Hydro Update: 10/12/18

The Hydro team provides updates on Hydrogen’s blockchain and decentralization efforts, including the Hydro API and Hydro smart contracts.

This has been an eventful week for us at Hydrogen HQ. Late on Friday,

Noah

,

Anurag

,

Shane

and I had a long meeting about Snowflake, Blockchain Identities and how we could help to contribute to the overall Ethereum ecosystem with our experience. After a lot of back and forth, we decided to submit an ERC to establish a more future-proof standard for how the Ethereum community observes the concept of identity.

For the past week Noah and I have been working on this exclusively. The major components have been:

• Restructuring our Snowflake codebase: With this updated proposal, all of the core functionality has been stripped back to a lower level protocol which has nothing to do with Snowflake. This is what we are proposing as the ERC. This includes logic such as adding addresses and setting resolvers.
• Updating Snowflake logic: After updating the codebase to have a lower level proposal, we needed to change the logic in Snowflake itself. This is still a work in progress, but is mostly finished. We will most likely be publishing the new Snowflake code early next week.
• Fixing random things we didn’t think about: The process of making something which we think can be universally used is a long and drawn out one. Over and over again we found ourselves finding issues with our proposal, thinking of sweet new ideas or just generally stumped on what option was best. One example of this was the decision to use uints instead of strings as the identifiers. This is slightly less usable for the end user, but much more gas efficient. We felt that in the end this tradeoff was worth it.

We officially released our ERC today and are looking forward to quality comments and improvements.

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