Chainflip Development Update — June 25th 2021

Hallo again frends and fronds. The last couple of weeks we’ve been working on the “last mile” of the internal testnet. We’re pushing the final few pegs into the holes and making sure that our different pieces fit together nice and snug. Hopefully next update I can share with you some examples of what the network is capable of. Fingers crossed.

Progress Since Last Update

Personnel

Two of our senior Devops candidates have now progressed to final interviews. Those are taking place this week. I’m very much looking forward to having an extra pair of hands managing the various servers and machines, and implementing the necessary operational security protocols. We also secured a new hire on the Melbourne team, supplementing the team that’s getting greasy hands building the Chainflip Engine.

Research

V3 investigations are complete, we’re pretty confident that we could implement it without any dramas. The Research Rambos are now looking into Curve Finance’s incremental improvement on v3, which includes auto-rebalancing of liquidity ranges. We’re reasonably confident that this is better for traders, but there’s some work left to do to understand what it means for LPs.

Development

State Chain

The State Chain (as far as the internal testnet is concerned) is basically feature complete, there might be a few more items which come up during integrations but those should be quite easy to iron out without much trouble at all. We’re using some of the extra cycles to get started on some features which need to be in place for the public testnet.

Chainflip Engine

CFE is nearing completion, I was a little ahead of myself last time, but there’s only a couple of small pieces to go. We need to implement signing over the actual transaction object (not the payload) before broadcasting it, and then hook up the State Chain’s requests for aggregate signatures to the appropriate module. Some lift here for sure, but with appropriate prioritisation it shouldn’t set us back.

Staking Web App

Designs for the Staking App are now complete, so we’re hard at work implementing that such that we can QA our internal net and the staking interface at the same time. There’s probably a good bit of knowledge transfer that needs to occur here before the application team is fully up to speed with what’s going on inside the chain, so that’s a priority for the next couple of weeks.

Ethereum

Ethereum contracts are complete, we’re now running security tools on them. This should surface any unsafe practices and make life easy for the auditors once they get started with manual review.

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] Runtime upgrade process
• [SC] Support for the off-chain keygen process within the Auction model
• [SC] Vaults
• [SC] Transaction fees
• [SC] Emissions
• [CFE] Identifying dishonest participants in the quorum signing process
• [CFE] Signing ETH transactions from EOA for broadcast to the chain
• [CFE] Data persistence solution for fault tolerance
• [ETH] Security analysis
• [APP] Hook up API to internal testnet (remove reliance on test data)
• [APP] Boss battle with Webpack

General Thoughts

Rigorous assumption checking is well underway. We’re making sure that internal docs are kept up to date based on integration discussions, and overall I’m very pleased with progress. We’re not rushing, it’s a methodical exercise to get to the finish line in one piece with a bit left in the tank for the post-launch party. I hope you’re all safe and well and your meals are kept in bear proof containers.

Until next time.

Tom