Chainflip Development Update — Jan 6th 2023
Dear god. When did that happen? The year seems to have ticked over to the year of our lord, 2023, and I for one was somewhat unprepared to be reminded that we are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and we still don’t have nuclear fusion or supersonic commercial airlines.
Despite spending 30 hours travelling in a very lame sub-sonic A380 back from Australia this week, I’ve had a decent break over christmas and new year, and I hope your holidays have been wonderful. I return slightly heavier and more tanned than when I left, but feel recharged and ready to tackle whatever 2023 throws at us. It can’t be worse than 2022, right??!?
As MC Method Machine finds himself soaking up the rain somewhere in Europe for entertainment, it has fallen once more to me to write this fortnight’s developer update. This only happens from time to time, so forgive me for relishing in this task and embellishing what should probably be a pretty straightforward, clean-cut blog post.
Oh come, let us adore him
You may recall that in the last Community Update I mentioned that we have a shiny new CTO on the way, known only as Dr. Goldfinger. Today I’m very happy to announce that he has landed in the Chainflip Berlin Office earlier in the week with the grace and etiquette of a youthful swan. Rather than sing his praises on his behalf, why not allow him to do the hard work for me? Allow me to introduce you to Dr. Martin Rieke!
Martin: Thank you, Simon! I hope I can live up to the anticipation fuelled by being previously introduced as a mysterious Bond villain character. However, I do fit some of the clichés: I am German and I do have a PhD in Theoretical Physics. And while I hope "zat my pronountziaschon izn't so bäd", I did at one point work in Investment Banking as a Quantitative Analyst, which is probably on most lists of evil occupations. But I digress... Over the last couple of years, I worked as CTO / Chief Science Officer for another Crypto startup in Berlin and helped it grow from a handful of people to 100+ employees and being one of the market leaders in Europe. Eager to repeat this fantastic experience, I was very excited when I met Simon and was offered to join Chainflip. So, here I am: the first days in the office were incredibly fun, and I am looking forward to working with all the amazing people here. To paraphrase the real Goldfinger: "Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He's fired rockets at the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavour... except blockchain swaps!" -- Let's change that!
Thank you and welcome aboard sir. We’re all very excited to work with you, and I’m personally grateful to have such an experienced set of hands on deck to put everything we’ve worked on for the last 2 years into production.
Progress Since Last Update
Looking over what the team has been up to over the holidays, progress remains once again impressive.
- Work on the DOT-ETH swapping functionality continues, with the goal of deploying it on testnet
- Network deployment tooling upgrades which allow us to perform more comprehensive testing closer to production network conditions
- Our monitoring and alerting infrastructure continues advancing, with high availability log ingestion and extrinsic based alerting (very important)
- The State Chain team are upgrading the substrate version we are using
- New Website is ready to ship (whoa!)
Outlook
Over the next 2 weeks, we’re going to be shipping, shipping, shipping. We have a suite of updates and upgrades to the staking app and block explorer in the pipeline, upgrades to the Ibiza testing suite, and a new internal testnet deployment to test and develop our infrastructure.
As for Perseverance, everyone’s favorite testnet, we are all back on deck next week and plan on pushing through some additional upgrades and tests which will finally allow us to continue our mission of pushing well past 150 Authority Members. Things slowed down over the holidays, but with the extreme amount of tFLIP out there thanks to the giveaway, it’s time to shake things up.
Vibe Check?
Good vibes confirmed. There’s a lot to do, and a limited amount of time before the Trail of Bits audit deadline. This will be a sweaty-browed month, but I have supplied everyone with retro-sweatbands and white polo shirts. We have everything we need. Wish us luck.
Until next time,
Simon