Viacoin Development Update — 07/2018

5 min readJul 18, 2018

Our last development update was published at the end of April 2018 so it is time for a brand new development update! As you may have seen on Twitter, we’ve released a lot of exciting stuff in the past few months. We’re keeping the development pace high and will continue to release more exciting things, which are discussed at the end of this development update. Enjoy!

Latest announcements:

Viacoin Copay

A while ago we released the Viacoin Copay public beta. We were very pleased to see that the beta was downloaded hundreds of times and received an average rating of 4.89/5 by its users. We have ended the public beta and released a stable version in the Google Play Store. Click HERE to download it.

We have also released the Viacoin Copay desktop beta. You can download the following versions:

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.

New Exchange Listings

In the past months Viacoin got listed on several new exchanges:

Bitibu (VIA/BTC and VIA/USD).
Xchange.me (BTC/VIA).
Blocknet (DEX).
Cxihub (VIA/BTC).

Trezor Support

Trezor recently released their latest firmware update, including Viacoin support. Trezor offers unmatched security for cryptocurrencies, password management, second-factor authentication, while maintaining an absolute ease of use, whether you are a security expert or a brand new user. This means that Viacoin is now available on both Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets. Read all about the new firmware update in Trezor’s blog post.

Vialectrum 3.1.3.1

We have released Vialectrum 3.1.3.1, adding new features like Revealer support, Trezor support, performance improvements and more! The full changelog and the download link can be found HERE. We will soon publish a tutorial on how to use your Trezor hardware wallet with Vialectrum 3.1.3.1.

Merchant adoption:

You can now use Viacoin on the following websites:

Cryptips allows your favorite Twitch streamers to accept Viacoin tips. Their peer to peer system gives the streamers full control over their tips, which means no third-party system or fees. Tips are sent directly to their own wallet.

Evolution Host is a premium VPS hosting provider that also specializes in game servers, IRCds and mIRC Bot Hosting. Evolution Host is based in the United Kingdom and their team has over 20 years of experience in the online hosting industry.

NViacoin

In our last development update we announced that the Viacoin development team was working on an alternative Viacoin implementation in C#, also known as ‘NBitcoin.Viacoin’ (or ‘NViacoin in short’). ‘NViacoin’ is the most complete Viacoin library for the .NET platform. It implements all most relevant BIPs. It also provides low level access to Viacoin primitives so you can easily build your application on top of it. The development recently finished the integration and our pull request was merged.

BTCpay support

We have finished the Viacoin integration for BTCpay, meaning that merchants from all over the world can start accepting Viacoin as a payment method. We will soon release a website to help you set up a store, create invoices, create your own ‘Point Of Sale’ and more, using BTCpay!

What is BTCpay?

BTCPay Server is an Open Source payment processor, written in C#, that conforms to the invoice API of Bitpay. This allows easy migration of your code base to your own, self-hosted payment processor.

To simplify the definition, BTCPay allows merchants to be their own bank, receive payments in Bitcoin, Viacoin, Litecoin other cryptocurrencies without the third party. BTCPay allows merchants to run their own node (or connect to someone else’s node by using the hosts) and receive payments directly, P2P, with no fees, no intermediary, no censorship while providing better privacy over their customers financial and private data.

Coin development:

Viacoin Core 0.16

The Viacoin development team has started working on Viacoin Core 0.16. One of its features is the support of native Segwit bech32 addresses, which start with ‘via1’. Using bech32 results in lower tx fees and avoids confusion when writing it down (not case sensitive). Viacoin Core 0.16 also adds sha256 hashing optimizations (which leads to faster synchronization and block validation), HD wallets by default, several bug fixes and other optimizations.

ViacoinJ

The Viacoin development team has also made progress on ViacoinJ and they are close to finishing it. 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:

Viacoin Samourai

We have started the development of Viacoin Samourai, a high security and anonymity wallet for Android. Viacoin Samourai will support AES-256 encryption, bech32 addresses, VPN/TOR, numerous ways to obscure your balance and transaction history, remote commands and more! Read all about Viacoin Samourai in our latest article!

Marketing

With the recent release of Viacoin support on BTCpay we feel like now is the perfect time to increase the marketing of Viacoin. Without spoiling the specifics we can happily share that we are working on the following: