Development

Progress Report: July 2022

Monday, Jul 18, 2022

Since the last progress report was issued, we are pleased to say we have been making excellent progress in line with our projected roadmap. One of our biggest releases since then has been Mojito wallet. In this short post, we’ll be going through some of the important updates we’ve been able to implement since our last report.

Mojito Wallet Launch

You may have heard, or even tested the freshly launched Mojito wallet. This wallet has been released in order to allow users to send and receive Bitcoin in the safest way possible. Eventually, you will be able to use this wallet to store ML tokens and transact between any address, all whilst preserving your privacy and security and giving you the power to set your own fees. Since the external launch of the Mojito wallet, we’ve been able to start working on new features such as Lightning Network support, and the web wallet is also well underway, with an internal release planned for next month. The release went well, we have even been able to add wallet to the App Store after what felt like an incredibly long wait, we talked about this update more in our community call which took place last Friday, 15th July. Feedback has been positive and we are iterating on the comments we receive, to allow our users the best possible experience when using Mojito wallet.

Core protocol

Crypto Primitives

In other areas, further work on crypto primitives has been carried out. Crypto primitives are key to any cryptosystem, serving as the building blocks, or the foundation to building cryptographic protocols. In our last progress report, you’ll have noted that we integrated interfaces for both cryptographic hash functions and randomness, with an initial version of the public key cryptography support. An implementation of Schnorr had been merged to the current codebase and BLS support was to be added. Since then we have added symmetric key crypto support via chacha20poly1305 and an initial implementation of VRFs for our PoS work.

P2P

Swarm maintenance update: we have been adding more comprehensive tests so that we can consider and be prepared for every possible scenario.

Test framework

We have implemented a new functional test framework which has the ability to spin up a small network of nodes, and ensure the whole system works together as expected, rather than just testing individual components in isolation.

Block processing/handling

We have also been doing a large amount of work on block production and handling. The initial versions of MLS01 and MLS03 are being tested. We are carrying out block filtering to see where and if blocks exist, emission schedules and making changes to the way in which block time works.

Internal release of node

As discussed in our last community call, we have released an internal node that allows you to run a basic blockchain.

PoS consensus for mainnet

We have made significant headway in the research and design of its planned full DSA consensus system. The initial version is now in full research and development phase and we’re writing software as we go. One key point to note is that the VRFs have been merged.

Updates since last time:

Public testnet release is approaching, and we are happy to report everything is well underway.

Conclusion

We are pleased to announce that progress in the Mintlayer team is well underway, and we are reaching and surpassing our targets. It is very rewarding to see this project come to fruition. We are open-source, so if you would like to contribute: we welcome your participation. Please find good issues for new contributors here. You can also contact us with any questions, suggestions or feedback you have here: support@mintlayer.org. To install Mojito wallet on Android and now iOS please click here. To contact us directly, you are invited to join our Telegram Community chat, as well as to send us any questions or comments you have via Twitter.