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Jeremy Lam
Product Lead at OmiseGO

April Tech Progress Update

New Faces

The tech team continues to grow this month! We welcome Kasima Tharnpipitchai and Pawel Nowosielski.

Kasima joins us to facilitate the engineering process of Plasma from research to production is robust, safe and reproducible. He has decades of experience shipping software at a wide range of growth stages, from startup to global scale. He’s excited to BUIDL and ship the network!

Pawel joins the dev team and has been building huge systems for global corporations for as long as he can remember. When Pawel heard about blockchain technologies he realized that its broad adoption will change the world like the Internet did. For now, only his cat can stand his blockchain praises ;)

eWallet SDK

The eWallet SDK moves closer to reaching the Sente milestone and has many exciting features coming up! This month, the eWallet SDK team worked on:

Redesigning the Admin Panel

Following a retrospective on the current state of the existing admin panel, as well as the addition of awesome new team members, we’ve started a complete redesign in order to provide a better user experience. The eWallet is full of complex features that need to be abstracted from the end user, therefore this is one of the main focus of the eWallet team.

Finalized the Transaction Request Flow

The eWallet already contains everything needed to send transactions between accounts and/or users. Transaction requests allow the creation of “future transactions”, generated in an incomplete state that will be finalized once the recipient (or the sender) consumes it.
This feature allows providers to set up some interesting new flows such as payment via QR code scanning, barcode giveaways and easy transfers of tokens between users simply by generating a QR code and scanning it.

First Experiments Integrating the eWallet with the Ethereum Blockchain

We started testing the water by integrating some functionality of the eWallet with the Ethereum blockchain. Our goal for now is to create a simple Proof-of-Concept which includes the generation of accounts on the blockchain and the minting of new ERC-20 tokens.

Refactoring the Android SDK

We received some great feedback on the Android SDK from the community, Yannick Badoual in particular, and decided to do a major refactor. It has now been finalized and we have resumed planned work on the SDK.

Improvements to eWallet and SDKs

We are continuously working on improving the eWallet and the SDKs by fixing bugs and doing small refactors.

Released Docker Images

We saw people requesting access to the Docker images for the eWallet on Reddit and we were happy to comply and upload the images!

StackOverflow

We have realized Rocket Chat might not be the best place for finding technical questions and answers. To change that, we set up an OmiseGO tag on StackOverflow. We encourage people to post their questions there and we will do our best to provide helpful answers.

Next for the eWallet SDK

In the coming month, we will be focusing on:

  • Finishing the first version of the Admin Panel
  • Implementing the Ethereum integration PoC
  • Designing an exchange mechanism for the eWallet (internal transactions, external, etc.). More info about this soon!

Tesuji Plasma

We are in the final stages of review for the Tesuji Plasma design document. Once this is complete, we will share the design on our GitHub repository!

The blockchain team in Warsaw has been making great progress towards an ‘internal testnet’ release.

The goal of the release is to have an operating child chain server and root chain contract that are both deployable by CI (continuous integration), to an Ethereum testnet and can be used for internal testing purposes.

  • Watcher database structure and API to get transactions from the Watcher (done)
  • Child chain stops accepting transactions for UTXOs that have been exited (done)
  • Deposits on the root chain are tracked and recognized (done)
  • Transaction signing (in progress)
  • Performance baseline for the the child chain (in progress)
  • Detection of invalid exits (in progress)

Plasma Research

Plasma MVP

The research team has been focused on to improving and optimizing the Plasma MVP proof of concept. Highlights include:

  • Improving deposit exits and challenges
  • Optimizing block submissions on the root chain
  • Refactoring the RLP library to be Plasma specific

We are working on the final touches before branching off our reference implementation of the Plasma MVP spec, with some additional improvements.

That paves the way to start research on topics for the Tesuji milestone. Next steps will be focused on benchmarking and optimizing the underlying data structures.

Plasma Cash

We broke ground on the implementation of Plasma Cash proof of concept, thanks to the Plasma team based in Taiwan. Research is underway on merging and splitting tokens and the use of bloom filters in place of Merkle trees.

Community

We’re continuing to improve our engagement with our developer community. The number of Issues and Pull Requests opened by our community on Plasma MVP is growing! We’re working on improving transparency into our research efforts to encourage more collaboration.