Scala+Stellar Weekly Update June 21, 2020

🤔 Thinking about

The open beta release of Vibrant is a great move that fills a market gap, bringing practical applications to users in need. It feels really important. Stellar is tremendous infrastructure at a price that is highly compelling, but infrastructure is not product. For Stellar to really build up significant network effects it needs to balance the brilliance of the infrastructure with consumer products that serve our target customers. Vibrant looks great and is an important step in the right direction. Kudos to the SDF team behind this. Let's Goooooo! 🚀

I've also been thinking about fees and what happens to them when the network reaches 100% utilisation. And what that might mean for business models that currently pay fees on behalf of users.

Finally, I'm super stoked for the scheduled Turing Complete Contract proposal video. It's not until next month, but I find I keep checking to make sure I haven't missed it.

🔙 Last Week

Current SDK

Publishing v1 transactions. The existing SDF was already able to parse v1 transactions, now it publishes in v1 by default (v0.13.0)
Fee bumps. This hot new feature is exposed in the SDF via a bumpFee method on Transaction.
TestNetwork testing. A few months ago the Horizon+Core docker quickstart image started taking 5 minutes to start up. This really impacted the test cycle for integration tests. I finally had enough and started migrating to TestNetwork based testing. To this end, I built a mechanism to efficiently fund a pool of accounts at the start of the integration test and merge them back into friendbot at the end. This means I can integration test quickly and often, without having an impact on FriendBot funds.

  // Test setup
  private val testAccounts = new TestAccounts(quantity = 20)
  def beforeAll() = testAccounts.open()
  def afterAll() = testAccounts.close()

  // Then, in the test:
  val List(senderKey, recipientKey) = testAccounts.take(2)

SDK Rebuild

The SDK rebuild has friendbot support! The SDK will check the Horizon root document to determine if FriendBot is supported and what its URL is. If present, it will use that to create and fund the account.

// Funding an account on testnet
val horizon = Horizon.sync(Horizon.Endpoints.Test)
val seed = Seed.random
val response = horizon.friendbot.create(seed.accountId)