Companies in the Technology sector have received a lot of coverage today as analysts weigh in on L3Harris Technologies (LHX – Research Report), Trade Desk (TTD – Research Report) and Lumen Technologies (LUMN – Research Report). L3Harris Technologies ...

Analysts Offer Insights on Technology Companies: L3Harris Technologies (LHX), Trade Desk (TTD) and Lumen Technologies (LUMN)

After losing an early 14-point lead and falling behind late, the Seattle Seahawks found a way to finish off a big home win over the Cleveland Browns to move into first place in the NFC West. Reporter Corbin Smith dishes out his top five grades and other notable performances from a fun Week 8 contest at Lumen Field.

Seahawks Report Card: Top Performers From 24-20 Win vs. Browns

The Comets won the regional championship with a final score of 60. The Comets defeated both Jackson Lumen Christi (76 points) and Hanover-Horton (84 points) to earn the regional title. It was their first title as a program since 2002. Their regional ...

Jonesville boys cross country wins regional title, the program's first since 2002

The stock    was off 24.3% in Wednesday morning trading and on track to record its largest one-day percentage decline on record. Lumen shares, which recently changed hands at $1.11, were on pace for their lowest close since Oct.

Lumen’s stock erodes further, sinking toward worst day in its history

Nearly all of our most-read articles on TCTMD this month stemmed from TCT 2023, with two notable outliers.

TCTMD’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories for October 2023

By Will Feuer Shares of Lumen Technologies lost about a quarter of their value after the Quantum Fiber and CenturyLink parent reported a third-quarter

Lumen Shares Drop 25% After 3Q Loss, Creditor Deal

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Lumen Technologies Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode.

Lumen Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

" BlackStar Group is thrilled to hear about the Network as a Service offering from Lumen," said founder and CEO, Chris Hendrie. " NaaS has the potential to empower BSG to better serve our live event clients with expanded options and flexibility for the expected speed, low latency bandwidth, and quality service for which we're known."

Lumen builds on its network cloudification vision to offer burstable on-demand internet

The Seattle Seahawks scraped past the Cleveland Browns, with head coach Pete Carroll happy with how Geno Smith overcame adversity.

Seattle Seahawks QB Geno Smith Playing 'Winning Football,' Says Pete Carroll

Get the most recent info and news about Lumen on HackerNoon, where 10k+ technologists publish stories for 4M+ monthly readers.

Lumen is the world’s first hand-held, portable device to measure and track your metabolism. See if your body is using fats or carbs for fuel in a single breath.

