Latest PIVX Labs

The Superblock Report

Episode 13

Introduction

Howdy once again, all! Welcome to Episode 13 of The Superblock Report.

A medical complication, alongside 5+ pointy-things 💉 have been given to our writer & marketer Mirela — for the time being, I (JSKitty) will be writing this report, alongside PIVi generously handling our GitHub reporting.

Although written in my usual informal tone, this is not a joke! I won’t disclose too much publicly without her consent, but it’s enough to keep her bed-ridden for a few weeks, along with hefty medical bills, for this reason, I’ll try to handle everything until May 1st, at which we’ll re-evaluate her condition & get her back in the ropes, heal quick, super-girl! 💜

Onwards in to the Labs Abyss.

General Monthly Recap

How many months can we go without launching a new platform?
The answer is… zero!

Last month, PIVX Labs released PIVX Rewards, an engaging community-building platform, as of today, PIVX Rewards has:

• 366 users (366 active SHIELD addresses!)
• Distributed over 150 PIV in Rewards!
• On-boarded ~100 members to the Labs Discord!
• Two promotional events: a week-long X tutorial series, and a Nintendo Giveaway!

This month? We’re releasing Labs Oracle — the open-source, dedicated Price Aggregation website and API for the PIVX community.

This came from the realization of an over-dependency on public aggregators like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, of whom have caused PIVX Labs in particular plenty of grief, ranging from:

• Blocking our access to their APIs randomly (the reason MyPIVXWallet intermittently forgets or is unable to load prices).
• Causing PIVCards and PIVX Rewards to track the price of PIVX incorrectly, which can incur losses to either Labs (under-requesting payments) or users (over-requesting payments).

Labs Oracle is designed to aggregate such data from various exchanges, aggregators, and perform it’s own in-house outlier filtering and averaging algorithms, providing the most stable, scalable PIVX Price API, entirely free to the community.

Given it’s open-source, MIT-licensed nature, the community is free to host their own versions of the Oracle, fork it, or contribute to the platform.

For more info, as well as a pre-release look (we’re not quite finished, insert “floor is wet” signs), get scrolling!

MyPIVXWallet v1.5.1

v1.5.1 has been one of our most sizeable patches in a while, with over a dozen fixes and improvements, applying feedback from the community as well as various GitHub Issues, we’ve ironed out a bunch of the common reported issues stemming from the v1.5.0 SHIELD release, while including a handful of new features too, huzzah!

The home page also had a small improvement: PIVCards hits the face of MyPIVXWallet.org, encouraging users to begin spending their PIV as it were intended: Private Internet Cash.

Time to let PIVi take it away…

[Panleone] — Network Refactor

This PR massively declutters the Network class and its relationship with Wallet. The point of this revamp is to make sure the Network sticks to tasks and returns values, without noodling around with the wallet’s or the blockchain’s conditions.

[Duddino] — Fixing Change Password

This PR patches up the change password function. It used to re-encrypt using the old WIF, but not anymore.

[Duddino] — Remove Legacy Encrypt Modal and Functions

This PR banishes the encrypt modal from index.template.html, cutting down on the duplicate code. Thanks to BreadJS for spotting this.

[Panleone] — Unify Shield and Transparent Sync

This PR simplifies the process for handling new blocks post initial sync. The old two-step method was time-consuming and resulted in a lot of unnecessary network requests. Now, shield and transparent sync is bundled together, making things much smoother.

Incoming (not-yet-merged) PRs:

[Duddino] — Rewrite Stake Tab in Vue

This PR overhauls the stake tab, giving it a Vue.js facelift. All the stake functionality stays the same, just a lot prettier.

[Duddino] — Resync from Scratch if Sapling Root Differs

If the sapling root doesn’t match what the explorer’s advertising, this PR makes the wallet resync from scratch. This issue can stem from a glitch in the sync process, an RPC node skipping over some shield blocks, or a forked explorer. But this PR keeps the wallet on the straight and narrow.

[Panleone] — Ditch Control Variables

This PR wants to scrap all control variables in the code. Instead, it introduces a wrapper class LockableFunction to mimic C++ RAII. Gives the code a good deep clean.

