Release 2: Alpha Centauri A
For those of you wondering how our roadmap aligns with our whitepaper, this release and and the dev work done during the month of July, are for you! We’re excited to share our third monthly release! Lots of progress to share, let’s dive right in.
Network Contracts
Our lead smart contract developer, Guillaume, has done some excellent work this month on our Ethereum smart contracts, adding tests, and building towards integration tests for our decentralized cloud architecture. We’ve learned a lot from following Livepeer’s progress on their DPOS system, and have added lots of unit and integration tests. We’re continuing to add tests to develop a clearer picture of how DPOS can be used with TrueBit to secure computations done off chain.
API Revamp
We have a rest API that is still private, but we’ve made a number of steps towards making it public, thanks to Rommel, our lead API developer. Our API is designed to connect centralized services external to K8s to internal decentralized services and local development tools. As part of this work, we’ve simplified the API build process, added swagger, improved our unit tests, reorganized internal libraries to support faster, more modular development.
TrueBit Toolchain
TrueBit is critical to providing proof of computations, and this release, we’re pleased to have contributed significantly to the TrueBit Toolchain. The toolchain is a docker image used to compile C code to TrueBit flavored WASM, such that executions can be verified via the webasm-solidity.
TrueBit and Livepeer are both working hard to show how external computation can help provide scaling solutions for Ethereum, and the TrueBit OS will soon provide a simple interface for exploring TrueBit. Many projects, such as Livepeer, Golem and Transmute rely on TrueBit for verified computation in their whitepapers. Transmute is thrilled to be able to help contribute to TrueBit, and in so doing help not just ourselves, but other Ethereum based projects eager to apply secure off-chain computation to real world problems such as video transcoding and rendering.
Bootstrap and CLI
In order to run the transmute platform locally, some global dependencies are required, as well as the Transmute CLI. Previously, we’ve used a lot of BASH to get this done, but we’re pleased to have added ansible playbooks to our toolchain to support complex installation and configuration of software in a standard and modular way. This is really doing to help us keep our CLI clean, while giving us lots of flexibility and opportunities for integrations and extensions of the existing Ansible ecosystem. This work has been supported in large part by one of our preferred development partners, Consider It Done. We’ve worked together to develop custom solutions on top of the Transmute Platform, and they are skilled developers with experience developing blockchain applications that integrate web and mobile technologies with modern cloud infrastructure on Azure, AWS and GCP. We’re excited to continue to work together to make Transmute the tool developers reach for when building application PoCs.
IPFS PubSub Messaging
We’ve explored decentralized messaging solutions on top of IPFS. We learned that IPFS has some features that are awesome that not many people know about.
We’re planning to use what we have learned about IPFS pub sub to help support layer 2 solutions such as state channels, and our truebit integration in the future. This work is just starting, but IPFS continues to be an exciting technology to work with.
Mayor’s Challenge Blockchain Hackathon
We love hackathons. We built a biometric Ethereum and bitcoin compatible wallet with Azure cognitive services for facial recognition and OpenPGP.js for key management. The solution itself is not safe, but it was really fun to combine both old and new tech to try and make a key management system that would work for people experiencing homelessness, who can’t guarantee the privacy or security of their phones and have limited ability to remember passwords or use hardware tokens. Hard constraints always create a fun design challenge.
