Keep Network August Roundup
tBTC announcement, hosting Cross-Chain Summit, joining Messari Disclosures Registry, Istanbul contributions, Wyre Podcast, Tech Updates and more
San Francisco Cross- Chain Summit
Last month, the Cross-Chain Group hosted its first-ever summit in San Francisco, which brought together many of the industry’s leading developers. The event was designed as a workshop to present, share, and whiteboard ideas, and to work on common problems in blockchain interoperability. Read more about the event and the projects presented there in this blog post.
“We want other folks to be able to come in, contribute, and help launch this with us.” — Matt Luongo, Keep Project Lead.
Learn more about the Cross-Chain Group in this announcement article.
The Keep Network’s first DApp
During the Cross-Chain Summit, Matt Luongo announced tBTC, the first major app slated to be launched on the Keep Network. tBTC builds on the work token, random beacon, and threshold ECDSA keeps, and is planned to go live shortly after the Keep Network’s initial phase.
Learn more about tBTC:
- Keep’s tBTC announcement article,
- Leigh Cuen’s article on Coindesk,
- tBTC presentation at Cross-Chain Summit article,
- tBTC technical specification draft, and
- Podcast with Matt Luongo and James Prestwich, hosted by the Wyre team.
For an easier navigation, see the podcast summary breakdown here in our Slack.
Privacy and Scaling-Focused EIPs Accepted for Ethereum Istanbul Hard Fork
Two EIPs that our team has been contributing to and developing, 152 & 1108, have been accepted into Istanbul. Both of these EIPs were driven by a desire to improve interactions with private data on Ethereum.
One of the most prohibitive aspects with respect to privacy on Ethereum is the high cost of certain encryption operations, and both EIPs took direct aim at reducing this cost. With these changes, Ethereum will unlock new possibilities around random beacons, private token transfers, private computations, and cross-chain interoperability with Zcash, the foremost privacy-protecting digital currency.
— Antonio Salazar Cardozo, Keep Engineering Lead
Learn how these EIPs will improve the Ethereum blockchain and benefit the broader ecosystem in our recent blog post.
Keep has joined the Messari Disclosures Registry
Along with 10 other crypto projects, Keep has joined the Messari Disclosures Registry. By joining the Registry, projects commit to bringing a higher level of transparency to the crypto asset space through ongoing disclosures. There are now more than 50 projects adhering to the same values and standards.
“The effort is intended to be a collective action to push standards of basic disclosures that should be expected of projects with numerous global stakeholders. We want to allow for honest projects to have a platform to differentiate themselves and build trust with their communities and anyone looking to better understand their project.” — Messari
Read more in Messari’s article and Coindesk’s article.
August Technical Updates
- We announced tBTC, a DApp using Keep’s t-ECDSA technology and long-time effort in conjunction with Summa and the Cross-Chain Group. tBTC is a 1:1 Bitcoin-backed ERC-20 token providing seizure, censorship, and inflation-resistant BTC to Ethereum.
- We finished work on token grants implementation. Grantees of KEEP tokens will receive tokens in gradual transfers. The difference between grant tokens and ordinary liquid tokens is that grant tokens cannot be transferred away from the grant before the ownership is fully transferred according to a vesting schedule.
- We fixed one possible security hole regarding commitments in DKG protocol and seed we used to generate those commitments.
- We added logging of gas costs of all our contract calls from Keep clients.
- Bugfix: uniform distribution of group selection results — fixed bug in group selection protocol; not all groups registered on the chain had the same chance of being selected in the case when we were marking some groups as expired. We fixed this problem and now all groups have the same chance of being selected.
- Group member inactivity test scenarios for DKG protocol — we covered with integration tests all possible scenarios when one or more group members become inactive during distributed key generation protocol. We fixed a couple of minor bugs we discovered along the way to make sure the protocol completes if less than threshold group members become inactive.
- Beacon timeout for a relay entry — if the group selected to produce a new random number does not deliver relay entry on time, we terminate that group and another one is selected to do the work.
- Bugfix: from time to time group members tried to submit their key to the chain but due to a bug in the DKG protocol, during broadcast channel initialization in case of a network glitch, the group size was incorrectly assigned, and DKG result considered as invalid. This is now fixed.
Berlin Blockchain Week
Keep hosted and attended a number of great events during this year’s Berlin Blockchain Week, and we’re preparing a separate post about that, so be on the lookout!
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