Atom Update: 7/12/18

The Atom team provides updates on Hydrogen’s core API suite, as well as financial engineering and general architecture initiatives.

We have been hard at work improving Nucleus’ core architecture and building new features for Proton! See below for all of the details.

Nucleus Update

The team has spent a lot of time doing the legwork on a fairly large project to implement more robust data access controls within the Nucleus API. We have designed a new framework that will control access to data on two levels:

1. Endpoints that a user can call and data that users are authorized to view
2. Actions that a user can take on specific underlying accounts to which they are associated

This framework leverages “roles” or “authorities” that control access to every service on the Nucleus platform. Roles will also limit what data is returned when retrieving data, based on the role or authority of the caller. Users representing other underlying parties— such as financial advisors, registered agents, or enterprises building consumer-facing application with Nucleus — will have the ability to gain access to specific accounts. This access is granted with varying levels of control based on the corresponding client-account association type.

The Nucleus team aims to put this new framework in place over the next few development sprints. We’ll keep you all updated on our progress!

Proton Update

Fresh off of the release of version 1.1.0, we are shifting our focus to the next wave of feature additions for the Proton API. Here is a summary of what we are working on:

• Expanding the actuarial library. After laying the initial groundwork for an annuity framework that will be used for a variety of insurance and financial planning services, we are now working to make it more robust. Part of this effort is adding age range support for life tables, which currently are limited to discrete ages. This addition will make the overall library more flexible and increase the scope of services that can eventually be built on top of it.
• Creating an enhanced goals framework. The suite of goals-related services in the Proton API are among the most popular endpoints that users leverage. As such, we have received a lot of feedback and had the chance to discuss them at length with both clients and prospective clients. Based on the information we’ve gathered, we are rolling out an enhanced goals framework designed to be much more flexible. It will include things like variable portfolio attributes over time, multiple inflation rates, configurable cash flow details, customizable simulation settings, and more! Right now we are working on incorporating new functionality at the Algorithm level, and later we will build new services into the API.
• Adding more languages to the developer documentation. Our developer documentation will soon feature example requests from a variety of different languages. This will make things easier for developers of all types who want to build applications using the Proton API.
• Improving simulation performance. We are working on more changes to the Cython interface we use to run simulations, in order to speed up the execution time. The latest improvement works with fixed data types and dimensions to optimize operations on NumPy arrays within the Cython framework. In early testing, we see speed improvements of up to 50% depending on the specific processes run.

We’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch via Discord, Reddit, or Telegram.