We would like to make an announcement on the project that was proposed by Aleix and Guillem on the NEM Library earlier on, seeking funding from the community fund to the tune of 1 million XEM.

The response from the community has been a resounding yes, for the project to go ahead. The core team has done some deliberation on it and they are of the opinion that both Aleix and Guillem’s contribution and work are valuable for the greater NEM, and that they should be considered for permanent employment by the foundation instead.

We have decided that the community should only fund them for the work they have done to date (i.e., 600K XEM) and have them paid by the foundation from there on as employees.

Both Aleix and Guillem have gracefully accepted our alternative offer. To that end, they are now employed under NEM.io Foundation as part of our plan to expand and recruit more programmers.

Catapult is more or less completed for its beta release, but the project is huge. As you can imagine, it took us 15 months to release NEM version 1. But the Catapult is already taking 20 months now. Further, the design of the Catapult is based on knowledge already known to the NEM developers during its first iteration. Obviously, a lot more design work has been put in place to make the Catapult a better project.

Both Aleix and Guillem were drawn into the project immediately to help expedite and hasten its completion. Their involvement was to work on the APIs so that they can be documented, tested, and expanded.

Aleix and Guillem have reviewed on the catapult features, ideas and concepts. They have been working on the NIS2-API (i.e., Catapult API) and have been testing them. Lots of hours have been spent on finding ways to automate the generation of SDKs for different programming languages. We must report that they seemed to have found a good architecture for this automated generation of SDKs.

These include:

Creating API generator routes and models.

Implementing integration tests for all endpoints to validate correct behaviour of APIs.

Coming out with a solution to test different serialization libraries to build transactions.

Verifying these serializations by creating end to end testing for all transactions implemented in the Catapult.

More work is still required. These will include:

Generating a shippable nem-javascript-sdk adding websocket support and other features.

Generating SDKs in other languages.

Exploring options for a complementary GraphQL API

End to end blackbox testing

Jaguar0625, our lead programmer has been very pleased with their progress thus far. With additional help, it is hoped that the Catapult can be completed earlier.