Chainflip Development Update — Feb 17th 2023
Dear reader,
Welcome to another dev update coming from sunny South Africa.
If you played Zelda, you know that it’s dangerous to go alone. Luckily, last week we announced a partnership with Axelar and Squid which will allow us to leverage their capabilities and provide access to even more chains and currencies through Chainflip. We have also teamed up with an Auditor, who will leave no stone unturned in trying to find potential issues with our cryptography and our code. The kick-off call went great and we already received a ten out of ten for being well prepared in this first meeting. We will make sure that they are equally impressed with what we’ve actually built.
Progress since the last update
As you are reading this, our new Block Explorer should be up and running, making it even more comfortable to inspect the chain. We are also adding the final touches to the upcoming release of the new Perseverance testnet. To thoroughly test it, our platform team improved and expanded the way we run local instances of the network, shaving off significant amounts of time from typical test cycles.
In addition to that, Albert wowed us by writing a tool that lets us easily interact with the various Smart Contracts deployed in any chain instance, again making testing faster, smoother and more awesome.
Our Bitcoin implementation is now at a stage where it can successfully run FROST multisig ceremonies for Taproot transactions. Arbitrary ingress address generation is almost done and the other features are specced out and are being worked on.
Outlook
You might have spotted an ongoing theme already and that is improving the testing experience. The easier and faster it is to run comprehensive tests on your code, the faster the iteration cycles become. So we committed to taking our testing and the surrounding infrastructure to the next level in the coming weeks.
On the topic of not going alone, we are extremely lucky to have an amazing community that helped us in reviewing the new Swapping App and we have received invaluable feedback from many of you. Thank you so much for this! A lot of the feedback has already been incorporated and we will soon do a second sneak preview for you.
Vibe check?
As you already know, we are currently in South Africa, which is a welcome change from the miserable weather we’ve had to endure in Berlin recently. We’ve tried our hand at a “Braai”, visited the beautiful vineyards near Cape Town and experienced our fair share of power cuts so far. Luckily, we’re all working on laptops, so productivity and spirits stayed high. I literally had to stop the DevOps team from deploying a multi-laptop Chainflip testnet on the airplane wifi on our way here. Otherwise we might have been able to add another claim of being the “highest Blockchain” to our marketing materials.
Until next time,
Martin