November Roundup

Published in

Keep Network

5 min readDec 11, 2019

Keep’s EIPs in Istanbul, Cross-Chain Group tBTC demo in NYC (membership applications are open!), tBTC and Beacon tech updates, and new team members

🎉 Istanbul hard fork

Istanbul upgrade goes live on Ethereum — The Block

Ethereum has undergone a hard fork, dubbed “Istanbul,” in which six distinct upgrades have been added to the network at…

www.theblockcrypto.com

Ethereum has successfully completed the Istanbul hard fork. It brings six new Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to life. We’re happy to say two of those were contributed to and developed by the Keep team. These EIPs help to improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain and were driven by a desire to improve interactions with private data on Ethereum:

EIP-152: Adds Blake2 compression function F precompile. This EIP will enable the BLAKE2b hash function and other higher-round 64-bit BLAKE2 variants to run cheaply on the EVM, allowing easier interoperability between Ethereum and Zcash as well as other Equihash-based PoW coins,
EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs because elliptic curve arithmetic precompiles are currently overpriced. Re-pricing the precompiles will greatly assist a number of privacy and scaling solutions 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

✈️ Conferences

Liquidity: The Final Frontier, Nov 13

How does DeFi mature and scale?

Cryptocurrency-denominated financial products such as derivatives, yield curves, and coupon bonds, are mainly being built atop ERC20s. As a result, current DeFi protocols and ventures are likely to run into the same issue: liquidity.

tBTC’s trustless bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum will increase liquidity and value flowing into DeFi, allowing crypto-denominated products to expand into markets traditionally dominated by fiat.

At the event, there was a tBTC demo presented by the Cross-Chain Group, and a panel with Tezos, Cosmos Network, and Keep Network, where folks held in-depth talks focused on interoperability and scaling DeFi.

📣 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!

📣 Learn more and apply for membership here.

🎉 Team Updates

We are super excited to introduce Sloan Thompson, our Head of DevOps.

Sloan is passionate about bridging operations and engineering practices, providing robust infrastructure, systems, and meaningful engineering experience.

Prior to Keep, Sloan worked in the process industry supply chain, helping to bring aging systems and processes into today’s IT landscape.

Sloan has been working for Thesis, the parent company of Keep, for just over a year, and is now helping us on the staking front, getting network participants up and running as we march towards public testnet.

⚒ Tech Updates

Random Beacon:

Progressing on optimizing the cost of the beacon,
Configured the deployment of the staking dApp to our internal testnet,
Implemented support for switching MetaMask accounts in the staking dApp,
Implemented a retransmission layer on a top of libp2p PubSub to increase the delivery rate of network messages,
Finished research work on authorizations in the upgrade scheme,
Updated go-ethereum and libp2p dependencies to the most recent version,
Group size for random number generation increased to 64 members,
Set up the infrastructure for Ropsten contract deployment, the deployment mechanism is working, we have a full node synced with the network.

tBTC:

Plugged the redemption dApp into tBTC contracts, working through bugs,
Finished work on the redemption workflow implementation,
Began work on keep tECDSA key generation,
Started introducing changes to tBTC contracts to support the last tBTC v1 feature, Optionally Locked Deposits,
Started looking ahead to what v2 of tBTC will look like,
Planned remaining work through mainnet.

Yellowpaper audits

We are continually getting reviews of our Random Beacon specs, and are very appreciative of every comment. You can find the still-evolving draft of the yellowpaper here. Do reach out in our Slack if you have questions or suggestions!

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!

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