[Panleone] — Debug Logs Improvement

Logging is key, and this PR overhauls debug logging to make it more versatile. It introduces a debugLog function, as well as DebugTopics, giving context to the logs so we know which part of the application’s chatting.

[Panleone] — Quicken Shield Sync

This PR ditches fetching coinbase and coinstake transactions during the shield sync (since they’ll never contain shield data). This easy fix gave Panleone’s wallet a 40% speed boost. Talk about efficiency.

PIVCards

PIVCards has had a multitude of quiet updates in the background, further improving the scalability, sustainability and stability (three S’es!), meanwhile giving PIVCards some visual-audio love too, here’s a little that’s been done this month:

This month, PIVCards was mostly maintained by JSKitty (me!), changelog:

1. Added a full product range for Germany + enhanced German search results on-site.
2. Unify the Footer with the rest of the PIVX Labs Platforms.
3. Added a fee-split system, using fees to help fund Labs projects internally.
4. Removed the ‘Rockdev’ explorer for the ‘Duddino’ explorer.
5. Added CAD Mastercard support.
6. Optimised PIVX Tx fees.
7. Added Order Status to the user’s Browser Tab title, i.e: “Pending”, “Dispatching”, “Complete”.
8. Added a new default delivery notification sound.
9. Added additional Admin Dashboard controls.
10. Tweaked the fee distribution for improved sustainability and cross-platform funding.

Oh, did I mention that since launch, PIVCards has now processed 761 orders, equivalent to $85,500 USD in volume? An average of roughly $100 per-order, big spenders!

PIVX Rewards

PIVX Rewards has been a set-it-and-forget-it platform, completely self-sustaining, using the Labs fee programme enabled by PIVCards and the DAO — it’s kept itself running smooth-sailing with a net increase in pool funds, despite gaining ~2x the expected user growth, that’s a success!

The platform has had some general UX improvements, such as an easier Discord Linking flow, expanded FAQs and Footer, and a redirect for non-HTTPS connections — not the most exciting changes, however, we do have one surprise up the PIVX Rewards belt…

Labs Quality Control moves to PIVX Rewards!

As explained in the Labs Quality Control team — the process has now been moved from a half-archaic manual distribution process, to being completely unified and integrated with PIVX Rewards.

Three of the benefits are listed above, however, there’s a fourth benefit to this: all Labs “Community Funds” are now in a singular pool, namely the PIVX Rewards pool — as part of a larger effort to collateralize one major “moving force” for the community.

This massively simplifies the funding required by Labs, rather than creating a proposal for each of our ever-growing community efforts (such as Engagement events as seen in Discord/X/TikTok/YouTube), Labs now uses a single, multi-use pool for all “Community Level” usecases.

A “Community Level” usecase is essentially anything outside of the single-person scope, which is by nature, scalable to many:

• Does a contribution to Labs entail a single person (a developer)? They get a dedicated proposal (LRP/LMP).
• Does an event in Labs entail multiple people: such as the Faucet, Quality Control, Giveaways, Engagement-building Games? That will be funded by the PIVX Rewards pool.

At a high level, this sets Labs a new goal, for everyone’s best interests:

• Increase the transparency of the “PIVX Rewards pool” (more news on this soon!).
• Increase the spending power of the “PIVX Rewards pool”, firstly through Labs-generated fees, secondly through “Community Booster” proposals, thirdly through donations.

I’ll end the dialog of the Community Buidl™️ plan there.

Oh, also, we paid 1000 sats for a banner on “LightningNetworkStores”, cheapest ad ever? Probably.

Labs Oracle

The Oracle is our April project: built by Luke and JSKitty, the Oracle is intended to become the PIVX Ecosystem’s central data source, contrary to “de-central”, until all trading is done on DEX’es, the Oracle is a necessary middle-ground to ensure our services and community have consistent, stable, accurate access to PIVX’s price.

A work-in-progress production deployment of the platform is available here, with API Documentation available here!

For regular users or infrequent traders: this is the perfect “Bookmark Page”, a simple PIVX-first price website that displays the price of PIVX in your preferred currency — no tracking, no ads, no over-engineering.

