Hey Lane, thanks for joining me today. Can you tell the readers a bit about your background and how you got involved with cryptocurrency?

Thanks for taking the time to talk about OpenCAP, Troy. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, I worked at a company called Metal Fatigue Solutions who used electrochemical technology to detect bridge failures. The software I wrote (C++ and Go) would read sensor data, perform frequency analysis, and record the data in the cloud. I loved writing in Go so much that I wanted to get a job where I could write it all the time, so I got my current job where I write backend software. My current company does social media data analytics. Specifically, I’ve been working on our alerts and notifications systems. I’ve always had fairly libertarian ideals, and being into software development, I quickly became passionate about cryptocurrencies once I learned of them.

You’ve done a great job updating the community about the project on Reddit, for those who don’t know OpenCAP, could you share the project’s goals?

O penCAP stands for Open Crypto Alias Protocol. I started working on OpenCAP with a goal of solving one of the most significant problems crypto has when trying to gain adoption: UI/UX. The biggest hurdle I’ve found is that a crypto address is awkward. When I want to send Nano to a friend, they have to first send me their address via email, text, etc. It can’t be communicated verbally because it is too long, and there is no way someone could remember it off the top of their head, they will need to look up their own address every time. Once I get the address, I also can’t easily look at it and verify that it is their address. This is a huge problem when competing with systems like Cash App, Venmo, and Swish where you can look up friends to pay by username.

How does OpenCAP work and what differentiates it from other alias systems?

OpenCAP allows users to represent any cryptocurrency address with an alias that has a format similar to an email, for example, “username$domain.com.” OpenCAP has been built by the cryptocurrency community, with contributors from several different cryptos including NANO, BCH, BTC, and XMR. We have been designing the protocol building on ideas that came out of previous projects like Namecoin and OpenAlias. The reason for a new alias system is that we felt that there were stumbling blocks with Namecoin and OpenAlias that were keeping them from being widely adopted. I don’t want to get too deep into the woods, but basically, OpenCAP uses more modern standards for data retrieval that developers are used to, which makes it easier to develop on top of. OpenCAP also is more flexible in that some features simply are impossible when using a system like OpenAlias or Namecoin can be built on OpenCAP.

This all sounds very exciting, what’s next for OpenCAP?

The next steps for the project are to finalize a v1.0.0 spec. This would entail several apps actually using the protocol in its current state so that we can collaborate and see if any other changes are necessary. I think it is pretty solid right now, but it is always good to have more opinions. Currently, I’m working on a free-to-use OpenCAP server where users can claim an alias, while also been pushing code to various wallets to get them to support the “send to alias” feature. There are pull requests up on the Bitcoin.com (BTC, BCH) wallet as well as the Electrum (BTC) wallet. I know the Nano team, Canoe team, Nanollet, and Brainblocks team have shown interest and I hope they are able to start integrating soon. I would like to especially thank the Canoe team for their help in the first versions of the protocol, and everyone that has been involved in the community discord.

Thanks again to Lane for updating us on the project, for more information on OpenCAP, check out their GitHub.