Witnet Monthly Report — July 2019
Testnet-4 is almost ready, the first prototype of the Ethereum bridge is already running on Ropsten, our Solidity libraries are already in the making and we released impressive advancements on cryptography. This team is on fire!
If this is your first time visiting our monthly updates, welcome! For some general background on Witnet and our technology, please read this 3 minute primer, take a look at our whitepaper, or check out our project’s “must-reads” digest.
🏗️ Development Update
Testnet-4 is just around the corner and will see the light in a few days. This is a huge milestone for Witnet, as this testnet will be the first with bridging capabilities. What does that mean? Long story short: Witnet is already connected to Ethereum. As soon as we release our Solidity libraries — conveniently packaged into a Truffle box —any Ethereum developer will be able to make their contracts use Witnet to retrieve and aggregate data from any external source.
This Witnet Testnet-4 brings us closer than ever to the eventual release of the Witnet Mainnet late this year:
- The development of the Witnet<>Ethereum bridge is moving at the speed of light, and a preliminary version has already been deployed on Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet.
- The Wallet backend now exposes a method for generating new addresses in your wallets, which is already available through the Sheikah desktop app.
- We implemented three new methods in the JSON-RPC API of the witnet-rust node that conveniently allow for getting the node’s public key, signing any kind of message using ECDSA and producing VRF proofs for any message too.
- Alike to Bitcoin, we implemented a bucketing system that ensures that each Witnet node’s peer connections cannot be monopolized by an attackant, thus preventing dangerous denial-of-service and double-spend attacks:
- We published our own Solidity library for Elliptic Curve Cryptography. A lot of attention was put to make this the most efficient and well-tested Solidity EC library to date:
- We also released the first Verifiable Random Function (VRF) library written in Solidity. VRFs enable secret cryptographic sortition, decentralized workload distribution and provably secure commit-reveal schemes useful for voting and many incentive-based protocols. With this library, any Ethereum developer can build those features into their own contracts:
- We reflected on why decentralization is vital for the future of this project, and showcased the most remarkable actions and policies we have adopted in our path to embracing radical decentralization:
- We also kickstarted the development of a new component inside the Witnet ecosystem: our own Truffle box. This will enable any Ethereum developer to create Witnet data requests using Javascript and easily include those into their Solidity contracts by simply running
npm run compile. In this example, we are querying the USD price of a bitcoin from three different APIs, remove any outliers and then average the values into a single data point:
- Last but not least, we spent some time researching a method that will give us a 2X boost in critical parts of our protocol that require many elliptic curve operations:
👏 New contributors and bounties
We have kept publishing bounties on the Gitcoin platform, which is a great way to reward the effort of open source contributors.
We are taking this opportunity to remind the community that we are running the Witnet Summer of Code program, through which the Witnet Foundation will be funding and mentoring students who want to contribute to the Witnet ecosystem by creating open source software during the summer months:
Are you interested in contributing to the development of witnet-rust? We would be thrilled to have you! Visit our new contributing guide and development guide for more info!
We are also extremely interested and receptive to anyone curious about building a separate implementation of the Witnet protocol. Have a favorite language you’d like to try to build Witnet with? Let us know and we’ll be happy to support you!
💜 Team
The Stampery Labs team — which was commissioned by Witnet Foundation to develop witnet-rust and Sheikah —has been pleased to welcome two new brilliant and enthusiastic members (María and Claudia), who respectively joined the front-end and research efforts. We will introduce them to the community in the following weeks through a team interview. Really looking forward to read their own views on the future project!
If you want to be involved in Witnet make sure to check the open positions, including a new Growth Lead/Developer’s Advocate role based in Madrid.
