I have been working on parts of the bridge to replicate and become a mirror/proxy for the Steem blockchain, I discovered in the process that steemdoutputs incorrect JSON.
@faddat has been writing all sorts of code, you can see all the activity on the github: https://github.com/dawn-network.
Mostly so far he has been working with a new blockchain toolkit called Tendermint and Basecoin, an example implementation, and there was enough together and working to actually run a network previously.
Yeah, I only really started working full time on this about a week ago.