Development Update November 25th
Last week Radu talked about how we approach account creation and how we fetch balance for all tokens, if you missed out, have a read here.
This week we worked on transferring funds, add and edit networks and transaction history.
But first things first:
Chainless Backends
I want to start by adding something to the comment Radu made last week about the way we need to fetch balance on the Kadena Blockchain. Moving away from having to send a request to each chain, for example to get balance for token(s), should be high priority for all DApps (especially for mobile wallets).
Network activity is detrimental for battery life, so limiting your network activity on mobile needs to be a top priority, and having to send at least 1 request per chain is extremely inefficient.
An indexing service where you can get this data with 1 network request would be an extremely useful and important improvement and absolutely necessary with scalability in mind.
Chainless Design
Chainless design is hard, as there basically are no good proven examples for what works and what doesn’t in hiding the Kadena infrastructure. Raul Canta, in charge of the design and user experience, will go deeper into this next week.
I would like to call on fellow developers to stop forcing your users to getting used to the multi chain architecture. It may look somewhat harmless at this point, but this will lead to the worst user experience once Kadena scales to 50, 100 or higher amounts of chains.
Make the effort in presenting a chainless experience, we are open to help any DApp in coming up with a good infrastructure to be ‘chainless’, though a wallet can take a huge part in this.
With this I would like to refer to an issue I opened for the chainweb signing-api. Here I propose an option to let the wallet handle network communications so the DApp does not have to deal with accounts, and their balances and multi step transactions. https://github.com/kadena-io/signing-api/issues/18
One thing is for certain, as we want Linx to be the best experience you can have for interacting with Kadena, we will create an indexing service (at least) for Linx Accounts.(if there is no good solution available at launch)
A quick leak: We will support signing continuation transactions in the beta, and will inform DApps close to beta release how to make use of it for all your beloved NFT trading. Be aware that a WalletConnect V2 Client implementation will be necessary, so prepare…
Transferring funds
We apply the chainless approach in transferring funds as well. Of course there is still an option for users who need or want full control.
Simply said, Linx will decide what chain to use and to what chain(s) it will send unless you don’t want that.
Problems we encountered for a long time in wallets are the missing ability to drain your wallet to exactly 0, to send other tokens than KDA without having KDA for gas, or send from multiple chains in 1 effort. With Linx these issues are gone. You can drain any token to exactly 0 and you never have to think about having KDA on certain chains, or have KDA at all. With Linx you pay for gas in the token you are transferring or swapping.
Networks
A nice feature to have is the ability to change networks. This way you can easily switch to testnet or connect to your own mainnet, testnet or devnet node.
Adding a network is as easy as entering the url of your node and give it a name.
What’s next
Though transferring is not 100% fleshed out so far, we will work on finishing this next week as we proceed with signing transactions and finishing up the transaction history. Still a lot to do, but so far we are making serious progress.
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Cheers!
Floppie
