefing.com/whos-afraid-ethereum-top-12-smart-contract-platforms/

Layer 1 Podcast

Zaki Manian (Tendermint Labs Director, Iqlusion Co-Founder) and Dean Tribble (Agoric CEO): “Inter-Blockchain Communication, Cosmos Network, Agoric, Why We Build Blockchains, DeFi Thoughts.” https://youtu.be/HzdI1oJ2xas

No More Silos

Agoric Chief Scientist Mark S. Miller on building for interoperability in Web 3. Watch the archived panel. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/DiffusionDigital/register?session=9/

Chip Morningstar on TC39er Podcast

The Agoric engineer talks about his favorite flavor of proposals, coining “avatar,” and more. https://tc39er.us/posts/episode-5-chip-morningstar/

. . .

Events: Upcoming Events in Which We’re Participating

All scheduled events we were planning on have been postponed, naturally, or are taking place remotely.

Filecoin Ignite: July 6 - August 6

TC39: July 20 - 23

. . .

Bookmarks: What We’re Reading

Black Girls Code

The non-profit’s founder, Kimberly Bryant, talks about systemic racism in tech. We donated to the organization on Juneteenth and encourage our friends and partners to join in. (Mike Jablon) https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/black-girls-code-founder-ceo-interview/

Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler

The 1987 hard science fiction trilogy Lilith’s Brood by the celebrated author Octavia Butler begins alone in a dark room furnished only with the memories of the end of the world. This story is a wonderful break from science fiction’s many well-tread paths and tired perspectives: a window into a life of struggles, ambiguity, and uncomfortable compromises. Lilith’s Brood examines human nature, survival, and tribalism. (Kris Kowal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

. . .

Thanks for Reading

Please feel free to forward. You can join the Agoric community on Twitter, Telegram, and LinkedIn.

Updated: