Chainflip Development Update — April 15th 2024
Dear readers of the Chainflip Dev Update
Progress
With the release of version 1.3, we added support for USDT as an additional asset. This makes it much easier to integrate with exchanges that prefer USDT over our default choice of USDC. The decision to add USDT was made on short notice, but we committed to it, curious to see how long it would take us to implement. We agreed on it on March 1st and the release commit with the finished implementation was done on March 22nd! Version 1.3 also unifies the way that assets are referred to. Previously, assets were just identified by their name, for example "ETH". But with some assets being available on multiple chains, like "USDC" on Ethereum and Arbitrum, our new naming system prevents any risk of confusion. Another thing we noticed was that some validators didn't always agree on all the events. The chain still reached consensus, but some of the validators seemed to just not witness anything on Polkadot for example. Thus, we added a new penalty for not witnessing something that the remaining validators have already agreed on. For now this will only remove reputation points, but it already caused several validators to check their deployment and fix the issue.
Outlook
For the next version, we are planning to improve the deployment process, especially around the chainflip-engine, but also in terms of coordinating and communicating the updates, based on plenty of feedback we received. In addition to that, there will be two amazing new features in version 1.4. I don't want to spoil the surprise just yet, so you will have to stay patient for now.
Vibe Check
If you are a long-term reader of this Blog, then you know that we have an annual 360° Feedback process, where everyone can share and receive feedback from their colleagues and peers. We have just finished this years round and overall, the feedback was very positive. Of course, there is always room for improvement and we're all going to be busy with ironing out the little imperfections that were pointed out. In the meantime the protocol is attracting more and more volume and we're looking forward to improving and expanding it even further!
Until next time,
Martin