Community Call Recap - August 17th

Our latest Community Call took place on the 17^th of August. Ben Marsh (CTO) and Michael Bille (CBDO) gave the roundup of the latest developments here at Mintlayer.

If you missed the video, you can check it out below.

Read on for the full transcript of the community call.

Community Call Transcript

Michael Bille: Hi everybody. And welcome to the Mintlayer community call. My name is Michael Bille and I work on the business side at Mintlayer. And I’m here today with development lead Ben Marsh to take you through the latest of what we have been working on.

Before we begin if any of you have any questions regarding the development of Mintlayer during this community call, please shoot the question in our official channel on Telegram as we will be around for questions just after this call.

So Ben, how are you feeling today?

Ben Marsh: I’m very well, thank you. How are you?

Michael Bille: Yeah, good here. Thanks as well. It’s sunny day in Portugal, so no complaints here. So, thank you for joining me today. Let’s get dive into this one. We have a bunch of things today, so here’s what is on the agenda.

First, we’re going to do a recap of our latest progress report, which came out just two days ago and you can read it on our website, and we will also share what we have been working on and also what exciting things are coming next. And lastly, we of course, will be around Telegram for your questions afterwards.

Okay. It’s been a busy month since the last community call. So Ben, how has everything been going on the developing front for the last few weeks?

Ben Marsh: Yeah, it’s been going well. So, lots going on, on all three of the key projects; the web wallet, the mobile wallet and the core node. Everyone’s been pretty busy, lots of pull requests and lots of new code.

Michael Bille: That sounds amazing. That’s great to hear. And Ben, I know the team is working super hard, but they still have some energy left for the next super-exciting six months ahead?

Ben Marsh: Yeah. So, there’s plenty going on still at the moment with some exciting things coming in their future. So yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing what we get up to really.

Michael Bille: Great to hear Ben. All right, moving on. Let’s dive into the development update in the latest progress report.

We covered Mojito wallet updates regarding the lightning network and hardware wallet integration. And we also covered the core development regarding the Genesis block and the token standards on Mintlayer. And we lastly covered the consensus mechanism regarding the DSA consensus protocol.

So, Ben, I know you and your team have been working hard since our last development update. So let’s dive in – I’ve got a list here with topics I really want to ask you about and pick your brain about how these things work.

So, let’s start with the Mojito wallet. It’s already launched and working very well. We have, we already have the native Bitcoin wallet on Mojito, and now we are about to integrate the lightning network too, which is super exciting.

So Ben, tell us more about this feature. Will this actually mean that in future we can use the Mojito wallet for payments in shops who are accepting Bitcoin lightning payments?

Ben Marsh: Yeah. Of course, you will so you’ll be able to send transactions on the lightning network to anyone and everyone that you decide you would like to do so with.

So this has been under development for a short while now. We have recently started sending transactions on the testnet and have been for quite a few of these. And there have been some real transactions sent now on the mainnet - so everything is looking pretty good. So essentially, we’re just in the process of continuing to test the lightning network stuff at the moment.

On the whole, it’s sort of finished. Probably a bit more testing, maybe a few small tweaks to finish it off, but in the very near future, I expect that to be available publicly.

Michael Bille: That’s great news, Ben. Again, I’m just like super bullish on Bitcoin and the lightning network, as I really believe it’s gonna scale up the next few years to be something everyday users are going to use, so super exciting and great. We are in the early stages here at Mintlayer, so that is really good news.

Security is a very high priority at us for us here at Mintlayer and Mojito wallet is already a non-custodial wallet. And now you’re looking into integrating hardware wallets, so our users can take more control over their assets and move it to offline cold storage if they want.

So when do you expect this feature to be added to Mojito?

Ben Marsh: So this isn’t on the roadmap, obviously this is something that has been sort of planned in private, so to speak. So, we have started that process. We’ve been having some conversations with a chap from outside of the formal project who has done this before and has worked on integrating existing wallets with both ledger and Trezor. So, he is helping us plan this and how to go about it, and will almost certainly help with the actual development of this as well. So although we haven’t formally started development until we have released the lightning network stuff, so that’s going to come first, before we formally start it. Most of the sort of planning and design stuff is well underway at this point. And yeah, it’s going along slowly but surely at the moment.

Michael Bille: All right. Yeah. Wonderful. Now let’s talk about the long-awaited browser extension. I know that the community have asked for this for some time now after we launched the Mojito wallet.

So, this browser extension will actually allow you to use the Mojito wallet directly on Chrome, Brave, Firefox and Edge browsers. So Ben, are we still in track for a public release on the Mojito browser extension within the next two weeks, as you mentioned on the progress report?

Ben Marsh: So yeah, towards the end of August, we’ll be looking to release it, maybe pushing it back slightly depending on how the last bit of testing goes.

So again, it’s something that hasn’t been on the roadmap, so it’s not something we’ve necessarily formally discussed when we’re going to release this, but in the next month or so it will definitely be available. So, it’s currently in essentially a testing phase. Most of the key features exist and have been tested at least to some extent.

And we are in the process of testing, sort of more nitty gritty things at the moment. There are still a few small things that need to be added, but most of it is done at this point. So over the last, well, since the last progress report, we have actually been building a lot of infrastructure from the back end, which didn’t exist beforehand, but has made life easier and will eventually become part of the mobile wallet.

So yeah, it has been lots of work on that sort of stuff at the moment. So you’ll probably see those repositories become public pretty soon as well. Over, as I said about a month or so during that period, those repos will go live and yeah, we will have the first release

Michael Bille: Perfect. So as we all can hear Mojito wallet is not standing still.

We are moving in high pace with the lightning integration and now browser extension and hardware integration. So that’s wonderful. Excellent.

