November Newsletter

Greetings from the Agoric crew, normally centered at Palm House in Belmont, California, but geographically decentralized throughout the duration of the ongoing pandemic.

This past Friday brought to conclusion the Cosmos HackAtom V hackathon. We’re currently in prep mode for the upcoming Agoric-Chainlink Hack the Orb hackathon, following up our just announced integration. The hackathon (details at ) opens November 6 with an exciting chat (6pm UTC / 10AM PST) between Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov and Agoric Chief Scientist Mark Miller (the start of a [full day](https://www.hacktheorb.com/#section-schedule) of speakers) and runs through November 21.

And on Halloween we gathered virtually for a costumed all-hands meeting. You can join us online, too: Tune in on November 4, 9am Pacific, for the monthly Agoric Community Call.

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Updates: What’s Happening at Agoric

Engineering News

  • We completed the end-to-end integration with Chainlink, allowing developers to access Chainlink oracles natively in Agoric in support of our upcoming Hackathon.

  • We upgraded the Agoric SDK to support Cosmos 0.4 (Stargate) in preparation for IBC launch later this year.

  • We wrote a contract that implements a fully collateralized financially settled call-spread option contract. This contract can be modified by developers to build calls, puts, binaries, futures, prediction market assets, and collateralized loans.

  • Vats can now store large tables on disk, instead of purely in memory, with elegant code that mimics what an in-memory store would look like.

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

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Level up your JavaScript skills during a two-week online hackathon focused on the power of decentralized finance. Using Chainlink’s market-leading oracle solution and the Agoric smart contract platform, developers can Hack the Orb for a chance to win! With over $10,000 in prizes. Get your IDEs ready. It kicks off on November 6 with exciting and informational workshops and talks, and runs through the 21. https://www.hacktheorb.com/

Adding to our existing library of interchangeable, composable DeFi legos, Agoric is excited to announce that Agoric and Chainlink have teamed up to make it easy for smart contract developers to plug oracles into DeFi dapps. The combination makes the Agoric cryptoeconomy a data-rich environment for deploying new DeFi products, giving developers access to any form of market data such as asset prices, FX rates, interest rates, and more. https://agoric.com/agoric-chainlink-integration/

How Will Bitcoin Lead to More Freedom?

The 1987 debate that foreshadowed the divide in today’s cryptocurrency community: Mark S. Miller, Chip Morningtar, and Dean Tribble, who were involved with AMIX in the 1980s, have come together once again at Agoric to try and make good on Phil Salin’s vision. https://reason.com/2020/10/16/how-will-bitcoin-lead-to-more-freedom/

They were also featured in the new four-part Cypherpunks Write Code series from Reason: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBuns9Evn1w-T2RwqMhUnTZbTTe-M-g42/

DeFi Workshops: Smart Contracts in JavaScript

Agoric ran the first in its DeFi Workshops, a series dedicated to building DeFi apps, including smart contracts, covered calls, AMMs, etc., on Oct. 16. Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qudVWjSqDJU/

Dean Tribble at Liquidity 2020

Agoric’s CEO spoke about decentralized governance and the reuse of pre-built governance components at DystopiaLabs’ Liquidity2020 Summit. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/liquidity2020summit/30/

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Events in Which We’re Participating

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

Agoric Community Call: November 4, 9am Pacific

Hack the Orb: the Agoric and Chainlink Hackathon: November 6 - 21 Note: Nov. 6 is a full day of speakers.

TC-39: November 16-19

Interchain Conversations: December 12-13

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Bookmarks: What We’re Reading

Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

Dan Robinson’s widely read take on the monsters that lurk in the Ethereum mempool. (Graus) https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ecc5f0505dff

Fascinating journalistic exploration by Xiaowei Wang, this new book puts aside a “metronormative” understanding of the world in favor of the rural Chinese experience, such as how a far-flung chicken rancher uses blockchain to manage tracking and provenance. (Weidenbaum) https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/blockchain-chicken-farm/

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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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