For Developers: If you want the most stable, and completely free PIVX price APIs for your PIVX apps, you found your spot — The API is considered stable, however, new data points and APIs may be added in the future — we’ll see how the dice rolls later in the month based on priorities.

Also, noticed the domain? That in itself has some big news coming for it, stay tuned. 😉

Business Development

Spritz Finance opens voting for a PIVX listing!

For this, super-Jeff needs your help: go Vote for PIVX on the Spritz page and tell ’em what’s up, as for what Spritz is? Take a read below:

Spritz is a secure crypto bill pay platform that makes it easy to pay real-world expenses with on-chain assets. Connect your mortgage, credit cards and other bills to your crypto wallet and program payments without needing a bank.

BetAltcoins.com runs a 500 PIVX Giveaway!

Check out their X post and try your hand at winning some PIV, why not?
https://x.com/betaltcoins/status/1779573343689080926

MEXC Listing Inbound!

Despite being delayed by the March budget-mishap, the MEXC listing will be resuming it’s track upon the next budget cycle, watch out!

FlokiNET — an Offshore VPS service, is now accepting PIVX!

FlokiNET provides Secure, Stable and Anonymous Webhosting, Virtual Servers, Colocation, Dedicated Servers, DDoS Protection & more in Iceland Finland Netherlands and Romania.

End note: I realize there’s a handful of announcements, events and work missing from this report, but I must cut some corners on this release with the given circumstances, there was unfortunately no time for any review process from either team — so this report is really “JSKitty: Raw Edition”.

Onwards to an even better month, Labsians and PIVians alike! 🍻

The Superblock Report

Episode 12

Introduction

Hello there everyone! Welcome to Episode 12 of The Superblock Report! I hope that all of you are fine and dandy, and that you had a lovely month!

Put on your seatbelts folks, we are taking off! 🚀

General Monthly Recap

Happy MyPIVXWallet update everyone! Our lovely wallet has reached the lovely version of 1.5.0! It has been released with brand new, sparkly features, such as the long-awaited SHIELD protocol, as well as Exchange Addresses and various other fixes and parts around the app! More details are available below. ❤

Be sure not to blink though, as you might miss the upcoming v1.5.1 patch release, which is scheduled to be released in March, containing fixes to various minor UX bugs coming alongside SHIELD!

I am also happy to announce that we have had a very successful migration and update of the PIVX Core wallet to version 5.6.1, and that we assisted with all of the exchanges and services with the upgrade!

PIVX.Poker and PIVCards have gone through many improvements as well, thanks to our lovely developer Luke!

Business development efforts led to increased liquidity on Binance, progress with MEXC listing, and potential ventures into the Futures market, showcasing ongoing growth and expansion within the PIVX ecosystem!

I am very excited and proud to announce our new platform for our lovely Labsians — “PIVX Rewards”! It is the very first SHIELD-only platform — encompassed by a task-based reward system as well as an official mainnet faucet!

We have also introduced an activity in our Discord that closely resembles and resonates with “PIVX Rewards”, regarding its benefits and use case. It is the daily QOTD (Question Of The Day) contest! It’s aim is to increase and reward community activity as well as enable non PIVX users to get a grasp of PIVX for free!

Every day, at the same time, all of our Labsians are asked a question that they need to answer. The member with the most unique and interesting answer will receive 5PIV — they will receive a code that they can redeem in their MyPIVXWallet.

PIVX Rewards

We have made and released a whole new platform for our lovely Labsians — “PIVX Rewards”!

It is the very first SHIELD-only platform — encompassed by a task-based reward system as well as an official mainnet faucet!

With 124 users and counting since launch (Congratulations to our first 100 users — claiming their Early Adopters bonus!), let’s dive in to the details of the platform:

Community Benefits:

Starting off with the community benefits, the platform exists for a whole dozen of reasons, with many benefits going towards both the Community and Network of PIVX, namely:

• Onboarding: non-PIVians can dip their toes in to PIVX for free, needing only a SHIELD address to get started.
• Retention: rewarding existing PIVians for their engagement and social contribution in the community.
• Education: the platform is deliberately built to educate it’s users about PIVX and it’s uses, SHIELD being a prime example.

