March Newsletter - anydot
tldr; We have re-branded PISA research to anydot — to emphasise that our on-chain accountable API for outsourcing transaction infrastructure works for any smart contract. Even more exciting, we have have swiftly shipped two testnet products, any.sender and the Eye of Satoshi .
anydot — transactions made simple
At Financial Cryptography 2019, co-founders Patrick McCorry, Sergi Delgado and Chris Buckland decided to kick-start PISA Research with a mission to build and protect an emerging self-custody financial system.
It took some time to wind down our research and teaching responsibilities as we left our jobs in academia, but over the past few months we have been working at full-steam to design, code and ship our initial products.
To reflect the transition from deep technical research to a laser-focused startup, we are rebranding PISA Research to anydot — coined after the development of our Ethereum flagship products:
- any.sender: Users set a deadline for when their transaction must be mined and any.sender does the rest.
- any.watcher (coming soon!): Users attach an on-chain event to their transaction and any.watcher only responds if the event is triggered.
Both names originate from the programming keyword msg.sender in the Solidity programming language and refer to the sender of the transaction, but since our service allows anyone to easily send transactions, we have adopted the names any.sender and any.watcher.
What makes the anydot products special is our ambition to be the first on-chain accountable API. With an on-chain security deposit, we have skin-in-the-game to deliver our promised quality of service. If we fail, for whatever reason, then the user can force us to compensate them in a timely manner.
So in a way, we are putting our money where our mouth is, by demonstrating with a financial commitment how much we trust our products not to fail.
Plus, we have followed through with our vision that smart contracts can be used constrain the authority and power of third parties. In our case, we ensure the customer can swiftly issue punishment if any.sender deviates from the pre-agreed protocol.
If you want to find out more, then check out how the on-chain accountable API works for any.sender by reading the refund adjudicator code.
But let’s get to the fun part.
any.sender: non-custodial outsourcing of transaction infrastructure
Our Ethereum flagship product — any.sender — is a super simple API for developers to outsource their transaction infrastructure in a non-custodial manner.
No more implementing boring infrastructure, no more stuck transactions and no more dealing with the gas price.
Let any.sender take care of it — so you don’t have too.
Integrating to your workflow. A third party project (or wallet) can simply:
- Deposit coins into Relay.sol to register with the service.
- Install the any.sender client via
npm i @any-sender/client - Send a transaction to the any.sender API.
In the background, any.sender organises all jobs in a queue based on priority and gradually bumps the fee until the transaction is mined. Thus its sole purpose is to guarantee that your transaction is delivered.
Best of all, none of this is “academic”— it is running on Ropsten today — so try it today!
The Eye of Satoshi: Watchtower for the Lightning Network
But that’s not all! We have also been working on our Bitcoin flagship product — a watchtower for the Lightning Network — the Eye of Satoshi!
We have released the Eye of Satoshi on Bitcoin’s test network, and if you are reckless enough, mainnet too. Click here to find out more!
Over the next month, we are working to release an updated version of BOLT’13 and to focus on integration efforts with third party wallets / lightning nodes. More to come soon alongside some really exciting announcements.
If you want to follow our watchtower, it has a dedicated twitter account @eyeofsatoshi and very soon it will live tweet when justice is served (e.g. when a penalty transaction is issued).
Other news and upcoming events
Sergi Delgado presented the Eye of Satoshi at Advancing Bitcoin 2020 — covering some of the design trades-offs around privacy and subtle attacks on watchtowers.
Patrick McCorry co-organised Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2020 — the premier venue for cryptocurrency and computer security research — and the very venue where we decided to quit academia and focus full-time on anydot.
We are incredibly proud to have contributed towards organisation of Financial Cryptography and we hope to continue supporting it in whatever capacity we can.
Chris Buckland, Patrick McCorry and Salvatore Ingala hosted a hands-on programming night with developers (and pizza) in London to try out the any.sender API.
It was exciting to witness developers, who are not familiar with the any.sender, to adopt and use the API.
Our focus on streamlining the developer experience has really paid off — it took the attendees approximately 1 hour to understand the API, sign up to its service and send transactions via its API.
Considering it takes weeks (or months) to build production-ready transaction infrastructure, it is a huge win to see how easy it was to adopt our API.
That’s all for now though. If you want to find us in meatspace, we’ll be at ETHLondon, EthCC and the CryptoCompare summit.
Our mission to build and protect a global and self-custody financial system still remains. That ethos is at the very heart of the developer tools and services we plan to release — to demonstrate first hand the era of publicly verifiable and financially accountable services.