Lumen

At we collect constructive feedback, boiled down to single arguments, recognize duplicates and merge them into movements. stomt In this blog post, we show a way to split up large Laravel applications into smaller micro-services, in our case Laravel & Lumen applications, and the advantages and pitfalls it brings with it. As a result, we sped up our applications by more than 30% and achieved greater maintainability, too. These principles can, of course, be easily applied to other frameworks. Why do we want to share components between Laravel and Lumen instances? Our backend was a huge Laravel application. We had a server-side rendered administration interface, a for our clients, an OAuth 2.0 server, as well as our own URL-Shortener (stomt.co). In addition, we had a queue backend used for image resizing and other intensive tasks that shouldn’t bother our clients. I don’t want to say that Laravel is slow but we were searching for even better performance and when Lumen came around the corner, we decided to split our backend into multiple micro-services. That would make it easier to scale it across several Amazon Web Services and would also allow to give certain features better and more individual maintainability. REST API A lot of functions are needed in our REST API as well as in our administration panel. But while the REST API results sometimes were not enough and special behavior is needed from time to time we couldn’t rely 100% on just making API calls from one service to another. At this point we needed to be able to call commands/jobs from Laravel (used by our administration panel) as well as Lumen (our REST API). While we still have a “monolithic” codebase, we have multiple completely independent backend applications. You might want to call them “micro-services” (because it’s so trendy). Requirements when splitting up the application How to make sure that components, especially commands, configs and service providers can be used across different services when each service has its own namespace? Start using components (we will get into this later) and (thereby each component should have its own Event Subscriber class) Make use of Event Subscriber classes register them Make sure that you have all business logic in or something similiar. It is important to encapsulate all business logic in your components. Your commands have no access to data from outside. You do this in your HTTP layer and pass the data. commands (now called “Jobs”) (in Controllers) Use namespaces according to your folder-structure everywhere. (PSR-4 recommended) Make sure that things have mostly a single responsibility. The more you do that the more flexibility you have with your shared components. Splitting up the application Software evolves over time. You won’t start your startup developing a for your backend. You start with a prototype and you let your architecture evolve or do a rewrite. And then you should continuously have in mind to keep your technical debt low. Right from the beginning we at least decided to build our backend component based. A modular structure with a low level approach of principles. Domain Driven Design SOLID Let’s take a look how a component looks like: stomt component While Routes and Controllers are staying in the HTTP-layer, components include all the business logic which is separated in (in the meantime called “Jobs” in Laravels language), resulting and their handlers as well as entities/models/repositories. Component folders can also have sub-components. Components can also communicate with each other. commands events Example: Posts on our web platform are called “stomts”. Let’s say stomts can have comments. You would create a sub-component called “Comment” and place it into the Stomt-component folder. The comment-folder would have the same structure of sub-folders. How to structure the new backend Basic idea: The folder contains multiple Laravel/Lumen instances. apps Anything related to deployments: ElasticBeanstalk files, configs, migrations and seeds, environment-files and scripts are based in the root directory of the backend. The shared folder contains our shared components and service providers. We will dig into this soon. for example automatically creates a new git flow release including semantic versioning and regeneration our API documentation via . Release.sh aglio calls dependency updating composer commands in all services/apps. Update.sh Now let’s dive one step deeper. Take a close look at the -application folder. We are always referencing to the root -file while using symlinks to reference the and folders within the root-folder. This way configs can be easily maintained across all services as each config file allows multiple configurations. This may be Laravel specific. You can also see what we store in our shared folder: Components, Providers and Services. We will explore how to make service providers shareable later on. Let us first take a look on how to make the -folder accessible by the proper use of and . api .env configs database shared namespaces Composer Autoload multiple namespaces for shared components Now, what do we do about namespaces? Composer makes it pretty easy to define PSR-4 namespaces. While each of our application has its own Namespace (e.g. for our REST API) and Configfiles don’t need them, our Components folder has an own Namespace called StomtApi Stomt. We make those files accessible by using composers autoload configuration: Pretty easy, hm? Right now we are always deploying the full monolithic codebase while having the advantage of slim and more maintainable applications. More performance by being able to use Lumen for our and the full fledged Laravel framework when needed. REST API How to share ServiceProviders across Lumen and Laravel applications There is a small pitfall if you want to make ServiceProviders accessible between Laravel and Lumen applications. They both extend a different . EventServiceProvider Lumen extends from: While Laravel extends from: Laravel\Lumen\Providers\EventServiceProvider Illuminate\Foundation\Support\Providers\EventServiceProvider But if you take a look inside, both are doing exactly the same thing. Laravel is using the Event facade while Lumen is using to obtain an Event-instance because in Lumen, Facades are disabled by default. To ensure that the ServiceProvider system still works, Lumen makes use of . As the Lumen way would also work in Laravel, the solution is obvious. We’ll copy Lumens EventServiceProvider into the shared -folder and rename the file into “ServiceProvider”. Then we let all Service Providers extend our new . (You can’t call it “EventServiceProvider” as you normally use the to register in your applications) app(‘events’) app(‘events’) Providers ServiceProvider EventServiceProvider Event Subscribers In general: If sharing service providers makes sense totally depends on your applications. For us it does and therefore we wanted to share how this can be done. Future steps The long-term goal is to get components more and more framework agnostic. Regarding the Laravel specific Facades discussion: We don’t use them anymore. Which parts of our application will we transform into own services next? Auth and Search. Please feel free to make suggestions and ask questions here or on ! HN Originally published at stomt Blog .

