Development Update on Verge #28

Swen van Zanten

Published in

vergecurrency

4 min readSep 13, 2019

As far as I know it’s time for the development update again!

Verge Core’s “Roadmap”

Since we had lately released the newest version (V5.3.0) of our shiny codebase, we have seen various performance improvements and several bug fixes compared to V4.

We all know the current state of the art and what has been built on top of Verge, but we also want to keep an eye on what is actually coming in the future of Verge.

Mandatory Stealth Addressing

Yes, you heard right. In order to move forward, we’ll equip the codebase with the capabilities to send funds to stealth addresses by default. We will step-by-step clean up and require stealth addresses by default. So, whenever you generate a new address it will be a stealth-address instead of a standard address. Surely, there will still be the option to generate a standard P2SH address.

That way, stores, exchanges, etc must finally accept and use stealth-addresses by default, which would overall increase the network privacy.

Dandelion++ or Basic Ring Signatures

This topic is still up to discussion, but both are sender protecting algorithms which are making it harder for people to walk through the imaginary network graph and find the original sender of the transaction. Next to this people are already covered by the secure onion solution that is in-depth obfuscating your IP address anyways, but finding the original node is never the less a very risky situation as your node could be leaking some identifying sources (HWID etc).

So, Dandelion++ is a graph obfuscation theory which is quite new and requires a lot of pre-requirements. Shortly put it’s pure advantage is that you only need to change the way the network communicates with each other, which is way easier than integrating Ring Signatures.

Ring Signatures, on the other hand, have way fewer requirements must be well-understood to really secure the network and thus bring a lot of complexity into the codebase. (+ additional transaction information must be carried, maybe even a hard-fork)

That’s why we are currently re-evaluating, which path we want to go.

Hardfork Schedule

halving update, new difficulty update

Well as part of the final clean-ups that have been made against our old V4 codebase, we have realized that our proof-of-work algorithms are not up to today’s standards. Bitcoin has huge difference and other comparable blockchain projects have moved far away from older approaches that’s why we will most certainly (TBD) upgrade to the latest difficulty system originally introduced by DigiByte and it’s development team. Thank you giving us the opportunity to have a look under the hood of DigiByte. ❤️

Additionally, to those changes there will also be new halving schedules coming to the newest codebase, which will turn out in a new 7-year-plan that will keep on covering miners with rewards. The upcoming halving (within the new plan) would be at block 3.8M.

Disclaimer: Those goals are not sorted in any particular order.

Last android update [not really]

I scared you, huh? Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. To make it simple, I am now entering in the most hideous part of the project, linking vDroid (the Android Wallet) to VWS.

I’m spending some time on learning how to setup and use the infrastructure and I’d rather take my time, than rush in a copy-paste marathon and not be able to debug whatever errors that could occur upon release. So, you’ll hear from me occasionally, but don’t expect regular Android updates until it’s done.

While I’m playing around Bitcore, Sevco, again, contributed to the wallet by adding the Transaction details view, as you can see here:

Sevco has been helping around with the wallet for a while now and I want you guys to show him the support from our community. So, feel free to tip him a coffee here:

XVG: D5FTDd9qDpa8gt1VzPQutj3Uvoc2TjwpVo

He’s also made a couple of changes on the backend by encrypting the shared preferences. This basically allows on rooted devices to not get sensitive data (seed) stolen.