State of Development: Week of July 9th, 2018

With our last few releases we have made significant progress in getting close to the launch of our Mainnet.

Bitcoin NG is now stable and deployed on the Testnet, meaning that two parties can quickly and easily open a state channel and move tokens privately and without paying any fees.

Epoch nodes are now stable and efficiently sync with each other.

Sophia can also be used to write smart contracts which will be successfully executed on the chain.

However, there are still a number of features that have to be finished before we can launch our Mainnet which keep us busy for the next few sprints.

We have started implementing Proof of Fraud for Bitcoin NG that ensures that malicious behavior does not go unpunished.

We are taking a similar approach to State Channels. We have to finalize a method for closing a State Channel which ensures that when one of the parties participating in a State Channel walks away or starts behaving maliciously, the State Channel can be closed and tokens already committed to it are redistributed between the parties according to the last state both parties have agreed on. Some work also still needs to be done to enable the execution of smart contracts in a State Channel.

Our team has a clear understanding of what needs to be done to achieve this, so currently it is only a matter of implementation.

A few weeks ago we also commenced our preparations for a security audit by collaborating with a team of external security experts and creating threat models. That will serve as an important baseline for the security audit.

Thank you for your patience. We are getting closer to æternity each day.