Shared Components Across Multiple Laravel/Lumen Micro-Services

How blockchains organizations are finding a business model with Initial Coin Offerings Stellar co-founder is a genius , one of Stellar’s co-founders, is most likely the only person who has built two crypto-currency companies at scale. Jed Co-founded eDonkey2000 in 2001, a p2p file sharing company. In 2010 he got excited by Bitcoin and the possibilities of decentralized currency and realized that it needed a marketplace to trade and so he created Mt GOX. Within three years it was handling more than 70% of the World’s Bitcoin transactions. After Jed sold Mt GOX, the exchange was re-coded by its owners and unfortunately hacked. After Mt GOX Jed founded what became Ripple. He brought on , , and to create this new network. Jed left after disagreements with . Jed McCaleb David Schwartz Arthur Britto Chris Larsen Chris Larsen For a year, he was somewhat missing in action but made a swift return with his new brainchild: Stellar. Stellar uses the same open sourced code base from Ripple, but this time Jed was able to strike the deal with Stripe. He understood how a non-profit organization could serve the development of a cryptocurrency and a commercial ecosystem. was born in 2014. Stripe invested $3 Million, which was repaid with 2 Billion Stellar coins called Lumens (XLM). The Stellar team attracted prestigious advisors like , (Stripe), (President at Y combinator) and (Founder of WordPress). Stellar is now poised to redesign how people interact with payment systems and banks. Stellar Patrick Collison Sam Altman Matt Mullenweg Ethereum found a business model We take a step back to 2014, where I met with co-founders and at the Battery Club in San Francisco. Ehereum Vitalik Buterin Gavin Wood I remember how complicated the value proposition was back then. I understood it was based on the same as Bitcoin, but that this time the goal was to enable the recording of information in the through the creation of smart contracts. Several remote distant parties could agree and trust each other thanks to the reliable and distributed ledger. To record information in the blockchain, you would need to use Ethereum tokens. Even if I could have imagined the potential of such technology and the number of potential use cases, I admit it was hard to believe how this could scale. technology blockchain The tipping point: Coinbase and ICOs I understood that the Ethereum model was going to pivot in July 2016 when , Coinbase co-founder, announced that Coinbase was going to offer Ethereum along with Bitcoin. Since then Ethereum has started to gain real traction. At the same moment the number of Initial Coin Offerings started to grow. One year after in July 2017, Ethereum value had reached more than 50% of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency market capitalization and 100% of ICOs were happening through its blockchain. Together Ethereum and Coinbase had sparked a revolution. Brian Armstrong Source: icostats.com via Forbes Stellar has all the potential to become the next big ICO platform Overview of Stellar On a high level, Stellar connects banks, payments systems and people around the world. You can think of it as infrastructure for payments — designed from the start to make it easy for financial institutions to issue tokens representing fiat currencies. Stellar also features a built in distributed exchange which allows people to not only buy and sell currencies like in a typical foreign exchange but also to seamlessly convert from one currency to another during cross border or cross currency transactions. It works like a distributed exchange. What makes Stellar an ideal platform? Liquidity There are thousands of tokens being issued right now and each one is going to want to be issued on these 3rd party exchange. But the exchanges don’t have the capacity to list all these coins or they make you wait a long time or they charge a fortune. With Stellar you don’t need to depend on these 3rd party exchanges to list your token because Stellar’s built in distributed exchange allows you to list your token yourself as you issue it — that means you can have day one discoverability and transferability. Token issuers can customize tokens to satisfy securities, consumer protection and AML regulatory requirements. A Stellar token can also be added to a 3rd party exchange. Performance Stellar is significantly cheaper and faster than other protocols, including Ethereum (5 seconds median settlement time on Stellar vs 3.5 min on Ethereum for execution and secure confirmations). It costs 1 cent to make 100,000 transactions on Stellar. Security Stellar’s expressive but purposely limited system for smart contracts limits potential to write exploitable code. Ethereum has a Turing-complete programming language, which means you can write any complicated smart contract; whilst the flexibility is nice, in practice it allows the developers to write exploitable code. Anonymous hackers have stolen millions of dollars by exploiting vulnerabilities. The simplicity of the Stellar model helps avoid these situations. It’s ideal for applications that don’t require the full generality of Turing-complete smart contracts (which applies to the vast majority of ICOs). Ease of Use Launching a token on Stellar is super easy. Simple tokens can be created in a matter of hours and more complex ones take a day or two. Because Stellar supports simple programming, you don’t need to hire expensive solidity smart contract developers. Investors can also participate in Stellar-based ICOs using ETH or BTC just like they’re used to. Mobius, Stellar’s first ICO The first ICO to happen on the Stellar blockchain is . Mobius was co-founded by , it is a sort of middleware for app developers, enabling the creation of decentralized apps, these are called “DApp”, to avoid the GooglePlay and AppStore pay tolls and to also link easily to different blockchains. They define themselves as the Stripe for blockchain. For Mobius Stellar offers a level of expressivity that’s very practical with significantly greater security and lower attack surface compared to Ethereum, plus transaction speeds and cost are highly attractive. mobius.network David Gobaud The difference is this time there is no major consumer friendly exchange like that is selling Lumens but Bitcoin and Ethereum holders can easily buy Lumens on the major exchanges like Kraken. Since the market cap and the number of people who started to buy crypto has increased since a year, the first ICOs on Stellar should attract a lot of Ethereum and Bitcoin holders. Coinbase A big thanks to for her help on this post. Katerina Stroponiati

Why Stellar could be the next big ICO platform

(This is a republished blog from my failed startup, Mighty Spring, on the subject of Referral Hiring) A on the First Round Capital blog promoted “referral hiring” as the go-to form of talent sourcing for young companies and provided ammunition for generating greater numbers of referrals from existing employees. recent post It seemed obvious while reading this post that using the suggested tactics would improve raw referral numbers, but degrade referral quality. There was little mention of the introduction of misaligned incentives and the downside risks associated with those new incentives. Comments on the post from the popular startup community, Hacker News, seemed to indicate that many employees have an intuitive grasp of the ris;ks and incentive problems that come with trying to juice referral-based candidate lead generation — more so, perhaps, than employers who are narrowly focused on trying maximize their referral numbers. Today, with the help of comments from the community on the aforementioned FRC post, we’ll attempt to present a fuller picture of referral hiring. Hacker News The Importance of Incentive-less Referrals Offering a referral bonus to employees for referring friends who get hired is common practice, but is it necessary? By offering bonuses in this way, companies essentially turn their employees into part-time contingency recruiters who now face the same bad incentives of their full-time counterparts. With $5,000 or more potentially on the line, a given employee is likely to be more lenient with their referral standards than if there were no financial reward at stake. Meanwhile, employees who truly love their jobs naturally gush about work and try to get their talented friends involved. In the Hacker News discussion, user made a comment to this exact effect, “If I love my job, then you better believe that all of my developer friends are going to hear about it until I am blue in the face.” Conorgil145 To drive a significant volume of meaningful referrals, focus on a feedback loop with your employees that address their root concerns — the reasons that they’re not already gushing to their talented friends about how much they love their company. If you want your employees to gush to their friends, ask them directly, “What can we do as a company to improve the likelihood of you recommending us to those in your network as a place to work?” Requesting referrals from employees who have fundamental concerns about their workplace lowers the likelihood of them referring their most talented friends. Instead, you’ likely to hear about their buddy who “really needs a job”. Once you’ve nipped the real issues in the bud, keep your hiring needs in the forefront of employees’ minds by mentioning them at regular intervals. Make your workplace somewhere people really do want to work, and the word of mouth will take care of itself. If you insist on using referral bonuses, consider tying them to the long-term success of the hire instead of positioning them as a quick buck. Fast cash actually lowers the standard of who your employees will refer. Try, for example, referrals bonuses (cash or equity) that vest based on the hire’s performance over the first year. Your Hiring Process (is a Problem) Companies don’t like to admit it, but many have hiring processes that treat candidates who are early in the hiring funnel as expendable, interchangeable, and disposable. This incentivizes employees to not refer their friends for fear of mistreatment. notes, Angersock “What’s really annoying is when you try to bring in talented engineers from your network, and your company drops the ball: either by not getting in touch with them, or low-balling them, or refusing decent equity. If I’m referring somebody from my network to you, I want to make sure you treat them well and with promptness–disrespecting them is a sign of disrespect to me as well, and makes me look like an ass to them.” It doesn’t take much to turn a good candidate off with your hiring process. Slow contact at important junctures, overly-vague explanations of how the hiring process works, what to expect from a given interviewer, and poor transparency into decision making criteria are all big annoyances for candidates (though most companies consider them to be a given in hiring). In a world where “hire the best, no questions” is considered foundational behavior for success, isn’t your hiring process your most important product? What if the only product your company produced was your hiring process? How would it change from your approach today? First impressions don’t fade easily. You may get a candidate who has been through a poor hiring process to accept an offer, but they’ll remember how they were treated. Even if they chalk their experience up to chance, they still may still be concerned about subjecting their friends to the same treatment. The Hacker News crowd expounds on the troubles with the middle of the hiring funnel, and the resulting effects: writes, Tptacek “My sense of it is that the valley believes recruiting to be a ‘top of the funnel’ problem. My experience says that it isn’t. My hypothesis is that the inefficiency is in qualifying candidates (deeper in the funnel), and that if you can fix that problem, the top of the funnel can sort itself out without much effort.” writes, InclinedPlane “I’ve seen too many examples of poor interviewing process, too many bad hires made, and too many good hires passed over to not put most of the onus on the middle of the funnel. Most interviewers are just not good at understanding the fragility of the process, or in having sufficient empathy to understand the difficulty of getting good data on a candidate.” From GVIrish, “By putting all of my contacts in the hands of the HR dept I no longer have any control over how or when the company contacts them. That company can easily break the trust I have with my contacts. I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that, referral bonus or no referral bonus.” Proxies Will Fail You Referral hiring can seem like a panacea, especially compared to low conversion rates from alternatives, but that attitude masks the real problem: you’re likely bad at evaluating cold leads. Like focusing on candidates from top-tier schools, seeking out friends of existing employees is nothing more than a proxy for independently-determined quality. This approach leaves you with an insulated pool of candidates, and a statistical evaluation will tell you that focusing too narrowly on referrals virtually assures that you’re missing out on the best talent in the market. points out the dangers here: Tptacek “Network hiring unavoidably personalizes the hiring process: candidates come in the door with sponsors. It’s hard to hire objectively, staying as close to apple-apples as possible, when your candidates are friends of employees who have significant bonuses riding on the selection.” If You Want More Referrals, Align Incentives For Success Consider paying for your employees’ contact lists, not the hires that come from them. By doing so, you put the incentive to conduct a high-quality and thorough interview process on the people doing the hiring. Traditional recruiting fee and standard employee referral fees are an equally broken extension of that model. structures are broken Poorly-aligned incentives are ultimately bad for you, the company, even though they look like they reduce risk in the short term. A better, more efficient hiring funnel will provide outsized returns over many, many hires, and aligning incentives in candidate sourcing is the best thing you can do to jumpstart the necessary change. Colliding Worlds Right now companies are only asking to mine your LinkedIn and Facebook connections. But what’s next? Does anyone want to connect their Snapchat account? Soon they’ll want family trees and the posts from your Secret account. From on the subject, edandersen “My personal network is not yours to ‘mine’. If an HR person at my company contacts a friend of mine to pitch a job at the company I work at, trying to use my name as an ‘in’, that is seriously unprofessional.” More from pnathan: “I’m not going to want to sit down with you and let you chew through my social networks for recruiting leads.” Conclusion Well-executed referral hiring has exceptional value, but not all referral hiring is well-executed. Incentivized referrals have inherent risk, and pressing current employees to offer up a marginal referral potentially alienates the referrer and likely generates a worse-fitting candidate than one who is organically recommended. If you’d like to augment your current candidate acquisition efforts with high-quality, non-referral-based leads, check out . We provide a curated short-list of candidates who are both qualified for, and interested in, your company’s open job. Mighty Spring TL;DR: Optimize your hiring process and candidate lead generation strategy end-to-end with referrals as one element. Consider ways to drive referrals that are not based in financial incentives. If you must use financial incentives, align them with long-term organizational goals. Use as another way to see great candidates :) Mighty Spring

Don’t Break Referral Hiring

The State of The Market — March 14, 2019 : $3,902.74 (-0.26%) : $132.87 (-0.53%) : $0.312247 (-1.33%) BTC ETH XRP The market continues to remain unchanged today, adding less than $150 million to the total market cap in the last 24 hours. For Bitcoin, both the bulls and the bears are not ready to give up yet, as the 24-hour trade volume is at a constant $10 Billion. Most of the coins have changed by less than 2%. We might see some action over the weekend, but that is not a guarantee as there was no movement during the previous weekend. In other news, . The wallet app will soon be updated, and coinbase users can link it with their accounts. Once connected, users can transfer their funds instantly with just a couple of clicks. Also, for running an illegal Bitcoin operation. 1pool Ltd. was a Marshals island-based firm which dealt in BTC-funded security-based swaps. offering illegal BTC-margined retail commodity transactions to customers in the U.S, without registering as a futures commission merchant. They also failed to comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) protocols. users of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.com can now directly withdraw their holdings to the firm’s wallet app International Securities Dealer 1pool Ltd. is facing fines of almost $1 Million The exchange stated that it would accept XLM deposits for 12 hours before commencing with full trading. According to the post, the process of enabling XLM’s full trading includes limit, market, and stop orders, which will involve three stages. These are transfer-only, post-only, and limit-only. Per Coinbase Pro, XLM trading will be available for customers in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions initially, and support in other regions might come later on. This news comes after Coinbase Pro listed XRP last month. ( ) 1) Yesterday, Coinbase Pro announced that it had listed Stellar Lumens (XLM) on its platform. Read More According to Robertson, Cotten did this after the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) froze the exchange’s fiat holding in January 2018 over questions about the origin of the funds. The statement was issued by law firm Stewart McKelvey and in it, Robertson said, “While I had no direct knowledge of how Gerry operated the business, he told me that he had been putting his own money back into QCX to fund user withdrawals in 2018 while the CIBC money remained frozen.” Robertson issued the statement to show CEO Gerald Cotten “had the best interests of the business in mind and cared for his customers.” ( ) 2) Jennifer Robertson, the widow of recently deceased QuadrigaCX founder Gerald Cotten, announced that her husband mixed his own private funds with customer funds on the exchange to compensate customers during a legal battle with a bank. Read More He is currently facing up to 10 years in prison for embezzlement charges. The 33-year-old is accused of stealing $3 Million of customer funds and faking exchange data. The prosecution claims that he diverted Mt. Gox funds to his other companies, including a 3D printing firm. However, Karpelès maintains his innocence. The exchange filed for bankruptcy in 2014 after losing 850,000 bitcoins to a hack. Karpelès is certain to face conviction as Japan has a 99% conviction rate. ( ) 3) Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox is receiving his sentencing on Friday. Read More

Coinbase Pro Lists Stellar Lumens, And Former QuadrigaCX CEO Misappropriated Exchange Funds

StellarPort: The Stellar Network exchange is launching a promotional giveaway StellarPort, the Stellar Network decentralized exchange, just launched their new advertising campaign. It’s a lottery based givaway for a minimum total of 10,000 XLM (Lumen)! StellarPort will hold their new Lumen Giveaway every Tuesday. If there is no winner the jackpot will roll over to the next week’s prize. There are 4 winners per week, dividing up the 10,000 XLM between the different winners. The prizes are as follows: Jackpot: 5,000 XLM, plus 50% of StellarPort’s weekly inflation payment*, plus any rollover from the previous week. 1st Place: 3,000 XLM. 2nd Place: 1,500 XLM. 3rd Place: 500 XLM. Your chance to win is based on the amount of XLM currently held in your wallet as well as your trade volume on StellarPort. *What is Inflation Destination? The Stellar Network uses a fixed 1% inflation scheme that adds new Lumen to the network weekly. It also adds the transaction fees that the Stellar network charges to that distribution pool. The network automatically awards those new Lumen to any account that has other accounts “vote” for it. The act of “voting” for another account to receive a portion of that pool of new Lumen is called “setting your inflation destination”. Votes are counted based on the amount of Lumen that the voting account holds. An account with 1 Lumen, for instance, would receive 1 vote while an account with 2 Lumen would have 2 votes, et cetera… In order for an account, such as StellarPort’s, to receive a portion of the inflation pool, it must receive votes from accounts that hold a combined total of at least .05% of all Lumen in existence. Any destination account that overcomes that 0.5% barrier during the voting period is awarded the newly injected Lumen in accordance with the percentage of votes it received. For instance, if people holding 2% of all Lumen pointed their Inflation Destination pointers at your account, you would receive 2% of the inflation pool. All unallocated Lumen returns to the pool for distribution the next week. StellarPort requires you to set their account as your Inflation Destination in order to enroll in their Giveaway, which is how StellarPort tries to cover their Giveaway expenses. Thanks for reading and good luck on that Stellar Giveaway! If you enjoyed this article, share it or applaud! If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. Disclaimers: StellarPort is not a member of the Stellar Foundation. Additionally, I currently occupy a contracting position at StellarPort as a Developer and Marketer.

