This Week: Building a Formidable Blockchain Network

EOS’ journey to becoming a leading blockchain ecosystem in the industry for the development and deployment of decentralized applications (dApps) is well underway. Having opted for a multifaceted ecosystem-wide approach, EOS network developments and its many different initiatives are in full swing.

Some of the bigger and more anticipated initiatives are reaching their final stages before being launched to the public. Initiatives such the EOS EVM, Antelope IBC, and $100 million ENV Fund, to name a few, are edging ever closer to full launches and giving the EOS network a massive boost in developer, economic, and user activities.

Antelope Coalition meeting

The Antelope Coalition between EOS, WAX, Telos, and UX Network blockchains held its weekly meeting this past week in which they discussed various initiatives that aim to improve the Antelope ecosystem as a whole.

The following projects were discussed in the recent meeting:

P2P Peer Discovery RFP - Coalition members voted on which of the two teams (OCI and Fudan) bidding on the P2P Peer Discovery project would be awarded the contract. All Coalition members unanimously voted to award the contract to Fudan. Reasons for picking Fudan are; that the team’s bid is more affordable, the P2P project is less risky, and that working with Fudan expands the number teams that the Coalition can work with in the future

Coalition top-up to fund RFPs - The Coalition is currently discussing and looking into how much is needed in funding in order to continue with the RFP’s and be able to pay its contractors.

RAM Limitation Fixes - As the only bidding team for this RFP and after a deeper look at its requirements, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) is proposing the Coalition alters the RFP’s scope of requirements due to a lack of resources and its current priorities elsewhere. Under the altered RFP scope the ENF would focus only on the more urgent aspects of RAM Limitation Fixes. There’s also the possibility that the UX Network team can undertake some of the work as a subcontractor.

Ledger app support - The Coalition is still engaging with the Ledger (hardware wallet) team, which has been slow in responding, about additional support for Antelope chains and their native cryptocurrencies.

Antelope IBC - All the accounts/MSIGs for the different Antelope Coalition chains have been completed. Antelope IBC won’t be activated simultaneously by all chains as they individually need to finalize when they’ll activate IBC on their side due to varying network priorities and schedules.

Dune v1.1.0 Release Notes

The ENF has shared the release notes of Dune, a tool to abstract over Leap programs, CDT, and other services/tools to perform the functions of node management, compiling smart contracts, running tests, and several other common tasks required to develop smart contracts on Antelope blockchains.

The latest version (Dune v.1.1.0) has multiple new features, some of which include:

DUNE plug-in extension - DUNE plugins are Python scripts that allow users to customize and add new functionality to DUNE. They can be used to add new command-line options, interact with DUNE's internals, or perform other tasks related to cleos/nodeos.

Installation on Windows - DUNE is now available as a Chocolatey package and can be installed on Windows.

Packaging - DUNE can now be packaged as an RPM or DEB package. The documentation for installing DUNE on Linux has been updated.

DUNE image - DUNE now uses pre-built Docker image for running DUNE. The image is automatically downloaded during the first usage, so there's no need to build it from scratch.

Dynamic updates - DUNE now supports dynamic updates. Users can upgrade DUNE image to the latest version using a simple command line.

Leap/CDT versioning - DUNE is allowing users to change the CDT and leap versions.

Functional tests - Users can validate DUNE by running functional tests using a simple command in the DUNE directory.

The release notes point out that those who have previously cloned DUNE, may still have an older version of the Docker image. To upgrade to the latest version of DUNE they’ll need to run the command ‘dune --upgrade', which will download the most recent version of the image from GitHub Packages. Alternatively, a set of different commands can be used to remove the old Docker image.

Please refer to the Release Notes for further information - DUNE v1.1.0 Release Notes

Pomelo Grants Season 4 analysis

Following another successful season of Pomelo Grants in Q4 2022, the team has done some analysis to uncover areas of strengths and weaknesses. Due to efforts from the previous seasons, this Season 4 saw less attempts of projects trying to game and/or cheat the system in order to acquire more than their fair share of the matching pool funding. The few projects that did try got disqualified.

Season 4 of Pomelo Grants saw the top 10 funded projects receive just over $200,000 in funding to help foster a strong EOS ecosystem. Projects that participated in Season 4 covered the following categories; Ecosystem Growth (20.5%), DeFi (20.5%), Infrastructure (14.7%), Governance (10.9), Arts & Media (8%), Developer Tooling (7.5%), Community (5.5%), Security (5%), Privacy (4%), and Education (3.5%).

Furthermore, Pomelo’s analysis shows that the majority of projects are based in Asia - East Asia (32.1%) and Southeast Asia (13%), with the latter witnessing a huge jump from 0.8% last season. Other regions represented are North America (21.2%), Europe (16.6%), Latin America (14.5%), and the Middle East (1.9%). Not shown on the graph of percentages from the analysis are the Africa and Australia regions which probably share the remainder of 0.7%.

As the EOS ecosystem continues to grow, so too will the participation in Pomelo Grants, which will most likely result in an increase of the matching pool fund. It will be interesting how the participation of different categories and regions continue to evolve. For the most part, the dominating category will most probably be dictated by network demand of what the ecosystem is lacking at that point in time.

EOS officially activates IBC

Perhaps the most exciting news of the week; EOS has officially activated IBC on its network! This comes after it was decided in the recent Antelope Coalition meeting that each chain would independently launch IBC on their side of the chain in a manner that aligns with their current priorities.

Having been the first Antelope blockchain to execute the multi-signature (MSIG) proposal necessary to create the accounts for EOS IBC back on January 12, EOS has once again been the first to activate IBC on its chain. This signals the intentions and determination that EOS has in being a network connected to multiple blockchain ecosystems.

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In the next few days to weeks other Antelope chains will independently also launch or activate IBC on their side so that data, transactions, and communication can flow freely from one chain to the next, almost instantaneously.

This opens the door for greater collaboration efforts between members of the Antelope Coalition. For instance, the members could all agree on funding for the development or the deployment of a multichain application that could be accessed on either of the member chains. Which would become by far the most scalable decentralized application (dApp) on the planet.

As of writing EOS is trading at $1.10 (up from last week’s price of $1.07). It is currently doing $97 million in daily trading volume and its market cap currently sits at slightly improved $1,192,671,499. However, this week does see EOS move down two spots to 45th in position by market cap rankings. All stats are based on CoinMarketCap data.

Sources

● Antelope Coalition meeting (YouTube)

● Dune v1.1.0 Release Notes

● Pomelo Grants Season 4 analysis

● EOS officially activates IBC

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