Release 1: Proxima Centauri
Before we dive into the release details for this month, it’s important we clarify our mission, and explain why we mix foundational work with experiments each release.
Transmute is a decentralized app engine for enterprise development teams. We’re not only making hybrid infrastructure easy for developers; we’re also providing the frameworks, tooling and support services that make building on hybrid infrastructure fast, safe and easy for companies. To support this, we split our focus between infrastructure and framework development.
With this in mind, here’s the scoop on our progress for June 2018.
Federated Identity
While blockchain and decentralized software offer many benefits to businesses and their customers, one of the key challenges is the onboarding process. At Transmute, we believe in bringing apps to users — not the other way around. Currently, technologies like OpenID, OAuth, and LDAP are widely used for managing user and customer identities. Meanwhile, identity providers that have massive user bases [ike Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.] offer users the option to reuse these accounts when registering for a service instead of creating yet another email and password credential pair.
Transmute is building solutions that make it easy for centralized identity providers to support decentralized self sovereign identity.
Decentralized and Centralized Identity
We expanded on the basic authentication and registration for decentralized identities foundation we built last month, adding support for DID registration and recovery to the Transmute API. The Transmute API is our bridge to identity infrastructure providers like Okta and Auth0 — both popular for their integrations with social identity providers and corporate infrastructure.
At the Austin Ethereum Meetup, we demonstrated a decentralized directory built with PGP, LDAP, Ethereum and IPFS — one of the more experimental efforts this release.
Transmute CLI Improvements
The Transmute CLI is an open source tool for configuring hybrid infrastructure. Its job is to make Kubernetes and microservice development simple for developers, which is an enormous feat in and of itself. We’ve learned a lot about what building on state-of-the-art virtualization and containerization solutions means, and we’re excited to continue developing our CLI to help make decentralized application development portable and easy. This will includes a rework of the CLI as our vision solidifies, but this release we are focused on local development with Minikube.
Network Smart Contracts
Transmute’s vision is to build decentralized cloud infrastructure that is compatible with public cloud providers including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as bare metal. To date, we’ve been exclusively focused on the centralized side, but this month we launched the smart contract development needed to support our vision for hybrid infrastructure. We’ve stepped up our integration work with TrueBit, began developing our Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) smart contracts [following closely the work of Livepeer, while keeping a keen eye on the challenges faced by similar systems like EOS and Lisk]. You can read more about our approach in our whitepaper.
Decentralized Messaging with IPFS
We’ve been huge fans of IPFS for a while now, and this month we’ve begun adding support for decentralized messaging built on IPFS. Many applications require some form of a messaging system, and if you are using a storage system such as IPFS or Swarm, you will likely also need messaging support at some point. Here our goal is to demonstrate how decentralized identity can integrate with centralized identity providers and decentralized messaging infrastructure. We’ve built some simple proof-of-concepts in order to comprehend what is most valuable for developers, and we plan to incorporate the feedback we’ve gotten from the community into our framework.
Block Explorer
Transmute uses MetaMask a lot, and we love it! One of our favorite things about MetaMask is its ability to connect to local and private Ethereum networks. There are many cases where an application is essentially a joint between a block explorer and an external database. The application combines data from both to provide detail about transactions and accounts in the system. We’ve developed a block explorer that uses MetaMask to assist with this use case. Some of its core feature include: standalone hosting on Github Pages (no server required), uses MetaMask for easily switching networks.
Transmute Framework Starter Kit
We’ve released a new create-react-app based dapp starter kit. It uses Truffle, the Transmute Framework and create-react-app to demonstrate how to build dapps with Ethereum and IPFS. Support for Github Pages deployments and MetaMask is included.
Transmute Helm Charts Repo
As part of our infrastructure development, we’re pleased to announce our helm charts repo. This is where we will provide custom helm charts for deploying hybrid infrastructure to Kubernetes.
Product Roadmap
Many of you have asked us about our high level roadmap, so we took some time to condense our whitepaper to the major technical milestones and put it to a monthly timeline. We’re proud to share our monthly release plans for getting to a feature complete Transmute Platform Alpha in 2018. We’re keenly aware of the massive learning curves ahead, so this plan is subject to change. We’ve released the birds eye view through December 2018 on our corporate website, and we’re committed to updating it monthly to keep you all informed of our progress.
