Portal Update, January 30th, 2022
This update is for informational purposes only. It is solely intended to act as an update of Company plans that may, and are expected, to change based on ongoing legal and regulatory requirements, shifts in the marketplace, input from our communities, as well as internal business developments.
THIS UPDATE DOES NOT PROVIDE ANY GUARANTEES, REPRESENTATIONS, OR WARRANTIES FOR HOW THE FINAL PRODUCT WILL OPERATE, FUNCTIONALITIES IT MAY PROVIDE, OR WHO WILL BE A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE FINAL PRODUCT.
Building distributed systems is hard. Portal has spent the past several months refining our product design, developing core technologies, and establishing new partnerships; today we’re excited to share some of our plans and progress with you.
As censorship pressure grows and monetary inflation expands, 2022 is going to be a critical year for distributed systems like Bitcoin, the Lightning Network, and the Portal Network as this financial revolution evolves. Those who have been paying attention (for more than a few years) will recognize the opportunity to build new technologies and deploy new infrastructure, and Portal is doing exactly that — carefully adding layers to existing, reliable systems.
Bringing the powerful functionality of Bitcoin’s smart contracts to the average user comes with some ineveitable UX trade-offs, so we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and working on the design, interface, and their privacy implications of our product. Our engineering and product strategy have significantly evolved, so let’s take a look.
Path to Protocol Market Fit
The world is full of “protocols” that no one uses for their primary intended purpose. At Portal, we’ve made the conscious decision to make “protocol market fit” our true north. This determines every major decision we make. This also means that we have to extensively test not just the underlying technology and the infrastructure for reasons of security, privacy, and other technical constraints, but also from a usability and user experience perspective.
Based on this philosophy, we have made the choice to release the Portal client as soon as possible, rolling out access to new applications and features in multiple phases. While the initial release will not include support for the off-chain market, a waitlist feature will be integrated for requesting access to early technology previews — including types of contracts other than cross chain-swaps!
Previous whitelist applicants and community members signed in to either A) our Discord or B) our Telegram will also be added to the list, so make sure to get logged in and verify to receive your invitation.
We are always open to suggestions from the community about the applications, features, and assets you would like to see on Portal. Please reach out to us with ideas in our Telegram or Discord communities.
Technology Roadmap
Phase 1: Portal Client Application
During this phase, on-chain privacy will be our primary focus. Safe & sane defaults can be hard to identify, as current anonymity sets available to the public in many wallets are, in a word, “thin” — something we hope to both broaden and deepen as we work to make these technologies accessible to all. As adoption grows, the anonymity set will expand and the system will become more secure and privacy preserving.
The Portal Client is our first step to bridging the decentralized and centralized crypto ecosystems. It is undergoing intensive testing by our team in a private alpha. As it stands, the Portal Client supports self-custody for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), and will enable the addition of other ERC-20 based assets. We are also making great strides towards our interoperability goals, having completed initial integration with several existing centralized exchanges, and begun initial research into supporting on-chain liquidity markets, such as Uniswap. In addition, bridging centralized exchanges to Defi is easy as the Portal Client provides a seamless, secure bridge between your CEX accounts and self-custody. Integrations currently include Coinbase, Binance, and we are testing a handful of others. These integrations make it seamless and secure to bring your assets into your custody instead of centralized exchanges, while not compromising the functionality the centralized exchanges provide.
Phase 2: Portal Client L2 Support:
Following our initial release of the Portal Client, we’re planning to launch support for Payment Channels on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. This means adding Lightning, and possibly Raiden, to the technology stack, which will form the foundation for the complete off-chain exchange functionality.
While we do have a few other yield-generating features for the Portal Client users in the works, it’s probably best that we keep some things close to the vest. However, we’re happy to share a video of what one of our engineers published showing their work on cross-chain ETH (Ropsten) :ETH(Goerli) pairing, which enables support for trading across Ethereum-like chains.
https://www.loom.com/share/bf89d8cfbb2541ada5023737e32c1e18
Phase 3: Portal Network
Once the peer-to-peer contracting functionality has been tested sufficiently, we’ll begin to roll out the interface elements which will enable initial orders to be created. As we make progress we’ll share information about consensus around network operation, and prepare to press the big green button for an initial test network launch.
What makes Portal unique
The market is awash in centralized exchanges and wallets. What makes Portal’s mission unique is our focus on making peer-to-peer, trust-minimized cross-chain swaps and other contracts fast, cheap, and secure. We plan to expand the types of contracts offered to many other financial applications, as more applications are built on Bitcoin. We are seeing a ton of demand and potential for bitcoin-to-stablecoin options, derivatives, futures, and many other non-security applications as well.
Future plans include support for additional Layer 1 blockchains, both EVM compatible and others, which will enable greater connectivity between liquidity providers while maintaining existing trust relationships with other networks.
As we evaluate where to allocate our resources, we’ll be looking to the community to help decide which integrations and features to invest in. Be sure to join our Discord, Telegram, and Matrix groups to share your suggestions, ideas, and feedback!
Research & Development
Research has been ongoing in testing various forms of both on and off-chain contracts, focused primarily on PTLCs (“Point/Time-Locked Contracts”) and extending support for descriptor wallets. The activation of Taproot on Bitcoin mainnet has enabled the live execution of the privacy-preserving variant of our State Channel implementation, which we plan to deploy as part of Phase 2 of our rollout. We plan to follow up on this with a more extensive post soon.
Fabric Protocol Update
Fabric is nearing completion of the reference implementation, @fabric/core. Soon after will follow a formal specification of the Fabric protocol, over which the Portal “ARC” (“Application Resource Contract”) will execute. Members of the Portal Network will be permitted to participate in network governance through the Portal Client, which will serve as the flagship demonstration of the Fabric Protocol. While we continue work on the Portal Client in a private, closed-source environment, the Fabric Protocol is and always will be open-source, so developers can start prototyping applications & infrastructure now.
Opportunities at Portal
We are aggressively growing our engineering team and recently onboarded 2 Senior Developers who come with deep domain expertise in Bitcoin Script, Solidity, Layer 2 networks like Lightning, and a variety of other blockchain-based technologies. This additional talent will help ensure the safety and integrity of the precision-based software we ship, allowing us to deliver on the precision-based engineering that secure software requires.
Other teams at Portal have had recent additions as well, including both the finance and marketing departments. Multiple roles remain open, so take a look at our job postings on AngelList or LinkedIn.
Looking Forward
We believe Bitcoin is the universal trust anchor upon which true self-sovereignty will be realized — in a time like ours, nothing is more important than putting this powerful technology in the hands of as many people as possible.
We’re excited to be a part of this journey for you, and hope you’ll tune in to future updates as they’re provided!
This update is for informational purposes only. It is solely intended to act as an update of Company plans that may, and are expected to, change based on ongoing legal and regulatory requirements, shifts in the marketplace, input from our communities, as well as internal business developments. THIS UPDATE DOES NOT PROVIDE ANY GUARANTEES, REPRESENTATIONS, OR WARRANTIES FOR HOW THE FINAL PRODUCT WILL OPERATE, FUNCTIONALITIES IT MAY PROVIDE, OR WHO WILL BE A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE FINAL PRODUCT.
