The Roster Expands

Welcome to the last Developer Update of 2017. What a year it’s been!

As a developer and CTO, I always ask myself — is time spent developing people more valuable than time spent developing code? To this day, I still haven’t made my mind up, so we try to do both equally. The last month has been a great example of this. We’ve made great strides in developing codebase, but also in growing our team and communicating our vision of the DA Power Play platform to each new member of the team.

Currently, we’re managing more than 30 Git repositories on a private Gitlab server ranging from different microservice modules, AI modules, smart contracts and frontend pages. We expect this number to grow significantly in the next quarter as the development of the modules continues.

As our team expands, we’re preparing repositories for public release and we’lll be moving our repos from Gitlab to Github to enable us more efficient code management, but also to ease the community feedback process. You can already see new members in our Github organisation.

A lot of work has been done in connecting all the features/services, establishing communication protocols between different features/services. We can also confirm that we’ve identified the User Management and Collector modules as a priority for this current dev. period and intend to have this complete and running during the beta (the initial beta and open beta will be announced sometime in January — more on that at a later date).

AI Scientist Ivan Filkovic exploring possibilities on our magic whiteboard.

The Node Editor and Private Cloud

A lot of work has been done on the Node Editor. We’ve established a focus group aimed at modeling the nodes and finding the best node-set, enabling users to create arbitrary strategies. This process involves finding balance between the number of available nodes in the editor and various complexities from the generated graphs. The more basic implementation of the nodes is, the more complex the graphs are needed to create a strategy. The more complex implementation of nodes is, the less complex the graphs are — requiring less nodes, but at the expense of having “magic black boxes” that can sometimes be difficult to interpret. This research will continue into the new year and our next dev. period. Below, you will find a screenshot featuring the current alpha version of the Node Editor.

Node Editor — Alpha version

Further work was also made on the Private Cloud where the strategies will be executed. We’re creating a Conductor module that will focus on managing and scaling personal machines. We’re also leveraging Kubernetes for container orchestration. We’ve also conducted countless hours of reasearch and development to to ensure the security of containers from unwanted access — this will completely protect your algos — and yes, even members of our team won’t be able to access them.

Orderbooks

Trading algorithms is not fun without an orderbook where you can experiment with trade execution. As such, we’re working on a orderbook implementation that supports crypto asset peculiarities. This will be represented with up to a certain number decimals — both prices and quantities. The current setup on a typical consumer laptop runs at approximately 1.5 million writes per second. Of course, we’re still working on speeding things up both on hardware and software layers. You can see some test trades that we executed in the screenshot below.

An example of some internal test trades

As previously stated, we’re the entire frontend layer is being built on Vue — we feel it meets the requirements we need, while also providing a familiar fit for our entire dev. team.

Building for Web 3

We believe Web3 stack is the future. As a result, we’re doing everything we can to ensure everything is built with Web3 in mind from the start.

For example: You’ll provide proof of your identity by either signing messages with your Ethereum private key, or you’ll interact with specific smart contracts. We deem this part of the stack stable (signatures and smart contracts), and progresses rapidly as we have seen with improvements brought in the Byzantium fork. But for a truly distributed web, we need to see implementations of Swarm (bzz://) and Whisper (shh://) more stable and ready. We’re keeping close tabs on both. The Swarm team is making progress, but the protocol is still not as stable as we’d like it to be — however, we’re eager to see how this continues to develop. Whisper on other hand is seeing v6 of their protocol being implemented, but still, it seems more changes are coming and the protocol is simply not yet widespread enough for us to consider utilising yet. Simply put, both Whisper and Swarm are still not stable enough for us to release products built on their foundation. However, we will keep a close eye on them and will continue to investigate possibilities to contribute resources for their development.

That’s it for our latest Developer Update — and the last one of 2017! We hope it answered some of your questions and inspired new ones as well! If you’d like to discuss the topics we covered here, please join our Telegram Group or reach out to us on Twitter and Facebook. We can’t wait to bring you more information in January regarding dates for our beta, new exchanges, further dev. updates, and so much more. We can’t wait to share all of this with you — it’s going to be an exciting year! Happy Holidays and have a fantastic New Year. 2018, here we come!