July Roundup
Keep testnet, new partnerships, Berlin Interoperability Summit, EIP-1108 accepted into Istanbul, Zcash side-chains, and more…
First outside node, staking providers set up on testnet
We are excited to say that last month the Keep private testnet had its first outside node! Since then, we’ve added one more: we have Bison Trails and Figment Networks staking providers all set up and running now.
We’ve already reprioritized a couple of items based on feedback from the testnet, and are excited to continue to add new partners through this month. Join our Slack to stay up-to-date with the progress.
Keep is partnering with Summa to establish Cross-Chain Group
We are pleased to announce that Keep has partnered with Summa to establish a blockchain interoperability working group, called Cross-Chain Group.
Cross-Chain Group is an industry resource for technologies, projects, and efforts at the forefront of blockchain interoperability. The group is dedicated to furthering cross-chain research, design, and implementation through collaboration, development, and educational events.
Working together as a community, we aim to support a more robust and user-friendly ecosystem.
We’re excited to learn about new projects that are working on interoperability solutions. If you or a team you know should be included, we’d love to hear from you.
Read the article for more details.
Supporting Zcash side chains
More ecosystem contribution news this month - Keep Network is collaborating with the Electric Coin Co, the Ethereum Foundation, and Iqlusion (a Cosmos validator) to improve Zcash interoperability. Together, they are funding the addition of FlyClient proofs in Zcash.
Follow this link to find out what a FlyClient is and what it enables.
EIP-1108 is accepted into Istanbul
EIP-1108, originally introduced by our Head of Engineering Antonio Salazar Cardozo and Tech Lead Piotr Dyraga, has been merged. This implementation significantly reduces gas costs for certain elliptic curve operations, unlocking new use cases that until now have been either prohibitively expensive or downright impossible. Shoutout to the AZTEC team for their help in making this happen.
This is now the second EIP that the Keep team been working on of those accepted into Istanbul. You can find the full current Ethereum EIPs list here.
As the world heads towards integrating blockchain technology, developers have a great opportunity to make this transition as seamless and comfortable as possible. It’s important that we take care of the interests involved and be constantly improving and collaborating across teams to move the ecosystem forward.
Interoperability Summit
Keep is headed to the Berlin Blockchain Week, where on Monday, 19th August, together with Fabric Ventures, we are organizing the Interoperability Summit.
Some of the leading projects in the space will share their latest efforts and development updates on bridging the decentralized ecosystem. Speakers will include: Matt Luongo, Founder of Keep Network, Ryan Selkis, Founder of Messari, Nicole Zhu, Senior Developer at Polkadot, Szymon Sypniewicz, Founder of Ramp Network, MakerDAO (speaker tba), Cosmos Network (speaker tba).
Join the technical discussion on interoperability and defragmentation of the blockchain ecosystem!
Get your tickets here! Spaces are strictly limited — please RSVP as early as you can!
Tech updates
Here is the progress of our Engineering Team from last month:
- Fixed a showstopper that allowed group members to collude to sign an entry they choose instead of the previous beacon value.
- Discussed metrics — what does the healthy beacon look like? How will we monitor its state?
- We have completed work on a test engine for DKG. This will allow us to cover all edge cases of DKG protocol in tests.
- Staking providers are up and running on our testnet.
- Finished implementing a smart contract upgrade scheme — this will let us safely upgrade Keep network smart contracts, with a clear migration path for network operators and for developers building on top of the network at each step before moving to new versions.
- Client logging update — we have updated our logging approach to support log levels and sub-levels properly and allow for easy operator filtering.
- Relay request sequencing — we implemented blocking incoming threshold relay requests if the random beacon is currently busy.
- Refactored Distributed Key Generation process removing relay request ID — there can be only one DKG running at a time.
- Improved error logging — now in the case of any failure in a request to the chain, we can recreate entire problematic transaction — this will help us debug failures easier.
- Finished the review of the private testnet deployment code.
- Discussed a final system tests plan — a full catalog of ways to test the system end-to-end before going to mainnet, what kind of perturbations we want to test, and how to simulate them in a controlled way.
Community gifts send-outs
This month Keep team is also sending out some swag for those community members who won contests and have been awesome in helping us with project support, whitepaper translations, and so many other things!
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