State of Development: Week of August 6th, 2018

Last week, our release produced a long-awaited functionality for contract creation and their execution in state channels.

Our next release focuses on three major features:

Forcing the progress of a smart contract on-chain.

Implementing Proof of Fraud for Bitcoin-NG.

Introducing oracle support in Sophia language.

Smart Contract On-Chain

After releasing our first implementation of state channels last week, we are getting closer to finalizing this major feature of the æternity blockchain.

To advance the progress of a smart contract it only remains to:

Exploit the blockchain to produce a valid off-chain channel state that can be used by both participants, in order to continue using the channel or close it. (Side note: producing this new state is the hardest part; it should be both minimal but yet sufficient so that both participants can continue using it). This is to be used when one participant stops cooperating and the other wants to enforce a co-signed contract and to use the blockchain as an arbiter.

Expose this functionality via a WebSocket API so clients can conveniently use it.

Proof of Fraud for Bitcoin-NG

Work on our Proof of Fraud for Bitcoin-NG is being finalized and we are aiming to release this feature in the coming weeks.

Support for Oracles

Finally, we are working on introducing support for oracles, which requires the implementation of fees when:

Handling oracle transactions from contracts.

Handling oracles on other accounts than the current contract.

Introducing TTL “type” to Sophia oracles.

As a reminder, the best place to follow the development progress towards Mainnet launch (apart from GitHub) is the Pivotal Tracker.