Keep Network October Roundup
Expanding the team, DevCon5, Cross-Chain Group Developer Workshop at SFBW, tBTC demo in NYC and more…
🎉 Welcoming our new team member
We’re excited to welcome Carolyn Reckhow to the team! She comes to us from Casa, where she served as head of operations and client services. Previously, Carolyn was director of operations at ConsenSys, the industry’s first and largest blockchain venture studio.
She joins Thesis, the parent company of Keep as head of business strategy, charged with growing adoption of tBTC and bringing BTC to DeFi.
“It’s rare to find someone who knows both Bitcoin and Ethereum as well as Carolyn does. We’re excited to have someone join the team who is a well respected operator that has also been in the space for a long time”, said Matt Luongo, Thesis CEO.
This month, Carolyn was named one of the 11 most influential women in crypto by Decrypt.
✈️ Conferences
Devcon 5, Oct 8–11
In October, several members of the Keep team were off to Devcon5 in Osaka, where they presented a few events.
James Prestwich of Summa, and our partner at the Cross-Chain Group, held a tBTC talk at defi.wtf.
On the main stage at Devcon, Matt Luongo introduced tBTC as a novel mechanism for Improving the Federated 2-way Peg: A New Sidechain Design for Trustless Bridges on Ethereum. Check out the video here.
You can also find the Twitter version of the talk by following the link below.
Also on October 11th, Matt Luongo spoke on a panel about key management, and Matt and James together hosted a live tBTC design session.
Cross-chain interoperability in action — tBTC demo in NYC, Oct 17
Keep Network attended a collaborative “Building a Bitcoin/USD Yield Curve” event with UMA, Uniswap, and yTokens, which included a live demo.
Jarrell James from Keep spoke about the latest developments in creating tBTC — an ERC20 token for Bitcoin that doesn’t rely on centralized custodians. Dan Robinson from Paradigm presented his latest whitepaper on creating a yield curve for digital assets, Yield Protocol. UMA tied it together with a live demo that uses tBTC and UMA technology to create a BTC/USD yield curve with yTokens, that trade on Uniswap. Uniswap is a protocol for automated token exchange. Check out the summary of this event by David Gogel.
San Francisco Blockchain Week, Oct 31; Cross-Chain Group Developer Workshop, Nov 1
Keep was a sponsor of San Francisco Blockchain Week with several members of the Keep team there to represent. On Friday at SFBW Epicenter, Antonio Salazar Cardozo and James Prestwich from the Cross-Chain Group took the audience on a “wild ride through the past, present, and future of blockchain interoperability” and discussed some of the strengths and limitations of current cross-chain communication methods as well as plans for the future.
James Prestwich also presented a deep dive into Stateless SPVs and led a workshop on verifying Bitcoin transactions in Solidity. Check out the workshop’s GitHub repo here.
Don’t forget to follow the Cross-Chain Group on its fresh Twitter account ☺️
📇 Our press page is live!
Our press page is now live on the website, where you can find a media kit if you want to write about us, or find press mentions about Keep Network if you want to read about us! Check it out here.
For press inquiries, please contact us at social@keep.network ✉️
⚒ Tech Updates
Random Beacon:
- Support is now there for multiple bootstrap peers,
- The remaining pieces of candidate group member selection have been completed,
- We completed work on slashing RFC — a document describing what kind of misbehavior will be punished by the network and how,
- Most of the beacon pricing implementation is ready,
- We prepared gas cost optimizations for group ticket submission protocol,
- Finished work on securing broadcast channel for DKG execution; only stakers selected to the group can publish to the channel,
- Implemented additional tests to make sure no duplicate group candidate tickets can be submitted,
- Improved the execution time of our solidity tests, we are about two times faster,
- Made progress on preparing for a public testnet release from the infrastructure side, and
- We provided a bugfix to go-ethereum gas estimate code.
tBTC:
- Implemented a preliminary signer selection process, allowing different signers in the system for different deposits,
- Made great strides on a redemption dApp that allows redeeming a TBTC deposit for its original BTC holdings,
- Started working on a design system to accompany the open-source release of tBTC,
- Reorganized JS to reduce cyclical dependencies,
- Merged Uniswap on-chain liquidation pathway,
- Zeroed in on a minimum feature set for a v1 release, and
- There was a great tBTC review done by Deribit Exchange last month. We keep looking for hole-poking and questions about the design mechanism and anything else you might have in mind. Just hit us up on Twitter or Slack.
📣 We have been sending out some gifts for our most active community members, stay on the lookout for new competitions to get yours! If you are interested in translating the docs or organizing a meetup — hit up Elizabeth on Slack!
We hope you enjoyed the article! Please click the 👏 button and share to help others find it. Join our Slack to discuss this further with the Keep team, or leave a comment below!
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
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.
