March Newsletter

Let’s Talk About Validators

Greetings from the Agoric crew. Our monthly Community Call, which usually happens the first Wednesday of each month, is happening the second Wednesday this month. We’ll be talking about the role of validators in the Agoric economy. That’s next Wednesday, March 10, at 9am PT, and we hope to see you there. Set a day-and-date streaming reminder on YouTube.

Sign up for a reminder so you don’t miss out.

Our incentivized testnet is coming! It will consist of five phases, and validators will compete with each other in a series of tasks and challenges to win rewards. Validators will learn about supporting the Agoric network, and ultimately they’ll come away with valuable knowledge to operate on Agoric’s future mainnet.

Registrations for the incentivized testnet will be announced on Twitter and Discord, so make sure to keep your eyes peeled.

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Updates: What’s Happening at Agoric

Engineering News

  • We completed the Stargate upgrade, including IBC, and joined the rest of the Cosmos ecosystem in supporting and celebrating the launch of Stargate.
  • We implemented fees for our Treasury vaults, which will be a core element of compensation to token holders securing our chain and economy.
  • We’ve made considerable progress implementing fine-grained metering in our kernel code as a primary step in our gas model for Javascript execution.
  • We are upgrading to Nat 4.0.0 as part of moving to use BigInts everywhere, and are working through additional updates to the developer experience around amountMath and ratios.
  • We improved our chain’s memory and storage usage by implementing the retirement of locally resolved promises.
  • Our integration of the XS JavaScript engine is nearly complete. Its benefits include providing standards-compliant JavaScript in a small memory footprint, and supporting snapshots of running programs to significantly improve validator restart capabilities.

Follow our engineering news at https://agoric.com/weekly-updates/.

Interoperability with Cosmos Nodes and Etherum

Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) launched with the Cosmos Stargate upgrade on February 18th at 7AM UTC. This is exciting news for the Agoric economy, which is built on Agoric’s Layer-1 chain and connected to Cosmos zones and other networks like Ethereum via the same IBC protocol. https://agoric.com/ibc-stargate-crosschains/

Cosmos Stargate & IBC Launch

Dean Tribble chats with Gautier Marin (Tendermint), Anca Zamfir (Informal Systems), Chris Goes (Interchain GmbH), and Billy Rennekamp (Interchain Foundation). https://youtu.be/foRAwTDRZCw

Fireside Chat: Figment and Agoric on Accelerating DeFi

Agoric’s Dean Tribble (CEO) and Rowland Graus (Product Lead) met with Gavin Birch and Clayton Menzel of Figment Networks to discuss Agoric’s fast, familiar, and secure smart contract platform for DeFi. https://youtu.be/5hv_rMm09fw

Agoric Community Call: The User Experience

We’ve talked about our system, often in great detail. This week, Rowland talks about what Agoric will look like, from various users’ perspectives. https://youtu.be/ouzwEg1afDQ

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Events: Events in Which We’re Participating

All scheduled events are, for the time being, taking place remotely.

TC-39: March 9 - 10

CrossChain Workshop: March 9 - 10

Agoric Community Call #6: March 10

Real Life Security Threats and How to Avoid Them: March 15

Keep track at agoric.com/events.

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Bookmarks: What We’re Reading

And watching, and listening to

Robin Hanson’s A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens

https://youtu.be/0lKliaFllPA Many people have speculated about the Fermi paradox — if there are aliens, why don’t we see them — and come up with many interesting answers. Here, Robin Hanson explains his “grabby aliens” model, a simple model with a few open parameters, and reasons backward from what we see to plausible settings for these parameters. Among the surprising answers is that we are very early. Among those that will get to the threshold of a star-faring civilization, almost all will take much longer to get there. (Mark Miller)

An Essay on the Trial by Jury by Lysander Spooner (1852)

https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/fdscontent/uscompanion/us/static/companion.websites/9780199338863/whittington_updata/ch_5_spooner_an_essay_on_the_trial_by_jury.pdf A fascinating governance proposal for using jury nullification (the right for a jury to decline to prosecute particular laws) to protect minority rights. Could be useful in crypto governance, although random selection of a jury would need to address the sybil problem. (Kate Sills)

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Thanks for Reading and Sharing

Please feel free to forward. You can join the Agoric community on Twitter, Telegram, Discord and LinkedIn, subscribe to this monthly newsletter, and catch us at upcoming events.

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