Keep Network June Roundup
Conferences, team additions, Proof of Work newsletter, and more…
Matt Luongo on the Baselayer Podcast
Base Layer podcast by David Nage simplifies complex projects and technology, from blockchain interoperability, to relayers, and more. David explores who is building the future, why, and how they are doing it.
David invited our Project Lead, Matt, to join the podcast and discuss privacy, interoperability, and the blockchain space as a whole. Listen to the episode to hear Matt discuss how Keep started, tangible use cases, zero-knowledge proofs, and the upcoming mainnet launch.
You can listen to this episode on iTunes, PodBean or Spotify. Thanks for the great chat, David!
EIP-2129, bringing Zcash and Ethereum closer
Last month, Matt Luongo adapted EIP-152 into a full-fledged EIP, and Tech Lead Piotr Dyraga built an implementation of it to push the EIP to be included into the next Ethereum hard fork. The goal of this EIP is to provide a minimal version of Blake2b support as a precompile in Ethereum.
We are excited to say that during Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #63, it was accepted into Istanbul, which is a significant boon for the cross-chain ecosystem.
CogX, London
Last month we also have attended the CognitionX, the Festival of AI and Emerging Technology in London.
Our Ecosystem Growth & Innovation Lead Jarrell James spoke at the privacy panel with other experts — Tom Pocock from AZTEC team and Arjun Hassard from NuCypher. Panel was moderated by Christina Frankopan, Venture Partner, Fabric Ventures.
They discussed adoption challenges, inherently bad actors with centralized companies, secure multi-party computation & real-life, tangible use cases, how data is stored and shared from a centralized corporate perspective and more. Enjoy the video recording of the panel discussion below.
Zcon1, Croatia
Keep Project Lead, Matt Luongo, attended Zcon1 in Croatia last month, put on by the ZCash Foundation. This is an annual conference is focused on projects who are working on building privacy infrastructure for public good.
Matt and James Prestwich, the summa.one founder, together held a workshop on “Toward Cross-Chain Interoperability with Zcash” at the event.
“By 2020 I think we will actually get pegged sidechain, so there is an economic interop between Ethereum and Zcash (and possibly between other blockchains and ZCash). This is one of my favorite things that we are currently working on.” — zooko mentioned in this video.
You can check out the recording of the event on the Zcash Foundation’s YouTube channel.
Team Updates
We are very excited to welcome the newest member of the Keep team, Liam Zebedee!
Liam is a creative technologist and writer from Australia. Diagnosed with diabetes at 10, programming since 11, he is strongly rooted in the human-centredness of technology and design. He loves deep diving into research from subjective logic to the anthropology of value, and is driven by a keen instinct to reduce, understand and apply. Outside of work he balances on slacklines, confuses Dutch people, and can’t help but be a bit chaotic neutral.
Tech Updates
In order to provide a more in-depth look into our engineering team’s progress, we have stared a ‘Tech Updates’ secion. Here are the latest highlights:
- Private testnet up and running
- Stake delegation is done!
- Implemented a network node bootstrap mechanism
- We finished a token grant RFC that supersedes earlier vesting and slashing designs.
- We finished the Keep network application interface RFC 🎉 providing for a consistent interface for third-party developers.
- Callbacks for relay entries — as an application developer you can specify what contract and what function should be invoked when your relay entry is ready.
- Implemented support for concurrently running relay requests
- Command-line interface for calling smart contract functions — it’s used primarily for development purposes — we can call any function from our smart contracts from the command line, and execute view functions in previous blocks’ context, it’s very helpful for debugging purposes.
- We finished work on client group membership state management. All client state is now stored on disk encrypted. You can restart the client and everything will be loaded into the memory. In the case of a hard restart that could corrupt client state, the client dumps diagnostics for further debugging.
- We’re getting close to a complete upgrade system for contracts. The approach balances ease of maintenance with user and staker consent.
For a more detailed discussion of the progress, come join our Slack.
We are now also being listed in the Proof Of Work newsletter, look out for those in your inbox, or subscribe! Check out the last update here.
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