Technical Benefits:

When it comes to the technical side, we have even more benefits:

• Official Wallet adoption: PIVX Rewards as a platform cannot be used with any non-Shield deposit address, as a wonderful consequence: Every single user of the platform is guaranteed to be using either MyPIVXWallet or PIVX Core — and that, is true onboarding.
• Network-wide SHIELD Anonymity Improvement: PIVX Rewards produces a LOT of SHIELD transactions, dozens and soon hundreds a day, this increases the Anon Set, since the more transactions there are — the less likely anyone can be linked to a particular event, especially in SHIELD-to-SHIELD Txs.

Funding:

When it comes to funding: the platform has a completely transparent funding system (available here) and is currently funded primarily by PIVCards Fees and Community Donations, these alone will suffice for plenty of time.

As the platform grows and numbers are adjusted, we’re likely to introduce a third, scalable funding system: Non-Invasive Advertising, a completely in-house ads system where users can pay with PIV to install Labs-reviewed ads on the PIVX Rewards website, this will be entirely privacy-focused, without any invasive mechanics.

Essentially, PIVX Rewards is the hub for both New and Old PIVians to earn PIV for simply using and supporting PIVX.

Among the countless things that we will do with this platform, we shall list a few:

1. In-app PIVX quizzes that reward PIV
2. Start a PIVCards Cashback system that rewards PIV to your account
3. We can will Perks to those who join the Discord or support us on Twitter

And most importantly, we will run item giveaways, we’ll use our referral program to create an onboarding snowball (avalanche!) effect — this is what PIVX Rewards is all about!

MyPIVXWallet v1.5.0

Happy update MPW! Now, let’s see what our lovely team did for you this month! ❤

P.S: Brace yourselves, there is a lot! I’m so proud of everyone! Working so diligently and making our cute wallet even cuter! Thank you so much for your hard work, we all love and appreciate you! ❤

Duddino

Complete SHIELD data in Transaction Class

This PR is part of a wallet transaction refactor which allows satoshi-level accuracy for fee calculations, effectively dropping the fees spent in SHIELD transactions by using the minimum permissible fee by the network.

Add Exchange Address support

This PR implements the concept from PIVX Core called ‘Exchange Addresses’, a new address type which is only able to receive Transparent (Public) PIV and denies SHIELD inputs, MPW is capable of sending public transactions to this address — this address type was added to better comply with regulations put upon Centralised Exchanges (p.s: Use DEXes!).

Fix Masternode Collateral detection

This PR patches a bug which selected the wrong UTXOs during MN collateral locking, making it difficult to start a masternode properly.

Cache Transaction IDs

This PR largely increases performance for very large wallets — by caching TXIDs, there’s much less time spent serialising TXIDs during and after wallet synchronisation (i.e: Before the Activity History displayed, which displays those TXIDs).

Fix Negative SHIELD Values

This PR fixes MPW’s SHIELD deserialiser, which deseralised SHIELD valueBalances as uints rather than signed ints, causing them to be read negatively and thus break the user's computed SHIELD balance.

Prompt unlocks instead of alerting on Locked TXs

This PR fixes a regression where MPW started alerting (via error notification) users to unlock their wallet, if they tried sending a transaction while it was locked, this has been resolved and MPW now uses it’s original functionality: Prompting an unlock in-action for a much smoother User Experience.

Add commit hash to dev builds

This PR appends the Commit Hash to each developer build — this improves Quality Control, since the team can now identify the exact codebase state that a bug was found in, and this also prevents confusion between Quality Control members on which version of a PR is the latest.

JSKitty

(Before our Kitty’s wonderful work, I would like to publicly wish him a late Happy Birthday! You are our wonderful developer, and innovator! May all of your days be easy and filled with prosperity and happiness! ❤)

Remove Rockdev explorer

This PR simply removes the Rockdev explorer from the Blockbook backends of MPW, since the explorer is currently out of operation, it’ll be added back if proper functionality is restored in the future.

Fix PIVX Promos spacing

This PR fixes a tiny regression in which a space was lost in the PIVX Promos modal subtext, making it difficult to read.

Add Pending SHIELD Balance UI

This PR adds a Pending SHIELD Balance UI to the Dashboard, previously, users couldn’t easily see their Pending SHIELD balance, and it left them rather confused when their SHIELD coins would momentarily disappear between confirmations, this balance is now displayed accordingly in real-time to prevent confusion.

