Republic Protocol: R&D Announcement #2

With the first quarter of the year behind us, it is time to take a look at the Republic Protocol Roadmap, and what has been achieved. All of our milestones for the first quarter are complete, and we are already well on our way to finishing our milestones for the second quarter.

In March, we also began the preview of the Darknodes. We have been collecting feedback from our community, and have been making improvements to the operator experience; the biggest being clearer instructions and wider platform support.

Q1 Milestones

All milestones have been successfully completed!

• P2P network
  The P2P network allows traders and Darknodes to discover each other . The official Go implementation of this is completed, and has an extensive test suite.
• Atomic Swaps
  Atomic swaps make up the Republic Protocol settlement layer. Traders are able to swap tokens without needing to trust one another. The official Solidity and Bitcoin implementations are complete. They have test suites, and cross-chain trades have been successfully executed.
• Pools
  Darknodes are organized into pools, to improve the efficiency of the order matching engine by decreasing network complexity, and increasing parallelism. At the same time, random sampling is used to maintain security, and the Ethereum blockchain is used for global convergence on the view of pools. The official Solidity implementation, and official Go reference implementation, are complete and have been deployed during our Darknode preview with great success.
• Registry contracts
  For security, Traders and Darknodes are required to provide a good behavior bond. This provides them with an identity that is used by the P2P network, and Pools, and can be verified by anyone. The Solidity smart contracts are complete, and have extensive test suites.

Q2 Milestones

We have completed many of the milestones set for the second quarter.

• Orderbook
  The Orderbook is completed. It is also no longer implemented using Ethereum smart contracts. This means that the opening and closing of orders in Republic Protocol is not bound by the speed of Ethereum, and can happen as fast as Darknodes can perform the secure multi-party computations. Our research team has been focusing on improving the speed of order matching, with the goal of scaling to thousands of orders per second.
• Secret Sharing & Computation
  Secret sharing, and secure multi-party computations, forms the backbone of Republic Protocol. They were successfully demonstrated early in the first quarter and, since then, have undergone lots of optimization and improvement.
• Official Republic Protocol Darknodes
  The Darknode preview that began in March uses bootstrap Darknodes officially maintained by the Republic Protocol team. These are currently under improvements, based on the results collected from the preview, and will become the bootstrap Darknodes for the Federation Zero Testnet.
• Trading Terminal
  The Trading Terminal is an interface through which Traders can open orders, cancel orders, and settle orders. This is currently under development. Additionally, we are developing a Trading API for easy automated trading which is almost complete.
• Verifiable Secret Sharing
  Verifiable secret sharing, and verifiable secure multi-party computations, is under development and will be deployed into the Federation Zero Testnet once it is completed. It will include a smart contract for slashing the bond of malicious Darknodes.

Other Highlights

• Darknodes can now earn fees in ETH and ERC20s, they are no longer restricted to earning only REN. Likewise, Traders now pay fees in the tokens they are trading. This provides a lower barrier for Traders, and diverse earnings for Darknodes.
• The Hyperdrive consensus engine has been developed for achieving high-speed order matching confirmation (after an order is matched, the match needs to be confirmed). It is capable of confirming thousands of order matches per second. More details about Hyperdrive will be coming in future posts, including its more general application beyond Republic Protocol.

So what happens next?

The Republic Protocol development team is focused on the delivery of the Federation Zero Testnet, which will available to the public this quarter. The preview of the Darknodes was our first step towards this goal.

Our next step is getting our Trading Terminal, and API, into the hands of testers. At the same time, we will be continuing to improve the performance of our order matching engine.

We are looking forward to a productive second quarter, and to the release of the Federation Zero Testnet. I would also like to extend a huge thanks from our development team to our community, for testing, giving feedback, and always being willing to have interesting discussions with us about our work!

— Loong Wang, CTO, Republic Protocol

About Ren

Ren is an ecosystem for unstoppable privacy. Transfer tokens in zero-knowledge, trustlessly swap between blockchains and trade on a dark pool.

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