Hello from a distributed workplace (potentially) near you — beyond our HQ, just south of San Francisco, the growing Agoric team is now spread across two dozen home offices. We’re coming off last month’s fantastic Blue Lava conference, which helped devs chart a career course from web2 to web3. Check out the video playlist recap down below. But first …

Community Call: Join us on Wednesday, March 2nd, at 9am PT (17:00 UTC) on Twitter Spaces for our March Community Call! 📣  If you’re one of the 48,000 purchasers of Agoric’s BLD token, you’ll want to tune in for an overview of next steps as we make our way toward Mainnet 1. On the call we’ll also run through our community roadmap, go over Agoric security purple-teaming efforts (and audits), and have news from the board of directors of the DCF (the Decentralized Cooperation Foundation), among other topics.

  • 40M BLD Validator Delegation:

     

    Agoric has delegated 40 million BLD, bringing the total amount of staked BLD to 65 million. Questionnaire submissions from validator applicants were judged on security competency and proposed contributions to the Agoric Network in both infrastructure and community growth. Most validators will have received delegation by February 25. View the active validators on the Nodes Guru explorer. 

  • Join Us at the Prague Hackathon:

     

    On May 16 and 17, we’ll be part of a DeFi hackathon in Prague, Czech Republic. We invite all our community members to join us in Prague to build on Agoric. Look for news at gateway.events.

  • Agoric Bounty:

     

    Our latest bounty is to build and demonstrate a user-friendly pathway to bridge Agoric RUN to Terra over IBC and collateralize a RUN-UST pool on the Terra AMM (Terraswap) in a local or testnet environment. Join in.

  • Blue Lava Recaps:

      At the start of February, several Agoric team members participated in the first ever Blue Lava conference, a four-day event for web2 JavaScript devs looking to get into web3. There are nearly 20 videos in the YouTube playlist, featuring folks like Zooko Wilcox (ZCash), Monika Kochhar (SmartGift), Connor O’Day (Gitcoin), Miko Matsumura (Gumi Ventures), and Patrick Collins (Chainlink), as well as our own Dean Tribble, Kris Kowal, Mark Miller, Vanessa Petritto, and Rowland Graus. It’s a powerful collection of master classes on such topics as hardened JavaScript, web3 cloud storage, crypto venture capital, blockchain APIs, and more.

Agoric in the News

The Agora of Cosmos: An excellent Agoric primer from the RainAndCoffee Substack (“Agoric in this case is uniquely positioned to acquire the largest pool of developers in the world — JavaScript developers — and thus stimulate expansive growth”).

DeFi Decoded Podcast: “How Agoric plans to onboard millions of new developers into DeFi,” with guest Dean Tribble.

Zero Knowledge Podcast: “We hear about the two big challenges in using JavaScript in blockchain development, malleability and non-deterministic, and how Agoric addresses these,” with guest Dean.

From DeFi Year to Decade: Is Mass Adoption Here?: Dean is quoted in this look ahead on topics including DeFi’s visibility outside the crypto market, hybrid staking models, and potential DeFi-specific regulatory action.

Engineering Updates

  • Implemented support for Virtual Collections, which will make the platform much more scalable.  Next is to utilize Virtual Objects and Collections in AMM, Vaults, getRUN, ERTP, and Zoe.  We have also changed how we form composite keys so that they will be usable as keys for Virtual Collections.

  • Made Vaults transferable with ERTP.  That means they can participate in contracts as first-class digital assets.

  • Separated production Vat bootstrap from testing and demo mechanisms.

  • Clawback vesting accounts were released into our mainnet and used to set up thousands of accounts.  We are now contributing the code upstream to Cosmos.

  • Dynamic IBC (dIBC) reached another milestone of initiating an outbound IBC channel from within an autonomous Agoric VM contract.  It is available via the Agoric Network API.

  • Devnet is our prototype for the transition from mainnet-0 to mainnet-1.  Governance (validators can make executable proposals of JavaScript to run on-chain, vote on the proposals, and have them automatically executed if approved) is now testable in our devnet.

  • We have scheduled our “purple team” security exercise for the RUN Protocol for early March.

  • Audit of the Agoric Kernel (“Swingset”) scheduled for April.

Upcoming Events

These are upcoming events we’re hosting or participating in:

We’re Hiring!

Come help us bring hardened JavaScript smart contracts and plug-n-play components to DeFi.

  • Developer Relations

  • Senior Software Engineer

  • Senior Technical Writer

What We’re Reading

And watching, and listening to … 

Forrest Landry on Immanent Metaphysics

Kenny Rowe: This is worth listening to because the concepts that are discussed are deep and can inform many domains. It is a helpful mental gadget. Says Landry, “The value of the metaphysics isn’t so much in terms of whether or not it produces testable experiments, but whether or not it produces concepts that clarify how to think up testable experiments.” 

https://www.jimruttshow.com/forrest-landry-2-1/

Chuck Klosterman’s But What If We’re Wrong?

Santiago Semino: Klosterman opens the book by recounting a fun test he gives friends at a bar: name a historical figure from each century, going as far back as you can. Once you pass the 1700s things get … difficult. The book highlights how bad we are at not only recounting history, but how much worse we are at predicting the future: except in unique cases, everything we think will happen is probably wrong, and there’s a beauty to — and emphasis for Klosterman on — how important the present is.

https://chuckklostermanauthor.com

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