Weekly Dev Update #4

THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 12 Aug — 18 Aug 2019

Overview

BEPSwap Development

The team are working on 5 parallel streams of effort to deliver BEPSwap, which remains the primary focus.

1. Cosmos-powered SDK StateChain
2. Cross-chain infrastructure
3. Threshold Signature Scheme implementation
4. Front-end Integration for BEPSwap
5. Other development activities

The theme of the week was to deliver the MVP Frontend, integrate the Observer & Signer with the Statechain and deploy the TSS signer to a networked environment.

StateChain

• Remove Coin Keeper from codebase
• Add minimum refund value
• Cleanup restful end points && fix pathing of GET endpoints
• Connect Swap / Unstake MEMO with real logic
• Add RUNE tickers for Mainnet and Testnet
• Make price target and destination address optional in MEMO
• New transaction types: GAS and ADD
• Change precision of withdrawals to Basis Points

Cross-chain Infra

• Single-signer logic complete
• Scanner and Socket updates
• Create, Swap, Stake MEMO parsing
• Block Scanner updates
• Split Observer and Signer logic
• Add CI/CD for auto-deploy to testnet env
• Refactors

Threshold Signatures

• Deployed TSS signer to a remote network on AWS to prepare for testnet.
• Benchmark and test for continuous multi-send transactions — signing speed at 2 seconds.

TSS signing completed on a 2–3 second cycle

Front-end Integration

• Complete front-end MVP: Swap, Stake and Trade pages
• Finalise all components.
• Prepare for API integration.

Sneak Peak video:

THORChain Announcements

Other Development

The team discovered massive engagement on the THORChain telegram bot so have began refactoring the codebase to be compatible with all BEPSwap partner projects. The upcoming BEP2Bot will be a bot that allows BEP2 project teams to deliver news and alerts to their communities, allow BEP2 token tipping and more. This is part of the community and business development side of BEPSwap.

THORChain

THORChain’s bridging infrastructure is heavily dependant on the success of the TSS implementation on BEPSwap. Whilst the focus for BEPSwap is on user experience (signing speed) the focus for THORChain will be on decentralisation. This is because THORChain will maintain asset pegs, whilst BEPSwap simply manages asset movement.

With current benchmarking, the team have observed a minimally byzantine fault tolerant network has a signing speed that will meet BEPSwap expectations. THORChain’s bridges will cross to blockchains that have up to 10 minute block times so a TSS signing ceremony that takes up to a minute would be acceptable. At this stage it looks like a 15 of 21 of 27 bridge set would be adequate in both expected decentralisation and performance.

Part of THORChain’s Bifröst Protocol is allowing users to choose their own security/performance tradeoffs, so it is possible that some bridges may have smaller signer sets, but others will have much larger. This simply comes down to the value of assets held. The design of the Bifröst Protocol is that all bridges begin with the minimum signing set, and as assets accumulate, the signing participants will increase to ensure that the value of the staked assets (and number of participants) always exceeds the value of pegged assets.

Upcoming

This week has the following activities planned:

• Statechain: deploy a testnet environment
• Cross-chain infra: deploy a transaction spammer that mimics user activity
• Frontend: build API spec
• Bep2Bot: prepare for community launch

Timelines

The team are working for these milestones. These timelines are indicative, but it is important for the team to deliver with high productivity and constant community feedback.

Other Development:

• RUNEVault: July 2019 shipped
• Telegram Bot: August 2019 shipped
• Bep2Bot: August 2019 addition

BEPSwap:

The team have decided to factor in 4 weeks of September for auditing the code, thus mainnet will be pushed back to October.

• Testnet: August 2019 on-time
• Audit: September 2019 added
• Mainnet: October 2019 pushed back 4 weeks

THORChain:

• Testnet: Q1 2020 on-time
• Mainnet: Q2-Q3 2020on-time

Community

To keep up to date, please monitor community channels, particularly Telegram and Twitter:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thorchain_org
• Telegram Community: https://t.me/thorchain_org
• Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/thorchain
• Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/thorchain
• Github: https://github.com/thorchain
• Medium: https://medium.com/thorchain