Sneak’s much anticipated Alpha v0.4 launched on Monday, May 7th, to a lot of excitement from users on the discord. Pingpong had been toiling away at the code the past weeks and in characteristic fashion dropped an update in the testing channel the day before, ‘Finished Sneak universal blocks. Running more tests. Will release soon.’ Not a few could contain their anticipation after hearing from the lead developer.
Alpha v0.4 came complete with universal blocks, giving Sneak the capacity to allow faster transactions, rendering it scalable, and allowing much better integration of future technological implementations. This Alpha also defined the direction Sneak is charting regarding privacy by ensuring that stealth addresses now become compulsory and regular addresses no longer necessary.
No sooner was the Alpha launched than the resilience of the node tested. A stress test carried out by one of the discord users completed with zero errors, created 20 wallets and made 380 transactions in 300 seconds, resulting in an average of 1.27tps. Given that the node was still run on the same old ‘cheap & nasty’ package, this revealed quite a robustness to the Sneak codebase so far. This codebase, which has expanded rather decently over the past few Alphas, looked set to incorporate more cryptography work into it. Besides a few bugs spotted by some eagle-eyed users during testing, there didn’t seem to be much trouble with Alpha v0.4.
As announced by the Sneak team, the next Alpha release will have homomorphic encryption integrated while keeping the existing sealed boxes, part of the previous Alpha release, as a second security layer. By implementing universal blocks first, the developers apparently not only rendered the codebase robust, but also appeared to have set the stage to easily incorporate the security offered by homomorphic encryption. This encryption level allows untrusted nodes to verify transactions, while ensuring those transactions are not exposed to unscrupulous actors. In its future Alpha, Sneak wants to encrypt transaction amount, wallet balance and hashed amount with homomorphic encryption, thereby providing the kind of scalability which allows easy implementation of mixing schemes such as ring signatures. Additional Alphas will add flesh to the Sneak codebase and should soon start uncovering its DAG element.
The release of Alpha v0.4 made a one thing clear: Sneak is reinforcing its commitment to its privacy DAG project both in code and in action. Not only has the team polished Sneak’s transaction structure by implementing universal blocks, it has also demonstrated to the community its ability to deliver on the promised project. Little wonder a lot more people are now flooding the Discord seeking to get a bite of this interesting project. You too can be part of this community by joining the Discord.
