February Recap
YouStock, Aura, and Auradex
It’s been a little over a month since the Aura genesis block was mined and things are moving along at a modest pace.
The web wallet and the desktop GUI wallet were both released this month, followed by a few refinements on each. The latest releases can be found at https://auraledger.com/#wallets
A network stats page was set up and the stats bounty has attracted a healthy amount of aura nodes, so thanks to everyone who is participating and to everyone who tried to (apologies to those who had trouble connecting).
The block explorer was enhanced to support transaction history for accounts, in addition to a few performance enhancements and a mining calculator widget. The current price is now displayed on the main page and will be added to the account pages soon.
The discord channel and telegram groups are continuing to grow at a steady pace, with 388 and 313 members in each one respectively at the time of writing.
Aura was listed on its first exchange https://stocks.exchange/trade/ARA/BTC last week and has been trading slightly above the mining cost.
The bitcointalk bounty campaigns are wrapping up and payouts will be coming out over the next week for those that participated. The node stats bounties have already been paid.
The main website has been redesigned.
The YouStock and Aura whitepaper is all but complete and will be published within the next few days.
Work has begun on the YouStock platform with no roadblocks in sight.
Auradex
In the last update, I mentioned I was looking into cross chain atomic swaps. Well since then I’ve been hacking away at a new decentralized exchange powered by cross-chain atomic swaps for ethereum based blockchains like Aura. I’m calling it Auradex. It will enable users to buy and sell aura using ethereum without having to entrust their funds to any external server. Bitcoin and other trading pairs will be added after the initial alpha release. Auradex is both a wallet and an exchange, and funds are sent directly from you to the person you are trading with when a trade happens, and vice versa. The interface is mostly complete and the backend server is under development at the moment. The backend server will only be used to match buyers/sellers and store market data, it won’t store any funds.
Here is a sneak peak:
There are a couple drawbacks to cross chain atomic swaps at the moment. One is that you have to leave your computer online for trades to execute. Since you’re always in control of your funds, you won’t be able to swap if you’re not online. When you accept a trade, the software will handle all of the trading operations so you won’t need to constantly watch your computer, but you do have to leave it online and awake. If you lose connection mid way through a swap, you have a 24 hour window (which can be extended in settings) to get back online and complete the swap. Another drawback is that you need atleast a small amount of each cryptocurrency that you are swapping in order to cover 1–2 transaction fees to complete the swap. There is talk of enabling contracts to pay for transaction fees on ethereum, which would allow the fee to come out of the trade quantity, so this drawback may go away in the future.
That said, I think the pros vastly outweigh the cons. Almost every other week you hear of another centralized service getting hacked and customers are left without funds. Just last month a Japanese exchange got hacked and lost over $500 million. Not to mention the slow deposit and withdrawal times and overpriced fees for each. With Auradex, deposits and withdrawals are simply sends and receives to and from your Auradex wallet, and happen just as fast as any other transaction on the blockchain, and you control the fee. Bitcoin core developer Jameson Lopp summarizes the benefits well
Final words
Overall I’m very happy with the progress that’s been made over this last month, and look forward to bringing more developments in March!