StellarPort: Lumen Giveaway (10K XLM) and How Inflation Destination Works on the Stellar Network

Today, I got the opportunity to explore the of Stellar Lumens and make an . I guess I can finally cross that off my bucket list! The goal of this article is to push a simple transaction to the Stellar network. As I couldn’t find much technical ‘how-to’ information on Stellar, I decided to do it the old way: ! technical side analysis of the pros/cons RTFM Understanding Stellar It would be nuts to immediately dive into the code, therefore I found this high-level architectural overview guide on the Stellar . website API: Horizon All interactions with the Stellar network happen through , a RESTful HTTP API server. It allows developers to submit transactions, check account’s balance, and subscribe to events. You can use Horizon through your web browser, a command line tool like cURL, or the Stellar SDK which is the easiest solution. The Stellar SDK is available for . There are also community-maintained SDKs for . Horizon JavaScript , Java and Go Python, C#, and Ruby Stellar Core The Stellar Core is the backbone of the Stellar network, every Horizon server connects with it. The Stellar Core is responsible for validating transactions and reaching consensus. The core is run by a bunch of individuals creating a decentralized network. Each transaction on the network costs a small fee: 100 stroops (equal to 0.00001 XLM). The should prevent bad entities from spamming the network. _Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP)_SCP opts for safety over liveness — in the event of partition or misbehaving nodes, it halts the progress of the network until consensus can be reached. You can find more information on the protocol in their . whitepaper It is possible to become part of the network by running a Stellar Core instance. Such an instance can be easily set up with . Run Stellar Core with Docker stellar/quickstart docker image _Testnet_Luckily, Stellar provides a testnet for development purpose. Information can be found . here Let’s code Stellar : Basic knowledge of JavaScript, Express, and Async/Await. Prerequisites : Create two accounts on the testnet, fill the accounts with testnet tokens and transfer some random amount from one account to the other. At last, we want to be able to retrieve the transaction with the transaction explorer. In general, this Stellar coding tutorial teaches you the basics to get started with Stellar development. Goal Can be found , which makes following the tutorial easier. A complete snippet of the code is as well added at the bottom of the blog. Full working code: here Create Accounts The Stellar JavaScript SDK is the most stable SDK among the ones offered. You can easily install this package with npm: . npm i -S stellar-sdk We tell our Stellar SDK to use the testnet server URL: const server = new Stellar.Server('https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org')Stellar.Network.useTestNetwork() We are ready to create two random accounts. The Stellar SDK offers a function to randomly create a keypair without seed. let pairA = Stellar.Keypair.random()let pairB = Stellar.Keypair.random() This keypair contains a function to retrieve the public key and secret . pair.publicKey() pair.secret() Next, I’ve defined a route to initialize both accounts. In this function, we will create our wallet/account based on our public key and request the to send us 10.000 testnet Lumens on both accounts. I’m using the npm package for sending the request to the Horizon testnet API as this works well with async/await. We pass the public key from our first keypair via a query string. stellar friendbot request-promise await rp.get({uri: 'https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org/friendbot',qs: { addr: pairA.publicKey() },json: true}) The account is created now, but we don’t have the account object in our app. So, let’s retrieve this. accountB = await server.loadAccount(pairB.publicKey()) It’s now possible to check whether we got some Stellar Lumens on our account. accountA.balances.forEach((balance) => {console.log('Type:', balance.asset_type, ', Balance:', balance.balance)}) We repeat this code for as well in order to retrieve . pairB accountB Transfer Stellar Lumens A transaction can consist of multiple operations chained to the which creates the (multi-)transaction. To keep things simple, we will just transfer a small amount of testnet Lumens. We define the public key of as the destination. The amount transferred is equal to . The StellarSDK requires the amount parameter should be stated to seven decimal places. TransactionBuider pairB 30.0000001 const transaction = new Stellar.TransactionBuilder(accountA).addOperation(Stellar.Operation.payment({destination: pairB.publicKey(),asset: Stellar.Asset.native(),amount: '30.0000001'})).build() Cool, the transaction is ready to be signed by the initiator of the transfer — . Ok, now send this to the Horizon network: transaction.sign(pairA) const transactionResult = await server.submitTransaction(transaction) Retrieve History Code below will return only one transaction per ‘history page’. You can use the function on the ‘history page’ object to retrieve the next transaction in the history for an account. next() let historyPage = await server.transactions().forAccount(accountA.accountId()).call() We want to print the details of the operations in the transaction (which is XDR encoded). Let’s decode to base64 and loop over the transaction’s operations to print all sent amounts. let txDetails = Stellar.xdr.TransactionEnvelope.fromXDR(historyPage.records[1].envelope_xdr, 'base64') txDetails._attributes.tx._attributes.operations.map(operation => console.log(`Transferred amount:${operation._attributes.body._value._attributes.amount.low} XLM`)) At last, let’s retrieve the next ‘history page’. historyPage = await historyPage.next() That’s it? Yes, surprised? Did you know You can explore the transaction on the network — . The link is returned in the parameter: . example transactionResult transactionResult._links.transaction.href The metadata about the transaction is stored in the which is a standard data serialization format. You can deserialize it . XDR format here You can look up all transactions for a public key like . here The Stellar Analysis Pros Stellar is a payment engine, focused on asset movement where other blockchains may focus on the logic of the program itself. Stellar and Ripple are dealing with how your money is traded and sent, this is a more particular purpose. Stellar is easy to integrate for any web developer without knowing too much about blockchain. Perfect for payments / cross-currency / cross-border payments. Fast, cheap and easy to setup your own federated network: This is due to the consensus algorithm that does not use proof of work, but their custom . Stellar Consensus Protocol Very cheap fees: 0.00001 XLM per operation. A single transaction can contain multiple operations, so the fee doesn’t depend on the amount transferred. Cons Privacy — Every transaction can be found and read with a blockchain explorer. Important standards missing like payments links (still in development) that slow down the adoption. Payment links would handle the click on the link prompting the user for payment which is crucial for e-commerce. For now, you need to manually copy paste address, transaction memo and amount where Bitcoin has a one-click and approve payment option. It’s hard to determine if this is a : Stellar is not really using the concept smart contracts (it’s not Turing complete). It works for few popular use cases like escrow, time bounded and atomic transactions. However, standards can be extended for more use cases, but it will never get to the point of ‘Write your own DApp’. That’s ok as it makes Stellar optimized for this specific purpose of asset transfer, instead of being bloated by people’s fantasies. pro/con Stellar succeeded in removing the blockchain knowledge barrier even though it’s a blockchain payment provider. — Michiel Mulders Resources to become a Stellar expert Full code for this example on . Github Horizon API . docs Testnet . explorer Getting started code examples , and (react). here here here Check the of the Stellar network. status Interested in starting your own blockchain project, but don’t know how? Do you need help starting your token sale or having one audited? Get in touch with TheLedger . Full code : snippet

