December & 2019 Roundup
Can you believe it’s already 2020? The Keep team spent December heads down working on shipping tBTC and Keep to mainnet and refining our goals for the new year.
🔧 Development Updates
Launching tBTC and Keep are our top priorities. Look out for news on audits, open sourcing development, and a major launch this quarter!!
tBTC — Bitcoin on Ethereum
We published a tBTC development update in December, with an overview of the spec and development updates since August.
In December the tech team:
- Drafted remaining spec updates for v1.
- Started implementation on an almost fully spec-ed deposit signing group signer selection.
- Got close to finishing redemption and liquidation code updates.
- Enabled auto-generation if API docs.
Keep Network
Tech update for December:
- The Keep random beacon has been running with internal peers on Ropsten for 3 weeks and generated hundreds of beacon entries.
- We’ve made many bug fixes from observations during those weeks.
- We’ll be pulling existing staking provider peers into the public testnet in the next week or two as the next phase of Keep’s public testnet.
- For more updates and questions join our Slack and check out the Keep blog.
🌟 Team Updates
This month we’d like to introduce Łukasz Zimnoch, a software engineer working on Keep random beacon.
Prior to Keep, Łukasz worked on several software projects in the energy, financial and automotive industries. Keep is his first crypto project, and he’s excited to work here because he’s always eager to learn something new. Crypto interests him because of the possibilities to create software products which help people solve real problems and will have an impact on their lives. In his spare time he likes to read books (especially history), and loves to wind down by taking long bike trips & boxing at the gym. We’re very pleased to welcome him to the team!
🎉 Keep’s 2019 in review
This year we’ve achieved many of our goals & even some new goals added partway through the year! In 2019 we launched the tBTC spec along with Summa and the Cross-Chain Group. tBTC will be the first dapp on the Keep Network. We also launched the Keep random beacon on Ropsten this year, a huge milestone achieved!
Here’s our full year in review:
January:
- Annual team onsite in Atlanta
- Nicholas Evans joined as a blockchain security developer
February:
- Rolled out the Keep random beacon yellowpaper
- Keep & Summa started quiet ideation on tBTC
March:
- Keep spoke at MIT Bitcoin Expo
- Keep’s website got a design refresh
April:
- Keep proposed EIP1108 to reduce gas costs for certain pre-compiles
- Dmitry Paremski joined as a full-stack software engineer
May:
- Keep spoke at Boston Blockchain Week
- We presented Keep’s use of libp2p at IPFS
June:
- Keep spoke at Zcon1 and CogX conferences in Europe
- Liam Zebedee joined as blockchain full stack developer
July:
- Announced Cross-Chain Group (CCG) along with Summa
- Keep collaborated with ECC, EF, and Cosmos to improve Zcash interoperability with FlyClient proofs
August:
- tBTC was announced and demoed at the Cross-Chain Group’s inaugural summit in SF
- Keep spoke on tBTC at the interoperability summit in Berlin
September
- Keep spoke at ETH Boston and Crypto Springs on tBTC
October:
- Keep & CCG educated crowds at DevCon5, SF Blockchain Week, and several more events on tBTC.
- Carolyn Reckhow joined the team as Head of Business Development & Strategy
November:
- The Istanbul hard fork brought two EIPs developed by Keep to life- EIP-152 and EIP-1108.
December:
- Keep random beacon live on Ropsten!
📣 Join us at Cross-Chain Group!
Cross-Chain Group is an industry resource and working group dedicated to furthering the research, design, and implementation of the cross-chain architecture. Through educational events, advisory services, and open-source tooling, our goal is to expand blockchain interoperability and foster an environment that is more connected, functional, and scalable.
Working together as a community will bring greater interoperability of networks and ultimately, compelling product development, innovative solutions, and improved user experience. If you or anyone you know would like to be involved, reach out to us!
We hope you enjoyed the article! Please click the 👏 button and share it to help others find it. Join our Slack to discuss this further with the Keep team, or leave a comment below!
Stay tuned for more progress, and make sure you are subscribed to our mailing list!
For more information about the Keep Network:
- Follow us on Twitter
- Check out our whitepaper
- Join our Slack
- Read our business primer
- Subscribe for email updates
- Join us on Reddit
- Join our Telegram
- Press page
Learn more about tBTC:
- tBTC webpage
- Keep’s tBTC announcement article
- Leigh Cuen’s article on CoinDesk
- tBTC presentation at Cross-Chain Summit article
- tBTC presentation at DevCon5
- tBTC technical specification
- Podcast with Matt Luongo and James Prestwich, hosted by the Wyre team
