Development Update #4–04.17.2019

Published in

State Channels

2 min readApr 17, 2019

In our last update we released the Playground, a live demonstration of generalized state channels built using Counterfactual.

In the days since, we’ve re-grouped and made plans for the next development cycle. The core objectives of this cycle are documentation, simplification, and communication.

🏗 Open Source Development Process

Now that the Playground is launched, we’re trying to make more and more of our development process happen publicly.

Project management for Counterfactual now takes place through Github issues, where we encourage submissions and contributions from the open source ethereum development community.

Our goal is to get our process to a place where it is easy for new contributors to join the project, get up to speed on current development objectives, and effectively contribute to Counterfactual.

📝 Documentation updates:

Made progress on a “Getting started” guide that will be released soon
Made progress on building a Counterfactual “Truffle Box” that will give developers a “boilerplate” Counterfactual dapp to get started faster

⚙️ Development updates:

We enabled CREATE2 support in our contracts with a pull request to remove the need for any contract deployments at all — PR to be merged soon
Significant work on a custom build of MetaMask that embeds the Counterfactual node to support channels on all websites if you have MetaMask installed
Exploratory work beginning on making it easier to add new asset types using a simple “interpreter” pattern
Significant work to simplify the Node’s router / request-handling logic to re-use a more standardized JSON-based API used in other parts of the project

📣 Media & Appearances

Nima Vaziri appeared on POV Crypto #43 to talk state channels with David Hoffman
Liam Horne appeared on Hashing it Out #40 to talk about Layer 2, state channels, and the future of Counterfactual
Erik Bryn & Liam Horne presented at the SF Ethereum Developer’s meetup on April 1 (Video)
Liam Horne attended EDCON in Sydney, Australia April 11–13, where he gave a talk about Counterfactual (video to come).
Attending ETHCapeTown this week? We’ll be there, come say hi!

More coming soon

Stay tuned for more updates soon!

If you’re interested in following along, or getting involved, you can follow on GitHub or talk to us on Discord.