Sneak peek at what’s happening in Ryo development trenches

Let’s go atomic

According to Monero talking heads atomic swaps are impossible until you buy Tari. This is of course just a marketing strategy that we have seen thousands of times — gimp the current product to release a new one.

We are working on support atomic swaps with BTC via P2SH addresses. The mechanism of atomic swaps is extremely simple and described well here . All we need to implement in Ryo is a conditional timelock that allows earlier spending if you know the shared secret of the swap.

Quasar web-wallet and 64-bit “ChooChoo” Elliptic Curve Crypto library

You might recall me writing it over a year ago. It has proven itself nicely doing the scanning for our webwallet. The next step will be to integrate it into the CLI and GUI wallets to speed up scanning there too.

Implementing cutting edge crypto

Last month, a new and much safer way of encrypting data (AES-GCM-SIV) has been standardised. There aren’t any multi-platform C++ implementations, so we will write one ourselves. We are planning to release it separately under BSD licence, so other projects can benefit from this advancement too.

This will improve the security of saved wallets, as well as enabling fast encryption of network traffic.

Putting fun back into P2P

New P2P network with native IPv6 support and more efficient block broadcast

The current release will overhaul a large percentage of legacy BytecoinV1 codebase. This part of the code consists of about 30% of the total lines of code. Overall it has been neglected by Monero with only a single feature (fluffy blocks) implemented in five years — and a ton of busywork in patching the code rot.

There are multiple problems with the current setup. Fluffy blocks simply trade bandwidth for latency (we will implement a system that saves both bandwitdth and latency), critical features like IPV6 have to be shoehorned in, and the whole thing is much too rickety to implement what we want to do — anonymous tx broadcast without any external networks, as broadcasting transactions over Tor or I2P has its own set of security problems.