Welcome back to one of the most regular development updates on the bloggosphere. Hope that you have a warm beverage and the company of a googley-eyed JPEG for this one.

Progress Since Last Update

Research

Looks like we're going to be able to use Substrate's internals to resolve our p2p comms issues. Originally we feared that we would have to fight with libp2p, but after getting a little help from the kind folks over at Parity (and spending a good amount of time digging into the Substrate codebase), there's light at the end of the tunnel. This is a pretty big boost as it means we don't have to answer the "buy or build" question for a networking library. Score.

Development

State Chain

With the testnet on the horizon we're prioritising State Chain features rather ruthlessly. There's a few things to integrate now that we have merged our generic signing / broadcast process; broadcasting the supply update transaction to Ethereum; and integrating the end-to-end claims process for Validators to get their rewards back to ERC20 FLIP.

Chainflip Engine

FROST is now merged for both Keygen and signing. This has been a pretty gargantuan effort, and we reckon that we might be the first people to have FROST in production when we go live with Sandstorm. I think that means we can call ourselves bleeding-edge cryptographers, if we want...

Further work on the CFE is being carried out to increase the utility and structure of our logging, as well as to define and segment the multiple execution modes of the CFE (Active Validator vs. Backup Validator vs. Neither).

Ethereum

Still making progress resolving the audit issues, our Ethereum dev was in Lisbon last week so things slowed down a little, but that should pick up again over the next couple of weeks.

Web

Nothing to shout about in web world. More progress on the block explorer and the staking UI. You'll see them both soon enough.

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] Reserved peers p2p implementation (rollover)
• [SC] Migration of signing / broadcast to the new architecture (rollover)
• [SC] On-chain signature verification
• [SC] Resolve chain-halt voting issue in signing / keygen
• [SC] Define list of tests necessary for testnet release
• [CFE] Allow CFE to run in non-Validator mode (rollover++)

General Thoughts

Apologies about the Flippy launch being a bit rushed (and broken) - most issues are resolved but we did lose ~130 Flippies to the black hole of time due to our haste. The next piece of software we release will have more than a total of two hours spent on it, I promise..

Testnet deadline in sight - we're confident that we can hit it but there's a lot of testing to do between now and then. Looking forward to it.

Until next time.

Tom