Exploring Stellar Lumens — Development Tutorial

I’m currently building a RESTful API using , from the guys that brought to us . Lumen is a great micro-framework with most of the spectacular features from Laravel like Eloquent, caching, validation, routing, middleware and so on and so forth. The API I’m building it’s supposed to serve an, yet to develop, iOS app that it’s meant to support the information system of the college where I attend, which don’t correctly support mobile devices. Lumen Laravel This would be a pretty straightforward project but they won’t make my life easy and won’t let me to access the existing database. It sucks, right? However they have a available that I can use. But… If I used their web service alongside my API every time I made a request it would take ages to get the information I’ve requested. This is, obviously, a shitty way to do things. So I’ve decided to implement a database where I can store the data by myself. unfortunately SOAP Web Service I’m fully aware that we shouldn’t repeat data but I can’t find a better way this time. I’ve decided to develop some Python bots that would periodically fetch information using the SOAP web service and store it on the database to be later served using the REST API. I’ve decided to use mostly for its flexibility, performance and scalability. I’m using mongo 3.4 so all the commands below are tested for this version. mongoDB So… How to setup Lumen to use mongoDB has a wonderful Composer package to use mongoDB with Laravel: . Looking at the repo instructions you can see that, for using with Lumen and after you installed the package, edit the file and make it look like: Jens Segers Laravel MongoDB bootstrap/app.php $app->register(Jenssegers\Mongodb\MongodbServiceProvider::class); $app->withEloquent(); After this you should create the file and it’s contents are: config/database.php <?phpreturn ['default' => 'mongodb','connections' => ['mongodb' => ['driver' => ‘mongodb','host' => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),'port' => env('DB_PORT', 27017),'database' => env('DB_DATABASE'),'username' => env('DB_USERNAME'),'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD'),'options' => ['database' => 'admin' // sets the authentication database required by mongo 3]],],‘migrations’ => ‘migrations’,]; This will override and it will allow you to use mongo with your Lumen project. After this you have you change our file and append: vendor/laravel/lumen/config/database.php .env DB_CONNECTION=mongodbDB_HOST=<dbHost>DB_PORT=27017DB_DATABASE=<dbName>DB_USERNAME=<dbUser>DB_PASSWORD=<dbUserPassword> Out of the box mongo doesn’t have any authentication details. You can add your own user to it using: use admin Now I’m able to use Lumen’s commands, for instance, I can create my table using: artisan users php artisan make:migration create_users_table — create=users I’ve modified the migration file like: public function up() {Schema::create(‘users’, function (Blueprint $table) {$table->increments(‘_id’);$table->string(‘username’);$table->string(‘password’);$table->timestamps();});} Now I can use and I’ll see my newly created collection. php artisan migrate

