Bcoin Developer Road Map for 2018

While there was no shortage of excitement in the worlds of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies in 2017 (and there is sure to be more in the coming year), this will not be a post about any of that! Rather we wanted to take a step back to talk about the exciting things that happened with the bcoin project this year and give a peek into some of what we’re working on right now and into the coming year.

2017, Year in Review

First a quick rundown of some of what’s happened in the bcoin community over the past year.

1. BTC.com mined a block in March with bcoin. Block #457010 was the first ever block mined using software not based on Satoshi’s original C++ implementation (more here).
2. Back in March we held a very successful hackathon. It was a lot of fun meeting others in the Bitcoin and JavaScript communities and seeing all of the exciting projects that could be built in 48 hours! You can read more about the event and the winners in the wrap-up post, Bcoin Hackathon: Bitcoin For Your Thoughts?
3. We ran a survey on Earn.com (formerly 21.co) to learn more about the intersection of the Bitcoin and JavaScript communities. You can read more about what we learned here.
4. We saw a lot of growth on GitHub, more than doubling our contributors from 9 in 2016 to 21 in 2017. Stars and forks of the repo also more than doubled last year.
5. As part of our continued efforts at developer outreach, we completely overhauled the bcoin website, built more user-friendly API documentation, created a library of community written developer guides, and even launched a bounty program!

The Road Map for 2018

As a quick disclaimer, the following road map is not set in stone and does not represent any hard commitments. The cryptocurrency space is constantly changing. With the number of available curve-balls to throw seemingly inexhaustible, this list is meant to offer some insight into what is currently in the pipeline and what we’d like to work on in the coming months. If there’s something you’d like to see in here or would like to get involved, please get in touch! (Psssst! We’re hiring).

1. Continue to grow the community — Our hope is to continue the work that was started in 2017, with more events, more developer guides, and integrations with more projects. If this is something you’d be interested in being a part of, let us know!
2. Neutrino Light Client Implementation — Compact Client Side Filtering for Light Clients was first proposed by Olaoluwa Osuntokun (aka @roasbeef) back in May 2017. It offers increased privacy and performance over existing Bitcoin light clients, namely SPV (you can read more about it in the official BIP proposal). Its implementation in GO, aka Neutrino, is a prerequisite for the LND lightning project, and is already deployed on their testnet. Bcoin developer Jakh Daven has been working on a JavaScript implementation in Bcoin that supports a Neutrino compatible full node and the corresponding light client. You can expect a release of this sometime in early 2018. It is available for review, testing, and contributions on GitHub here.
3. Lightning Support — Neutrino is an important first step towards native Lightning Network support in Bcoin. This is something we hope to continue exploring this year. If this is something you’re interested in contributing on, please reach out and let us know!
4. Modularization and Refactor of Bcoin — This is something we are particularly excited about and is a project that lead developer Christopher Jeffrey has been working a lot on over the past few months. In addition to modernizing the entire code base, including migrating to ES6 class syntax, it will make the bcoin suite of crypto tools far more extensible (and useful!). Modules that were previously within the bcoin library, such as the CLI, crypto tools, faster websocket implementation, Buffer tools, and much more will be available as their own npm packages. The biggest change is a complete overhaul of the wallet system, making it more robust, more efficient, and more developer friendly. You can take a look at the work currently being done over on GitHub. One thing this makes possible that readers may be interested to learn is that maintaining forks of bcoin that work with other Bitcoin forks and cryptocurrencies will be much easier going forward.
5. Improved support for hardware wallets — This project is still currently under active development and not ready for public release. Our first efforts are focusing on ledger support with our own “bledger” API using tools from the bcoin suite. The API will support normal P2PKH transactions as well as P2SH, Multisig, and Segwit. Later we hope to also do the same for Trezor and other hardware wallets as needed/requested.
6. Bcoin GUI — Another big project that we are extremely excited about is a full-featured, enterprise-level GUI for interfacing with a Bcoin node (or other node compatible with the Bcoin API). We can’t say too much about it now but we’re aiming for an alpha launch in the first half of the year. One of our goals with the project is to create the most developer friendly and customizable crypto interface available. Like everything in Bcoin, the project will be completely open source with all code freely available on GitHub.

That’s all we’ve got for now! If there’s something you think is missing that absolutely should be on this list or any of the above is something you’d like to be a part of, reach out to us on GitHub, Slack, or in the comments below.

Onward, upward, and past the moon for 2018!