Fix Progress Bar

This PR simply fixes MPW’s Progress Bar, used mostly in the SHIELD transaction process, smoothly updating the progress, as well as fixing Screen Reader (accessibility) ability to read it.

Alessandro Rezzi

Refactor Tx Version

This PR fixes a handful of Tx issues and hardcoded version numbers, giving properly documented versioning and improving Shield stability with Sapling Tx version checks.

Fix Receive Flow

This PR fixes the Receive menu, which allowed wallets that did not support SHIELD to attempt to generate SHIELD addresses, leading to UI errors and confusion — the SHIELD UI is properly hidden for unsupported key types now.

Improve Tx Creation Flow

This PR fixes a large amount of issues with MPW’s Tx creation process, most importantly for users: MPW now uses accurate fee calculations to the satoshi-level, meaning MPW saves you on fees for ALL transaction types, by using the minimum permitted by the network.

Handle SHIELD Tx creation errors

This PR improves how MPW handles SHIELD Tx creation issues, like insufficient funds to cover Deshielding fees, and fixes MPW getting in to a ‘stuck’ frozen state upon those issues.

Add an option to automatically lock wallet after transactions

This PR adds a community-requested feature: automatic wallet locking! This improves the user’s security by locking the wallet immediately after transactions are complete, essentially, this allows you to use MPW with only a couple milliseconds window of the Private Keys being in memory, and ensures even physical access to your device shortly after Transactions is safe.

By default, this option is disabled for convenience, but users wishing to tighten their security may enable this in their Wallet settings in one click.

PIVCards

Luke

Luke was being very productive, as always, and went through a lot of testing and reverse engineering in order to stabilize orders that did not fit the norm!

He also created a new system that allows us to handle individual cards, so that we can set up VISA gift cards (and similar items) to work!

PIVX.Poker

Our lovely Luke sure had his hands in everything! As with PIVCards, he was also busy improving PIVX.Poker!

He has found and fixed numerous small simple issues that have been plaguing the PIVX.Poker system for a while now!

He has continued his quest of expanding the documentation of PIVX.Poker as well! Man, is he not an amazing worker? ❤

Business Development

I am happy to announce that PIVX’es Binance liquidity has increased for our market maker, Armada, which they can now utilize to strengthen our markets!

Wait, there is more! MEXC is now in motion as well, and contracts have been signed! All we have to do now is wait and see if our proposal is successful — if everything goes well, we can pay and expect a listing soon!

And to top everything off with a bang, various NDAs are currently in place for the potential Futures market!

The Superblock Report — After Dark

Congratulations for reading the entirety of our Superblock Report! It means the world to us — we love and appreciate every second of your attention! ❤

Now, let’s get to the juicy info that I have stolen from the Labs HQ! :3

In their most secretive drawer , I have found one very interesting file…”MARCH X GIVEAWAY”.

I tried to read the file, and decipher the interesting handwriting within it, but it was futile. I could only manage to read a few words and one number. :(

I shall list them now:
Nintendo (what does Super Mario have to do with MPW??), EU (Sorry everyone else!) and the number 16.

Until we meet again,
Hugs and kisses for my Labsians, your favorite traitor— Mirela ❤

The Superblock Report

Episode 11

Introduction

Hello there everyone! Welcome to Episode 11 of The Superblock Report! I hope that all of you are fine and dandy, and that you had a lovely month!

General Monthly Recap

I’m happy to announce that we’ve had lots of activity this month!

From refining our services to forming new connections — and even brainstorming for new projects — our team has been really active and hard working!

Our developer team has been working hard behind the scenes to make sure everything runs smoothly and reliably.

Plus, we’ve had some exciting results in making important connections and broadening our reach. You might have noticed that we’ve been showing up on some new exchanges and campaigns to get more people interested in what we’re doing.

And of course, we’ve been having some fun events and giveaways to celebrate our achievements with all of you!

MyPIVXWallet v1.4.0

Recent updates to MyPIVXWallet have brought significant improvements, including Cold Staking Unstake support for Ledger users, enhanced developer environment setup, and the introduction of Shield support for increased privacy and security!

These updates represent strides forward in usability, functionality, and security for MPW users!

Duddino

Add ability to undelegate (Unstake) on Ledger

Users of MyPIVXWallet with a Ledger can now release and spend Cold Staking funds from their Hardware Wallet — this is a step to better Ledger integration, however, technical challenges from Ledger’s side still make the wallet unsuitable for no-fuss, convenient Hardware Cold Staking!

Kyeno

Allow all host headers in dev environments

This PR allows MPW to be ran easier in developer environments with tighter configurations.

Duddino & Alessandro Rezzi

Shield Support

The biggest and baddest of them all: Shield support is now officially live on the Master branch of MPW — all pre-release versions of MPW now contain full and finalised Shield functionality. 🎉 🛡️

For users curious to try out Shield; it is now available at this URL: https://deploy-preview-244--cheery-moxie-4f1121.netlify.app/

In the coming weeks, the design of Shield is being reviewed, polished and re-tested by the Labs Community, once this process finishes (making the UX of Shield better than current), then Shield will release to the public, stable release of MyPIVXWallet.org.

PIVCards

This release comes as one of our most substantial service improvements since release — PIVCards are now dispatched within less than 2–3 minutes!

Now, you can confidently spend PIV at your favorite stores, right at the checkout, in a matter of minutes — no more waiting time!

PIVX Core Wallet

Liquid369

Exchange Address

Allows exchanges to have transparent only deposit addresses for various forms of their needed compliance.

Rusty-Blox PIV Explorer

Liquid369 has been working hard and has rendered the API near completion for Rusty-Blox! The next step is acquiring a larger server to finalize the testing and moving to frontend work!

PIVX.Poker

PIVX.Poker Tournament System has been developed and deployed by our wonderful developer Luke.

A lot of work was done regarding documentation and bug fixes, and additionally — a NodeChecker application was created, leveraging source code from a previous project made by JSKitty, to enhance the stability of PIVX daemons, particularly important for PIVX.Poker.

Business Development

Jeffrey, our brilliant business man, was working hard as always this month — producing wonderful results!

This month, we have a lot of news regarding Gate.io! To start off with a bang — PIVX/USDT got listed on Gate.io!

And, that is not all! PIVX got it’s first ever fiat pair — PIVX/TRY (Turkish Lira) is also now on Gate.io!

Gate.io Startup Free Offering: PIVX (PIVX)and Announcement of Free Distribution Rules( 138,122 PIVX free of charge)

HummingBot has launched an 8-week liquidity mining campaign for PIVX ($PIVX/USDT) on Gate.io! With a $4000 reward pool, participants are incentivized to engage in market making activities using the HummingBot trading bot.

The campaign aims to enhance liquidity and trading efficiency on Gate.io’s platform while providing users with the opportunity to earn rewards for their contributions to market making efforts.

PIVX Gate.io Startup purchase statistics are here! If you wish to take a look, they can be found below!

Gate.io Startup:PIVX (PIVX) Sale Result & Listing Schedule

The festive spirit has not disappeared yet! Coinbase & PIVX have celebrated The Year of the Dragon with an 888 USDT AngBao giveaway! 🐉

HotsCoin has also listed the PIVX/USDT pair! More details can be found in the announcement down below!

HotsCoin Announcement on the Upcoming Listing of PIVX(Pivx)

Atani Exchange has also listed the PIVX/USDT pair! More details can be found in the announcement down below!

The Superblock Report — After Dark

Congratulations for making your way down to the end of the report! Now, you have entered the After Dark section, where we lay hints and reveal tiny sneak peaks of future development plans. (⌐▀͡ ̯ʖ▀)

If you noticed my hint in the General Monthly Recap section, I congratulate you! There is something coming soon, and you will certainly like it!͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡ — ✧

There is a micro- project of PIVX Labs that is currently being brainstormed and prototyped…( ͡° ͜ʖ├┬┴┬┴

What could it be? I will tell you one thing only — it revolves around Onboarding and Retention. Stay tuned to find out more… ( ˶˘ ³˘(˵ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°˵)♡

Evil laugh -===≡≡≡ ᕕ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )ᕗ