Chainflip Development Update — Jan 19th 2023

On Wednesday, Simon asked me whether I felt ready to take over the task of writing the "Dev Update". Given that I had just joined Chainflip as the new CTO, and you - dear reader of the "Dev Update" - also seem to be interested in learning more about how things at Chainflip are coming along, our motives are somewhat aligned. So let me share with you what I was able to observe during my first two weeks at Chainflip HQ.

Progress Since Last Update

• As promised in the last post, our slick new website was launched and has a host of new features. The feedback on this has been nothing short of amazing, so thank you for that. If you have not had a chance to check it out yet here you go: https://chainflip.io/.

• Several improvements have been added to the Staking App and Block Explorer. A lot of these changes will be published to all those running nodes soon, so stay tuned for that.
• We improved the cryptography of our ETH related key generation, which not only resulted in better performance, but we also got to delete a lot of now unnecessary code, something that gives most programmers a warm and fuzzy feeling.
• Support for the Ed25519 signature scheme was added. This will allow us to support a variety of new L1 chains going forward, but I'm not going to spoil the surprise for now.

Outlook

One difference I noticed between the more traditional finance world and the blockchain world is that blockchains are more willing to break stuff. This of course differs from chain to chain, but even senior chains like Ethereum do it from time to time. And now it has happened again, as ETH is planning to remove a function called "SELFDESTRUCT" which we had grown very fond of.

It allowed us to collect incoming payments quite elegantly, now we will need to find a way to achieve the same effect without affecting performance, costs and security. Needless to say, we have a plan already.

No multi-chain project can be taken seriously without supporting the elephant in the room, a.k.a Bitcoin. Very soon we will begin translating our research into action so Bitcoin can be added to the growing list of supported currencies at launch.

The Perseverance testnet is growing and thriving. As part of my onboarding and in order to get my hands dirty, I got to deploy and run my very own Validator node there. With the increased activity, we are learning more and more things about how the chain behaves in the real world. One aspect that we will focus on is fine tuning the slashing rules.

Vibe Check?

The vibes are excellent right now: Simon is impressing us with his broad taste in music, playing some of his favourite smooth jazz songs in the office, which has boosted productivity by a calculated 40%. We were also able to tweak the coffee grinder settings and our espresso has reached new levels of quality that even the finest coffee shops in Berlin would be proud of. Finally, even though it is mid January, the sky has a clear blue color as I'm writing this. Happy faces.

The only downside is that due to the redesigned team website I'm not supposed to use my new DJ name to sign this blogpost... oh well.. Until next time!

DJ Goldfinger