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CigDAO aims to make crypto fun, a dashboard that displays the carbon emissions of the Internet Computer in real-time, a nifty feedback board for ICP developers, plus a whole lot of other cool stuff. Here’s the recap of Global R&D, April 2023.
Written by Angela Harp
More SNS DAOs Coming!
Open Chat SNS and SNS-1 are progressing nicely, both showing a steady increase in activity around proposal submissions and token transactions. OpenChat has also introduced a new feature that allows neuron gated chat groups to be created, which means special groups can now be curated that are restricted to community members vested in governance. Exciting developments are happening with SNS-1 as well. The community has risen to the challenge of building something for this DAO with the kick-off of ICPCoins. The goal of this project is to build a dashboard that tracks the performance of tokens launched on the Internet Computer.
* See SNS section of the Internet Computer dashboard for more details about the setup and governance activity on the existing SNS DAOS.
While OpenChat SNS and SNS-1 are the first SNS DAO launches, they’re certainly not the last. There’s plenty more in the pipeline. Projects including Catalyze, Hot or Not, Kontribute, Kinic, Nuance and Sonic are gearing up to hand over the control of their dapps to SNS DAOs. What’s more, various dapps in the ecosystem are offering SNS launchpad support beyond the NNS dapp: ICLighthouse is up and running, Funded and Plug will be available soon.
On the DFINITY side of things, R&D teams have been working hard to introduce new launchpad features such as a one-proposal mechanism. This will reduce the current 3-steps creation to one, and greatly simplify the process for both end users and developers. Another feature in the works is customizable geo restrictions, which will allow projects to encode geo restriction preferences into SNS proposals as per their requirements.
DFINITY also published its SNS voting guidelines, which lays out how the Foundation will participate in SNS launches moving forward.
Since the full release of ckBTC on April 3, 2023, the circulating supply of BTC has reached over 1.7 million USD, and many dapps in the ecosystem now support it. Convert BTC to ckBTC and back on IC Lighthouse, ICP Swap and via a DFX command line. Trade ckBTC on DEXs like ICP Swap, Sonic and ICDex, or used it to tip friends on DSCVR and OpenChat. Plus, it’s now also possible to fund your favorite projects with ckBTC on Funded.
Alongside watching all the exciting activity around ckBTC in the community, DFINITY has plans to upgrade the ckBTC experience. In the coming months, R&D teams will work on and submit various proposals to integrate more KYT providers, improve fee bookkeeping and the minter dashboard, simplify the BTC to ckBTC flow, and introduce conversion support on the NNS frontend dapp. Plenty of work to do, but all these improvements will surely help foster ckBTC adoption and awareness beyond the ICP ecosystem.
Transparently Sustainable Blockchain
A key goal of the Internet Computer is to provide an energy efficient compute platform that scales for the world to build sustainable systems and services. Thanks to the unique architecture and novel cryptography, the Internet Computer already hosts smart contract software, data, and computation, with energy consumption levels comparable with traditional software that runs on Big Tech’s cloud services and orders of magnitude lower than competing blockchains.
Beyond delivering green tech, a lot of work has been done in the past year to make the carbon emission of the Internet Computer fully transparent and verifiable. Together with Carbon Crowd, DFINITY released a sustainability report last fall and has now embraced Proof of Green, a collaborative initiative to develop an open-source, trustless standard for emission measurements of blockchains. The Internet Computer’s carbon footprint is now verifiable and transparent via the first real-time node energy consumption analytics tool on the newly released Carbon Crowd Dashboard.
While there is much to celebrate, the mission to decarbonize crypto continues. Further research and collaboration is planned to get all Internet Computer nodes represented on the dashboard, to optimize the metrics for better compute comparisons across the industry, and to clearly define the scope and policy around blockchain sustainability.
The Internet Computer Embraces Real-Time Energy Reporting and the Proof of Green Initiative
Research teams at Zama and DFINITY have joined forces to explore the possibilities of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology and applications on the Internet Computer. FHE, which enables computation on encrypted data, was first introduced in 1978, and has made massive progress since then. This technology is very promising for enabling privacy on a blockchain, specifically arbitrary computation on encrypted data.
The architecture of the Internet Computer is well-suited for FHE as it already supports threshold cryptography and provides a rich execution environment that can be extended in a straightforward way to allow dapps to compute on encrypted data. Possible use-cases span from confidential token transfers, to seal bid auctions, to privacy preserving data mining.
Zama and DFINITY have just released their first joint research paper:
Lightweight Asynchronous Verifiable Secret Sharing with Optimal Resilience
CigDAO: Let’s Make Crypto Fun!
CigDAO is developing open-source tooling to simplify DAO creation. Their “DAOBuilder” will provide the community with an easy-to-use command line to tokenize and decentralize applications on the Internet Computer. The main aim of the tooling is to make DAOs easy to customize, deploy and manage. In the coming months, CigDAO plans to release various new features, including a coordinator DAO and a ETH token DAO.
Follow this CigDAO on Twitter to stay up-to-date.
Exchange Rate Canister (XRC)
The new Exchange Rate Canister (XRC) is a price oracle that makes use of HTTPS outcalls to fetch data from Web 2.0 servers and lives entirely on chain. This canister interacts with major cryptocurrency exchanges using their public APIs to retrieve current or historical pricing information. Additionally, it periodically queries public APIs of foreign exchange data providers around the world to get forex rates.
This on-chain price oracle service provides functionality in a deterministic, yet decentralized manner, for various types of applications, and for any pair of a base or quote asset, be it crypto or fiat currencies. Use cases include comparing exchange rates against the market rate on DEXs and determining the value of the assets held under management in a canister, for example, with respect to a fiat currency. And, as of May 8, 2023, the cycle-minting canister (CMC) automatically pulls the ICP/XDR conversion rate from the Exchange Rate Canister, which means conversion rate updates will no longer require NNS proposals.
As the usual 144 exchange rate proposals (one every 10 minutes) are no longer necessary, voting rewards may no longer be released daily. Instead, rewards will roll-over to days where proposals are submitted to ensure that voting neurons do not miss rewards.
Watch the demo
Read more about XRC
View the source code
Any devs out there with feedback? Please share it on the newly released Developer Feedback Board. This new dapp hosted on the Internet Computer was launched to provide one single platform to collect feedback and requests from the ICP developer community, and to improve the overall developer experience. ICP developers can use this platform to report bugs, submit functionality requests, discuss developer concerns or upvote issues. Working groups will be formed to address and prioritize requests.
This feedback dapp was built 100% on-chain with Motoko. Like it? Here’s the open-source code.
BUIDL Bitcoin Hackathon
Registration is now open for the Internet Computer BUIDL Bitcoin Hackathon powered by Encode Club! This global, four-week online event kicks off on May 22 and is designed to give hackers a chance to learn, collaborate, and create groundbreaking projects, specifically around native Bitcoin integration.
Get more info on the tracks, workshops, prizes and registration here:
Announcing the Internet Computer BUIDL Bitcoin Hackathon, powered by Encode Club
We hope you enjoyed this recap. If you missed the last Global R&D or want to watch it again, here’s the full replay:
Sign up for the next Global R&D
Learn more about the internetcomputer.org and join the developer community at forum.dfinity.org.
Global R&D: April 2023 Edition was originally published in The Internet Computer Review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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