Viacoin Development Update — 04/2018

6 min readApr 30, 2018

April 2018 has been an exciting month for Viacoin since we had a lot of great announcements to share. This is why we have decided to release a new development update this month, instead of waiting until May 2018. We have updated all of our progress on our 2018 Roadmap article at the start of this month.

Latest announcements:

Viacoin Copay Public Beta (Android)

We have released the Viacoin Copay public beta. Viacoin Copay securely stores multiple, distinct viacoin wallets, allowing both business and privacy-conscious users to keep funds carefully separated. Manage personal, business, and testnet wallets easily, all without leaving the app. Viacoin Copay uses hierarchical-deterministic (HD) wallets, allowing for secure in-app wallet generation and backup. Viacoin Copay is currently scheduled to be released on Windows, OSX, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, iOS and Windows phones. CLICK HERE to download Viacoin Copay from Google Play.

General Bytes ATM support

The Viacoin development team finished the code for General Bytes ATM integration a while ago and created a pull request in General Bytes’ Github repository. Our code has been reviewed, merged and uploaded to the General Bytes server, allowing all ATM owners to start accepting Viacoin on their ATM(s). There are currently over 1,535 ATMs in 41 different countries. General Bytes will soon publish an official guide on how to add Viacoin to a General Bytes ATM.

New Exchange Listings

In the past month Viacoin got listed on 2 different Asian exchanges. Viacoin has been added to FEX, a new Hong Kong based exchange. They have launched a VIA/BTC trading pair and will soon add VIA/USDT. Viacoin also got listed on OOOBTC, a new exchange based in Singapore. They have launched a VIA/BTC trading pair.

Coinomi Native SegWit Support

Coinomi recently released an update that will allow you to use compatibility and native (Bech32) Viacoin addresses. The update is available for their Android and iOS app. We have made a short guide to help you upgrade your wallet. CLICK HERE to read the guide.

Trezor Support

The Viacoin development team recently finished the Viacoin integration for Trezor. After testing it, using Trezor’s emulator, our development team created a pull request in Trezor’s Github. Our pull request has been closed and Viacoin will be available on Trezor One devices in their upcoming firmware update! Keep an eye on our official Twitter account for the official announcement.

Vialectrum 3.1

We have released Vialectrum 3.1, adding new features like memory-pool based fee estimations, local transactions, Ledger support and adding more VialectrumX nodes. The full changelog and the download link can be found HERE. We have also published a tutorial on how to use your Ledger hardware wallet with Vialectrum 3.1, which can be found HERE.

Viacoin Core 0.15.1

As promised we have released Viacoin Core 0.15.1 in Q1 2018, which is packed with a lot of improvements compared to Viacoin Core 0.13.3.7. Due to several instabilities in the current M.A.S.T./Schnorr Signatures protocols we couldn’t insure a stable Viacoin Core version, risking users to end up having issues. Our development team is currently focusing on including M.A.S.T. and Schnorr Signatures in a future Viacoin Core update.

Viacoin Core 0.15.1 changelog:

Chainstate Database restructure: has been changed from a per-transaction model to a per-output model. Result is validating the blockchain during Initial Block Download (IBD) and reindex is ~30–40% faster, uses 10–20% less memory, and flushes to disk far less frequently.
Assume valid blocks: allows script validation to be skipped for ancestors of known-good blocks.
P2P network refactoring: refactor code with focus on concurrency. Speed up block fetching several times.
UTXO cache claiming unused mempool: speeds up initial block download as UTXO lookups are a major bottleneck there, and there is no use for the mempool at that stage
Block Relay Improvements: refactor code with focus on concurrency. Speed up block fetching several times
No keypool refill flush: no longer flushes the wallet between each key which resulted in a ~20x speedup in creating a new wallet.
Upgrade LevelDB: hardware acceleration for CRC on architectures supporting SSE 4.2. As a result, synchronization and block validation are faster.
SHA256 speedup: hashing has been optimized for architectures supporting SSE 4 (See PR 10821). SHA256 is around 50% faster on supported hardware, which results in around 5% faster IBD and block validation

A number of additional changes have been made in Viacoin Core that deal with peer connections and invalid blocks, as a safety precaution against forks and misbehaving peers.

Viacoin Core 0.15.1 can be found HERE.

Binaries are included, meaning that exchanges, users and mining pools do not have to compile from it from source.

A highly increased sync time compared to Core 0.13

Coin development:

Hashrate

Over the past two months the Viacoin network hashrate has increased from 50 TH/s to ~80 TH/s, which is a 60% increase. The increased network hashrate results in more power, security and capability of the Viacoin network. We have contacted several new Litecoin mining pools and we’re aiming to break the 100 TH/s mark in the next month.

NViacoin

The Viacoin development team is currently writing an alternative Viacoin implementation in C#, also known as ‘Nviacoin’ (derived from ‘NBitcoin’). ‘Nviacoin’ will be the most complete Viacoin library for the .NET platform. It also provides low level access to Viacoin primitives so you can easily build your application on top of it. ‘Nviacoin’ is an important component for BTCPay (a popular payment gateway that will include Viacoin as a payment method) and Styx (which uses TumbleBit).

ViacoinJ

The Viacoin development team has also made progress on ViacoinJ. ViacoinJ is a library for working with the Viacoin protocol. It can maintain a wallet, send/receive transactions without needing a local copy of Viacoin Core and has many other advanced features. ViacoinJ is needed for applications like the Viacoin Samourai wallet for Android. We will keep you updated on our progress.

Upcoming releases:

New website

A lot of progress has been made and the new website is closed to being finished. Our web designer is fixing a few small animation bugs and making some last-minute changes. Once the website has been launched we will release a form, allowing the community to submit translations in their native language.

Coinpayments

Even though the Viacoin development team is currently working on 2 different payment gateways, we have contacted Coinpayments and applied for listing. According to Coinpayments over 931,000 vendors across 182 countries are currently using their service. They provide plugins for big webcarts like OpenCart, WooCommerce and PrestaShop. Once our listing goes live we will actively approach the most popular webshops to boost Viacoin adoption and provide the community with more ways to spend their viacoins.

Viacoin Copay Public Beta (desktop)

As mentioned above, we recently released the Viacoin Copay public beta on Android. Our developers are currently working on the iOS and desktop versions. We will soon release the public beta for Windows, OSX, Linux and ChromeOS.