January Development Update
Happy New Years! This marks the first development update of 2020, and it’s been a busy year already. This year promises to be an exciting one for the Ren project, with the much anticipated release of Mainnet SubZero. We have hit the ground running this year, and a lot has been achieved in January.
In preparation for the fast approaching Mainnet SubZero release, we have been focused on tighter testing iterations, more open-source repositories, and more documentation.
Let’s jump straight in.
RenVM
- RenJS was completed and released. It is a low-level library for third-party developers to use when building user-interfaces, command-line tools, and bots to interact with RenVM.
- GatewayJS has been completed, and we are gathering feedback on its UX from different people throughout the DeFi community before its release. This will allow third-party developers to quickly build safe user-interfaces that offer a fully integrated and native BTC experience for their users. It is currently being integrated into the ChaosDEX as a demonstration, alongside other examples and tutorials that will be released as part of a stand-alone blog (coming soon!).
- The first draft of the RZL sMPC paper is now at a stage where it is ready for auditing and we are beginning the scoping for this audit. When the Hyperdrive audit is completed, our team will hand this over for formal auditing. Once publicly verified by our auditors, it will give us and those who plan on utilizing RenVM full confidence in the correctness of the core execution engine within RenVM.
- Began the development of the next major version of Lotan: a chaos testing framework for RenVM. This new version of Lotan uses the RenJS library to run fuzz tests, load tests, crash tests, and backwards compatibility tests against RenVM. By using RenJS, it also helps us find any bugs that might exist in the RenJS library. Lotan can run tests against local and remote deployments of RenVM, making our testing cycles faster and more comprehensive. This is the final stage of testing for RenVM before Mainnet SubZero.
Smart contracts
- We added the new Protocol smart contract. It offers easy lookup and configuration of the on-chain smart contracts that are used by RenVM. This makes deploying different versions of RenVM to different networks easier, faster, and less error-prone. This will be utilised heavily by our testing frameworks and should improve the third-party developer experiences.
Other
- We have begun migrating our project management to GitHub in preparation for more open-source contributions to Ren project, and a more transparent development issues/milestones. We have also released more detailed documentation on our Wiki and encourage everyone to give us their ideas/feedback/criticisms on GitHub Issues (a new place for long form and persistent discussions about the design of RenVM).
- We have started to refactor some of our codebase into smaller open-source repositories. This makes more of our codebase available to the public, and breaks them down into smaller, easier to understand, components. This month, we released surge (simple and efficient binary marshaling) and bound (collections that prevent accidental memory leaks).
- We are continuing to gather members of the Ren Alliance, and participants for the semi-decentralised core that will secure RenVM during Mainnet SubZero and Zero while it gains adoption and achieves economic stability. Interested in using RenVM, or supporting it by participating in the semi-decentralised core? Come join the alliance!
- Part of the team will be attending ETHDenver in February, so if you plan on being there be sure to come and say hello!
With the final stages of testing underway, we are getting closer to a stable and secure deployment of RenVM that is worthy of the name Mainnet SubZero. Now that the Hyperdrive audit is well underway, the RZL sMPC audit is ready for scoping, and no unexpected issues have been encountered, we are more confident than ever that nothing can stand in our way.
This year will be the year of RenVM.
— Loong Wang, CTO, Ren
