Chainflip Development Update—August 6th 2021

Another short one, plenty occurring here but not a huge amount worth talking about. TL;DR soon.

Chainflip Development Update—August 6th 2021

Another short one, plenty occurring here but not a huge amount worth talking about. TL;DR soon.

Progress Since Last Update

Research

Research in the last fortnight has gone into figuring out how to implement a trusted broadcast protocol over a non-trustful p2p environment. Most (if not all) of the threshold signature scheme literature makes the assumption that a trusted broadcast mechanism is already available. Progress made, laying down tracks.

Development

State Chain

Progress on the chain has been a little slower this fortnight due to staggered holidays, but refreshed DJs are happy DJs and the necessary sandstorm augmentations are coming along just swell. We've been working on liveness checks, vaults, governance multisig, and a larger item to abstract the request-response flow that occurs when the chain asks the Validators for a threshold signature.

Chainflip Engine

The past week or so we've spent a good chunk of time cleaning up the Chainflip Engine codebase. There's a lot riding on this particular component so ensuring that it is clean, understandable, and altogether easy to work on is a large priority. In terms of overall functionality we're getting towards the sticky and pointy end of the Chainflip Engine, so there's time to spend here ensuring that both the auditors and our future selves have an easy time understanding what it all does.

Staking Web App

Staking app has some extra flourishes now. Excited to show you all when the testnet goes live.

Block Explorer

Nothing much to report here, making a block explorer is not really why we're building Chainflip but it's a necessary evil.

Ethereum

Last week I (yes, me) solved a long-running issue in the Ethereum contracts repo. The FLIP token implements ERC777 (backwards compatible with ERC20) and the 777 standard from OpenZeppelin hardcodes the address of the ERC1820 registry. For this reason we were relying on Ganache's mainnet-fork capability, which is a little bit buggy. We've solved the issue now by replaying the 1820 deployment tx on our own local network.

Goals for the Next Fortnight

Some quick bullet points about what we hope to achieve by the time the next dev update rolls around.

Development Goals

  • [SC] Vaults (rollover++)
  • [SC] Validator Rotations (rollover)
  • [SC] Transaction request/response abstraction (rollover)
  • [SC] Liveness
  • [SC] Online Credit Plan
  • [SC] Proof of Concept for multisig Sudo
  • [ETH] Upgrade path (rollover)
  • [CFE] Fixing vulnerabilities in keygen/signing process (rollover)
  • [CFE] Refactoring
  • [CFE] Key Manager integration tests
  • [WEB] Hook up API to internal testnet (remove reliance on test data) (rollover++)
  • [WEB] Token launch page

General Thoughts

Lots of consolidation and refactoring this week. In the background we're working on the product experience for swapping. We might be a few months away yet (we are) but it looks absolutely fire already.

Until next time.

Tom