If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that the team is hard at work preparing to deliver a deluge of features that will add massive value to the Divi Project ecosystem. Let’s take a look at what you should expect.

SegWit

SegWit, short for Segregated Witness, is a scalability solution used in Bitcoin that separates the transaction signature from the transaction data. It was implemented to allow more transactions to fit in a block, thereby increasing the throughput and block size of the blockchain as a whole.

This implementation was a necessary step for Bitcoin as there were so many transactions on the network that users were sometimes waiting for hours for their funds to appear in the counterparty’s wallet.

Future proofing

The Divi Blockchain already has 2MB blocks that are minted every ~60s in comparison to Bitcoin’s 1MB blocks, mined every 10 minutes. Not to mention our innovations in UTXO bloat control, value-based fees, and Proof of Stake consensus with Masternode transaction verification, make Divi inherently more efficient and micro-transaction ready.

Despite our slightly different transactional structure and lower usage when it comes to real-world spending and transacting, Divi’s choice to implement SegWit this early is mitigation of future blockchain bloat. SegWit also implies a transaction malleability fix, which is necessary for Divi’s implementation of the Lightning Network.

The SegWit upgrade, in combination with the Lightning Network, gives Divi a significant advantage over other protocols as a method of peer-to-peer payment. Specifically, the motivation behind these implementations relates to our goal of creating a fully functional, decentralized alternative to cash. Hence, microtransactions must be a focus.

Lightning Network

The Lightning Network is a layer-two implementation on the blockchain that allows counterparties to create payment channels with one another. The channel may remain open for as long as necessary, and it will enable for near-instant transacting.

How it works

A simple example of how this works would be two counterparties who consistently transact with one another opening a payment channel using a multi-signature wallet into which they agree to deposit a certain amount of funds. Think of it as a joint checking account. As they do business with each other, they sign the transactions jointly, and thus a ledger is created that keeps track of where the money is going and who gets what once the users terminate the payment channel.

Once closed, the transactional information on the shared balance sheet broadcasts to the primary layer of the network and funds disperse in kind.

What this means for Divi is the potential for massive scalability. Thousands or millions of users can transact off-chain using the lightning network. Micropayments can be done not just by people and businesses, but by bots, IoT appliances, intelligent agents, and more. Moreover, because Divi’s blockchain is so much faster than Bitcoin, dropping out of a payment channel is much faster.

LOCCI: Lightning One-Click Cloud Installer

One of the most exciting parts of all this is that we plan to have the world’s first one-click installer for our lightning nodes so that anyone can set one up in the cloud with ease, even from a mobile phone, just like our MOCCI.

Atomic Swaps & HTLCs

Atomic Swaps, at a basic level, allow for a trustless exchange of digital assets operating on different blockchains. They eliminate the need for a centralized, custodial exchange to facilitate trades and enable users to retain control of their private keys while securely transacting with other individuals, whom they may or may not even know.

Refer to our previous article on this subject if you’d like to learn more.

PoS 3.0

The upgrade will move Divi’s staking mechanism to Proof of Stake 3.0. With this change come a few modifications to the staking architecture and parameters.

Pay attention here if you’re big on maximizing your staking gains.

The death of Coin Age

For starters, Coin Age will become a thing of the past. Instead, nodes will require a minimum staking time of 60 minutes, with a minimum of 20 confirmations. Since Divi block times are roughly 60 seconds, 20 confirmations should never be an issue.

A UTXO of at least 10 000 $DIVI will be required to stake.

Splitting hairs, erm I mean UTXOs

To remove any advantage to gaming the staking mechanism, we are changing the automated UTXO splitting methodology in this upgrade. Now, UTXOs will split at 20 000 $DIVI into 10 000 $DIVI chunks.

Additionally, when a node successfully wins a stake, the smaller UTXOs in that same address will now auto-combine up to 20 000 $DIVI, at which point they will be closer to splitting again into 10 000 $DIVI chunks, and the cycle continues. Keeping our UTXO set cleaned up helps Divi scale more efficiently.

We have developed a more user-friendly, decentralized way for people to be able to be able to easily backup their entire wallet, along with their user data and that of Divi’s partners, on our blockchain, using the op_meta field.

I can see one potential use-case for this within the “Universal Wallet” industry subset. Now, using a 24-word mnemonic, users will be able to recover everything on any device. Now that’s Crypto Made Easy!

Mobile Wallet Progress

Beta testers have received the first APKs (Android app) for testing as of Thursday, March 07, 2019. At the moment we are testing basic functionality such as send, receive, backup, recover, and create a wallet for DIVI and BTC.

Here are a couple of screenshots.

Users will be able to customize their wallets by selecting from a set of default images, uploading their own, or letting all the default images loop.

Open-Sourcing the Diviscan API

Some of the Divi Project community have been creating fun tools and bots using some of the technology that is available on our GitHub and a little ingenuity from around the web. It’s inspired me to prepare the official Diviscan API for Open Source development.

For those who don’t know, the Diviscan API is a RESTful API for making RPC calls to the Divi blockchain. The Diviscan Block Explorer uses this API for its functionality.

Endpoints

Developers can expect the following endpoints to be available at launch.

Local API endpoints

Get address of an account

List addresses and balances based on account name

Get all addresses of specified account

Get the balance of an account

Get number of active peers

Get account name for address

Get amount received by an address

Get new address for an account

Send from an account to an address

List received transactions for the wallet

Global API endpoints

Get info for an address

Get all UTXOs from an address

Get block information by block hash

Get block count

Decode raw transaction

Get blockchain info

Get all masternode info

Get recent blocks

Get transaction info

We are excited to share this library of API endpoints with the community and look forward to seeing what incredible ideas you can explore!

Some ideas you might consider:

Web-based wallet

Block explorer

Stats/analytics tracking

UTXO info lookup tool

I’m sure there are many other use-cases for the API, so don’t be afraid to get creative!

We expect these endpoints to be publicly available within the next two weeks.

As always, have a great weekend and if you have any questions, find us on Telegram or the Forum