How to use mongoDB with your Lumen API

Stellar Community Fund Drives Innovation in Blockchain Development The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) is set to launch Cohort 9 of its Kickstart Program, providing developers and founders with an exceptional opportunity to build, launch, and scale their projects on the Stellar network. Since the launch of the Soroban smart contract platform in May, the Kickstart Program is also open to builders working on DeFi projects and other decentralized applications. Applications for the Kickstart program are now open and will close on November 17, 2024, with the program running from December 2-6, 2024. Kickstart Program - 5-Day Virtual Accelerator The SCF Kickstart program is a structured, five-day virtual boot camp that provides early-stage developers and founders with hands-on mentorship and a path to potentially access funding from the Stellar Community Fund. This program is specifically designed for participants who have a concept and want to transform their ideas into tangible projects built on Stellar. Each day of the program focuses on a key development area: December 2, 2024 - Define Your Minimum Viable Product
December 3, 2024 - Create a UI/UX Mockup
December 4, 2024 - Outline Technical Architecture
December 5, 2024 - Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy
December 6, 2024 - Pitch Your Product to Industry Experts After completing the Kickstart boot camp, developers can apply for the SCF Kickstart Award, potentially earning up to USD $15,000* in XLM to validate and develop their projects. Projects that demonstrate initial traction may then become eligible for the SCF Build Award. Build Program - Roadmap To Launch The SCF Build Program supports projects that have moved beyond the concept phase and are ready to scale toward market launch. Offering up to USD $150,000* in XLM, this award assists teams with development costs, community integration, and resources needed to finalize their products. The Build Program benefits include: Financial Support - Up to six months of development costs
Access to Stellar LaunchKit - Includes audit credits, infrastructure offers, and additional funding mechanisms
Community Integration - Stellar actively supports partners and developers on the network To apply, teams must submit a detailed proposal outlining their project goals, budget, and how they meet eligibility criteria. The application process includes community voting and a panel evaluation, with funding distributed in tranches based on development milestones, ensuring projects stay on track. How To Apply Developers interested in joining the Kickstart program can apply at: https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart. Following the November 17th, 2024 deadline, selected participants will receive preparation materials and guidance from the Stellar Development Foundation and the SCF team. Teams that complete the Kickstart program and demonstrate project potential will have the option to scale further with the SCF Build Award. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker XLMUSD_RR) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook. Stellar Community Fund Drives Innovation in Blockchain Development The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) is set to launch Cohort 9 of its Kickstart Program, providing developers and founders with an exceptional opportunity to build, launch, and scale their projects on the Stellar network. Since the launch of the Soroban smart contract platform in May, the Kickstart Program is also open to builders working on DeFi projects and other decentralized applications. Stellar Community Fund (SCF) Stellar Community Fund (SCF) Soroban smart contract platform Soroban smart contract platform Applications for the Kickstart program are now open and will close on November 17, 2024, with the program running from December 2-6, 2024. Kickstart Program - 5-Day Virtual Accelerator The SCF Kickstart program is a structured, five-day virtual boot camp that provides early-stage developers and founders with hands-on mentorship and a path to potentially access funding from the Stellar Community Fund. This program is specifically designed for participants who have a concept and want to transform their ideas into tangible projects built on Stellar . Stellar Stellar Each day of the program focuses on a key development area: December 2, 2024 - Define Your Minimum Viable Product December 3, 2024 - Create a UI/UX Mockup December 4, 2024 - Outline Technical Architecture December 5, 2024 - Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy December 6, 2024 - Pitch Your Product to Industry Experts December 2, 2024 - Define Your Minimum Viable Product December 3, 2024 - Create a UI/UX Mockup December 4, 2024 - Outline Technical Architecture December 5, 2024 - Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy December 6, 2024 - Pitch Your Product to Industry Experts After completing the Kickstart boot camp, developers can apply for the SCF Kickstart Award, potentially earning up to USD $15,000* in XLM to validate and develop their projects. Projects that demonstrate initial traction may then become eligible for the SCF Build Award. Build Program - Roadmap To Launch The SCF Build Program supports projects that have moved beyond the concept phase and are ready to scale toward market launch. Offering up to USD $150,000* in XLM, this award assists teams with development costs, community integration, and resources needed to finalize their products. SCF Build Program SCF Build Program The Build Program benefits include: Financial Support - Up to six months of development costs Access to Stellar LaunchKit - Includes audit credits, infrastructure offers, and additional funding mechanisms Community Integration - Stellar actively supports partners and developers on the network Financial Support - Up to six months of development costs Access to Stellar LaunchKit - Includes audit credits, infrastructure offers, and additional funding mechanisms Community Integration - Stellar actively supports partners and developers on the network To apply, teams must submit a detailed proposal outlining their project goals, budget, and how they meet eligibility criteria. The application process includes community voting and a panel evaluation, with funding distributed in tranches based on development milestones, ensuring projects stay on track. How To Apply Developers interested in joining the Kickstart program can apply at: https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart. https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart . https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart Following the November 17th, 2024 deadline, selected participants will receive preparation materials and guidance from the Stellar Development Foundation and the SCF team. Teams that complete the Kickstart program and demonstrate project potential will have the option to scale further with the SCF Build Award. Stellar Development Foundation Stellar Development Foundation The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker XLMUSD_RR) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker XLMUSD_RR) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR ). Learn more in the SCF Handbook . https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR SCF Handbook SCF Handbook

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LUMEN

lumen.me

51-200 employees

Since 2014

COMPANY RANKING

LUMEN

EVERGREEN INDEX #93

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