Progress in the development of the infrastructure that will underpin the CommerceBlock network has been rapid over the past couple of months, as can be seen by following the activity on our Github. We have been busy adding new features to our blockchain implementation Ocean (built from the Bitcoin Core codebase) that enable the deployment of asset-backed sidechains with native support for the pay-to-contract protocol (BIP175) at the consensus layer. Additional features include new wallet functionality to handle embedded contracts and advanced identification/KYC protocols to meet the requirements of institutional clients.

As a major part of the next stage in our technology roadmap, we are very pleased to announce the launch of the CommerceBlock network testnet, which is live as of today. To see it in action, you can visit CBTExplorer.com which hosts a prototype of our new block explorer, which has been designed to display asset backed tokens transacting natively on top of the CBT base token. The CBT testnet is running a federated consensus protocol with 3-of-5 multisig block-signing nodes and 5 fully validating nodes: the infrastructure has been fully containerized/virtualized and is highly scalable, deployed on cloud-based hardware. The main purpose of the testnet at this stage is to perform security audits and stress test the system capacity: but we plan to soon enable public access so that anyone is free to join the test network and issue their own assets and contracts.

All of our software is open source and all of our development work is public — unlike many other projects — and this is a central part of our philosophy and values. We believe that this model is essential to the security of cryptocurrency and blockchain systems, enabling peer review and public audit of code that clients must rely on to secure substantial value, as well as fostering more rapid innovation and collaboration. We are therefore proud to contribute back into the open source projects that we have built upon — Bitcoin Core and Elements — and support their continued growth.

This launch marks the start of an exciting period of advance for the CommerceBlock project — and the next big step will be the publication of our new whitepaper which explains the technical design of the network and our staking model, as well as implementations of our attestation and pegging technologies.

You can follow our progress on our Github repository and by joining our Telegram group.