Things move fast at Komodo Platform. That’s why the Komodo team has decided to release a weekly briefing to cover all of the progress the Dev Team is making. This series of posts is called the Tech Tuesday Updates.
We’ve got brief tech news followed by some recaps and updates from the previous four weeks of Tech Tuesdays (#1, #2, #3, #4). The updates are timely as we are nearing a pivot to more detailed Tech Tuesday features, so a brief update on what has developed with those stories before we continue with deeper diving into Komodo technology in following weeks. In case you’ve missed a previous edition and want to catch up, you can find all the previous Tech Tuesday updates here.
People are always asking for roadmaps. I've included 3 low resolution guides to show what I'm writing about and where it sits for some of our engineering effort that are not so obvious (like the marketmaker v2 roadmap which we can go through another in #5 or #6!!)
Tertiary Partnership - University of Texas Arlington
This week we announced a partnership with the UoT computer science and engineering faculty. Komodo is committed to providing engineering solutions and this partnership further cements the commitment of the team in achieving technology backed by high levels of sound maths and engineering principles - already recognised by China's ministry of industry and information technology.
Solution to the Nothing-at-Stake Problem in Proof-of-Stake consensus
Mike Toutonghi from Verus (Komodo friendly fork) and the team have announced a solution to nothing at stake. All parties familiar with the problem have been notified across social media including Vitalik and the Ethereum team, Antonopolous, Zooko of zCash amongst others who lead in their respective fields of researching and promoting decentralized solutions.
Verus Project has also announced they will be ready to release a sapling (zCash sapling upgrade) ready release on the same day as upstream zCash project. This is an amazing goal within the Komodo ecosystem, as it reduces the resources required to perform private transactions. Transactions that we look forward to seeing implemented across a number of privacy-oriented needs which are currently in development.
Agama Mobile - Multi coin wallet available on Android Play Store for public beta testing
The Komodo developers have published to the Play Store a version of Agama Mobile for public beta testing. It is one of the most accessible open source wallets available supporting 50+ cryptocurrencies supported.
Crypto and AV alerts update
In the first Tech Tuesday we explained how some antivirus and malware software (AV) would detect false positives and fire off an alarm. We are pleased to announce that today was the final response from the several AV manufacturers we contacted that have whitelisted our applications for installation on systems.
Although this whitelist may apply to the binaries we ship currently, we have opened a channel with their teams and hope that this will result in quicker responses as users report issues with them to our support team.
We appreciate the community of testers, users and the AV manufacturers for making this process less of a problem moving forward in our endeavor to lower the barriers to blockchain adoption.
Ethereum Notarization on Holidays
Our lead developer of the ethereum notarization engineering project which successfully began notarizing ethereum to komodo in Tech Tuesday #1 has been away from the project but will resume working again soon. One of the problems the STAKED project team encountered in his absence was the fungibility between chains. This discovery was well tested and we look forward to the resumption of providing eth-connected research for future project development.
100% Privacy Coin ARRR built with Komodo technology became the 3rd highest mined coin
The approximately 60,000 block project (5 week old) project ARRR became the blockchain with the 3rd highest mined coin with the equihash algorithm - peaking at some 150 Msol, only 25% short of ZEN. ARRR is also now secured by dPoW for protection against block re-organisation resulting from a 51% attack.
There are several mining pools now open and it goes to show how much the early crypto adopters value financial privacy. As of this writing: ZEC, ZEN & ARRR are the top 3 mined equihash coins. ARRR is the most profitable equihash mining project.
Oracle Blockchain Generator Research
Simple blockchain creation is the Komodo Platform vision. The technical docs for creating an independent blockchain already exist and spinning them up is what we do from day-to-day for testing. Throughout the weeks, the STAKED discord channel has been mentioned doing testing and creating engineering goals that any project team in cryptocurrency would be proud of.
One of the newer goals is to provide some method of creating blockchains from off-chain data, put it on a blockchain, then spin up some seed nodes - anywhere on the planet. Further, the goal of providing security against 51% attacks is also bundled into the goal of providing a blockchain for any purpose.
Why make these engineering tasks? Komodo's team is tech-heavy. We have more engineering talent than marketing as we strive to make blockchain technology accessible to everyone. To do this, we challenge ourselves - and we hope to create products and services from the outcome of this research, proof of concepts, development and analysis - what else can we make blockchains do? Not for the sake of making blockchain enabled applications, but to see the usefulness in providing decentralized solutions in a pragmatic way.
When it comes time to collaborate with economists, sociologists, scientists, planners and many other trade, professional and academic disciplines - we will provide engineering collaboration.
5000KMD Infographic Contest Update
In Tech Tuesday #3, we explained the scale-out architecture that provides blockchain projects a foundational approach to thinking about scalability and blockchain interoperability. This architecture allows projects to work without the technical limits of other projects and the work put out from the designers around the world for this contest has been gratifying to view.
All submissions are viewable at the infographic contest reddit thread in the Komodo Platform subreddit.
dPoW protection across the ecosystem extended to any coin
HUSH became the latest coin to feature in the dPoW protection against 51% attacks for the Tech Tuesday #4 update. It is the first ZEC fork to receive this protection. GAME being a bitcoin fork was the first coin and has since had the frequency of attack attempts drastically reduce. This drastic reduction allows exchanges to trust coin developers and provide liquidity to the community of users.
An announcement during the past week of imminent attacks has been circulated - earliest published date of "educational purpose" attacks begins on Oct 13 to an undisclosed list of projects. In the event that HUSH is attacked, the dPoW protection will stymie any re-organisation and double spend attempts.
Delayed Proof-of-Work (dPoW) is a Komodo innovation to provide bitcoin's mining resources as security for weaker chains. From our engineering planning, we are always keen in testing where we can improve it and scale it out like the rest of the Komodo ecosystem.
GUIs Komodo's Custom Consensus Framework
Over the weeks, we've described what solutions will be available with Komodo's Custom Consensus framework-- including smart contracts, blockchain-based games, decentralized applications, and consensus extending capabilities. This provides rapid blockchain development, where the development cycle has been reduced 10-fold. This is multi-million dollar savings across multiple project development teams. Some of the sample solutions described are the creation of oracles, stable coin gateways and double spend resistant instant blockchain payments.
The core developers will continue creating reference Custom Consensus modules, but a small group of keen developers have emerged that want to make GUIs for these alpha modules. In Tech Tuesday #4 we mentioned the virtualization of blockchain creation (the network layer) by creating docker images as part of the development workflow.
Interested in GUI dApps development? Discord's #cc_gui channel will be where most of the work will take place in the coming weeks.
Thank you Komodo (& ecosystem) developers, what an exciting week!