In this article, we will discuss our weekly technical update and introduce you to our research and engineering team. For a summary of recent happenings at anetaBTC, please see the below announcements.
Announcements and Housecleaning
- The deadline for the Grace the Guardian NFT giveaway is tomorrow at 8:00 PM EST. Users may still participate in the giveaway here.
- The first Project Catalyst airdrop event has ended. The second Project Catalyst airdrop event is scheduled to begin on January 13th, 2022.
- The NETA Community Airdrop Fund (CAF) allocation is scheduled to be released on Monday, December 6th, 2021. This will also inform the community on how to participate in the CAF.
- If you haven’t already, here are the links to join Discord and Telegram.
- We’re on Reddit! Huge thank you to our community members who took the initiative to put the official anetaBTC Reddit together. anetaBTC Discord, Telegram, and Reddit are all community-run channels.
- Again, thank you to all those who continue to support our mission of empowering our community with decentralized tools. This would not be possible without you and your commitment to growing the community and protocol.
Meet the Team and Technical Update
We are overjoyed with the community growth and engagement we have seen thus far.
Six members of our community have been kind enough to be admins, moderators, and community managers. They will help maintain our Discord, Telegram, and Reddit, as we believe these are the best platforms for involvement with our community in addition to Twitter. We are open to additional platforms if it is of community interest.
Last week, we announced that we were onboarding an additional five engineers. Today, we will highlight our engineering and research team and break down what both teams are currently pursuing.
anetaBTC has a total of ten engineers and researchers contributing to and developing the anetaBTC protocol.
There are two researchers, Willie and Aibek, while the eight people on the development team are Talgat, Margy, Dair, Olzhas, Aisha, Yesbol, Darhkan, and Kalbek.
Research Team
Willie recently finished his Google AI Research Residency and is a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The other half of our research team is Aibek, who is a graduate from Moscow Aviation Institute and is the Lead Engineer for the Department of Navigation and Ballistic Support for the Republic of Kazahkstan.
Both of them are experienced and inquisitive researchers who are hell-bent on solving difficult problems.
Together, they are studying advanced security implementation as building a secure and private protocol is central to the mission of anetaBTC.
The two are currently researching Ren and their implementation of renBTC on Ethereum. Ren is a privacy-preserving virtual machine powering zero-knowledge financial applications.
Their current focus in regard to their research is mastering the concept of Darknodes, as this is a possible strategy for implementation.
Virtual machines have interesting utility with the ability to perform private computations over a decentralized network without revealing the underlying information.
RenVM’s protocol leverages zkSNARK and secure multiparty computations to validate proofs and run programs in zero-knowledge.
RenVM is powered by a decentralized network of machines, called Darknodes, that contribute their computational power and storage space in exchange for fees.
Darknodes are the physical machines that power RenVM, where every machine contributes CPU time for computing power and its disk space for storage. This network of Darknodes is permissionless and to encourage good behavior, a bond of 100,000 REN tokens is required to register and run a Darknode, similar to how the cost of registering a Cardano Stake Pool is 500 ADA.
The team is also in the midst of making Ergo native assets compatible with the RenVM protocol. This process is about 80% complete, and the team is optimistic to release good news on this compatibility in the near future. This implementation of Ergo native assets on RenVM, however, is for research purposes only as our intention is to launch anetaBTC on the native Ergo protocol.
Willie and Aibek are continuing their research on security, zkSNARKs implementation along with Darknodes, and how these concepts can be applied and integrated into the Ergo blockchain. This is a part of our general mission to empower our community to freely use their assets in an entirely censorship-resistant ecosystem.
Development Team
Talgat, our Lead Developer, received his Ph.D at Nazarbayev University and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. He is working on developing the core protocol with Dair, Kalbek, Margy, and Olzhas. Talgat is focusing on developing the BTC-ERG bridge that allows for communication of different states on the Bitcoin and Ergo blockchains to initiate specific actions upon scanning for the status of different outcomes.
Dair and Kalbek, the Bitcoin team, are focusing on the core Bitcoin protocol and writing smart contracts to send and receive BTC to newly generated wallets upon request.
Margy and Olzhas, the Ergo team, are focusing their efforts on writing smart contracts with ErgoScript and successfully communicating the correct actions on the Ergo blockchain. The first contract they are building on Ergo is initiating mint of anetaBTC upon request to a specified Ergo wallet. From there, the team will be developing iterations of sending anetaBTC back from the user's wallet to the anetaBTC non-custodial wallet/reserve.
Additionally, Talgat and Frosty are onboarding our new engineers to the team. We are creating a crash course for developing on Ergo, Cardano, and Bitcoin to have a foundational and efficient system to prepare for scaling our engineering team, which we are currently recruiting from MIT, University of Helsinki, and Astana IT University.
We hope you enjoyed this technical update and learning more about the anetaBTC engineering and research team.
As our internal onboarding system is fine-tuned, we plan to open-source the crash course and offer our system to Cardano and Ergo communities in hopes of doing our part to grow the developer ecosystem.
