MONET Development Update (01/19)

Since our last dev update, we have been focusing on important new features. We implemented a solution to Babble dynamic participants, started using WiFi Direct in our mobile ad-hoc blockchain demo, and built two clients (CLI and GUI) for EVM-Lite (the basis for a TENOM wallet). This has been a long effort of research and experimentation around critical components of the envisioned MONET infrastructure. In this update, we present the progress we made in the last couple of months.

Babble Core

Regarding Babble, our BFT consensus engine, the main focus was on implementing Dynamic Participants, an extension to the original Hashgraph protocol, enabling peers to join a running network dynamically, via consensus, without undermining security. The theoretical solution is rather simple, and the implementation relies heavily on the Hashgraph-to-Blockchain mapping, and FastSync. This work opens the door to a new method of bootstrapping networks, enabling them to be seeded from a single node and grow organically as peers are dynamically added or removed, in line with our vision of mobile ad-hoc blockchains.

Checkout this document for an explanation of the solution. Feel free to add comments to the document directly. This work hasn’t been merged into the master branch yet, because there are still a few things to fix (cf develop branch and Github issues)

TODO

• Remove peers
• Package proofs of peer-set changes

As a fun and useful byproduct, we are also releasing a tool that draws live visualization of a Hashgraph. This has been very useful for debugging, but is also a nice thing to look at. Here’s a capture with 4 nodes:

Or when starting with one node, and using DynamicParticipants to join with another node:

Babble Mobile:

On the mobile front, we have been iterating on our demo application — Chatterbox — and focusing on implementing WiFi Direct to enable devices to form ad hoc blockchains without access to Infrastructure WiFi or cellular connections. This successful experiment tells us that WiFi Direct is a viable link-layer protocol for forming ad hoc blockchains when all participants are in relatively close range; we can use the app internally in the office to chat among ourselves… not very useful, but a gratifying first application of Babble with mobile devices.

The main challenge with WiFi Direct is the lack of support in iOS — so we will have to build a workaround. This should be relatively straightforward since WiFi Direct is ultimately a sophisticated way of setting up one of the phones as a wireless access point.

TODO:

• Build compatible iOS/Android versions of ChatterboxDirect

EVM-Lite Clients

We have also released the first versions of the EVM-Lite clients, a CLI and a GUI.

We split the old evm-lite-client repo into three distinct repos:

• evm-lite-lib: the typescript/javascript libraries used by the two apps to communicate with an evm-lite node
• evm-lite-cli: A CLI wallet allowing to manage accounts and make transfers.
• evm-lite-wallet: An electron-based GUI with the same functionality as the CLI

TODO

• SmartContract support. It is already in evm-lite-lib but needs to be added to the client applications.