So now let’s go to the next topic I have on my list here and that’s the core development regarding the Genesis block, which is the first block on the Mintlayer blockchain. We have changed the Genesis block from a traditional block to its own type of block.

What is the reason for this update? Can you tell us more about that?

Ben Marsh: Well, there’s ever going to be one Genesis block. So, there’s no reason for it to be identical to every other block. So, there was a long discussion about this in the engineering team where someone proposed this idea and we decided to go with it, the idea being there’s only ever going to be one of them. So why not make it its own special type because we know we’re never going to accept another one appearing on chain.

I guess the best way to phrase it is it’s a security feature. We know we’re only ever going to expect one of them, so let’s only accept one of them ever. So, there’s been some work to split the Genesis block out from this sort of more traditional block types. And yeah, this was one of the things that’s been going on.

Michael Bille: Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Because I actually don’t know any other blockchains right now that have like a unique Genesis block. Is that kind of the first time this has been done? Or do we know anything been done before work on this before?

Ben Marsh: I have seen it elsewhere, but it’s incredibly rare. I’ve not seen many people doing this.

Michael Bille: But for a security reason, that’s a good way to do these things. So let’s move on. On the core development we have our token standards on Mintlayer and we have three of them.

We have MLS-01 is the standard token. We have the MLS-02 which is a privacy token, and lastly we have MLS -03 token which is the NFT token. The MLS-01 standard token is actually already in the testing phase. So that’s amazing.

Ben Marsh: Yeah. So, we’ve been doing some testing on that for a while now. The pull request has been open for a while.

We are currently changing how it’s been implemented, so we found a few ways to optimize the implementation that was originally done. So we are currently fixing a few things and making that code essentially more streamlined at the moment. And then we will go back into the testing phase, but yeah, it’s, we’re we saw some easy ways to make it more streamlined, quicker for their nodes to use. So we decided to fix those things first and then we’ll go back to the testing.

Michael Bille: All right. Good things. And yeah, and regarding the MLS-01, the standard token on Mintlayer in future, these tokens will have features as access control lists and also the lightning network integration. And, directly decentralized swaps from the original native Bitcoin to any MLS-01 token issued on Mintlayer. For me, this is a huge deal. I’m hugely bullish on these bad-ass features. Any comment here, Ben on this, or is it just me?

Ben Marsh: So, the atomic swaps will come relatively soon in the roadmap. I mean, I say relatively soon because they’re not all that soon. They will come somewhere in the sort of mid of next year, maybe quarter two, quarter three, this sort of time next year. Which will be the first way to, well, use Mintlayer with Bitcoin network natively. Then, as you were mentioning the ability to have swaps to token. So, we’re essentially heading towards DEX at this point.

But obviously there’s a whole load of things that we need to build before we get to that point. So. Unfortunately a long way down the line at the moment, but there’s lots of cool features that are going to come first, all of which are ultimately going to be leading up to that.

Michael Bille: Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, again, fantastic feature and lot of other cool things are in the roadmap as well. Let’s move on to the next thing here. And that is the DSA consensus protocol.

Ben Marsh: Yeah. So just like last time, this is still an area of active research. So, a couple of us who are devoting a good chunk of time to this at the moment.

Again, still doing some peer research bits, looking at how people have gone about this, reading papers, doing some maths, these sorts of bits, some of it sort of prototyping. So, if you look on GitHub, you’ll see there is an open pull request, which is still a draft at the moment. Cause it’s not ready, but it’s where things are starting to go.

And then, yeah, there’s a couple of us who are having lots of calls about this at the moment, and working towards this sort of version zero of the consensus. So, although it is not finished yet and we will probably have this same conversation in a month’s time, although we will be further along, but still, probably won’t be finished at that point.

It is moving along. I’m happy with the way that it’s going and the progress we’re making and yeah. Getting something good out of the end of this at the moment. And of course, everything that we’re doing at the moment is ultimately going to end up in the sort of final version of DSA, which is the DSA that everyone has been talking about for a while, which there is still a lot of formal things to do on.

So, we need to start writing some formal security proofs and proving things out more formally there. Whereas what we’re doing at the moment, we are able to borrow other people’s work for it. Which has meant there’s a lot less for us to do in the time we have, and this hasn’t been going on entirely internally. So, there have been some conversations with some friends I have in the academic world who are doing this sort of research and yeah, so we’ve had some external input on this and some liaising with academics as we’ve been getting through this.

Michael Bille: Oh, sounds good. Yeah. I know you’re doing a bunch of research and working on this DSA, so yeah, great stuff. Next thing on my list is what, what exciting things are coming next here at Mintlayer on the development front?

Ben Marsh: So, I mean, the first key things that are probably worth mentioning are we’re going to have two wallet releases coming up. So, one for the mobile, with lightning network added to it, and the first release of the web wallet, both of which should be relatively soon now - those should be really quite quick from here.

Then we have some things from the mobile wallet, which are, we’re going to start working on which aren’t in the public roadmap. So, they include the hardware wallet support, which we have touched on earlier in the call. And there are a few other bits, like the ability for users to generate their own entropy for generating the seeds for their wallets, and also multisig support in the Mojito wallet for mobile wallets.

I mean, of course these features will ultimately be ported across to the web wallet as well. Although it will always be very slightly behind because we started the mobile wallet before. But yeah, so essentially everything that comes out on the mobile wallet will eventually be mirrored in the web wallet as well.

And then of course there’s the core node, which I guess probably more exciting to most people. It’s what we’re ultimately here for. So, we are still on track to release a testnet late this year and, we have the things coming up in that like the proof of stake consensus which will be merged at some point, or the token code will be merged at some point. We have a few bits going on with the mem pool at the moment as well. So, it’s all still lots going on at the moment, which perhaps it’s somewhat hidden from the end user. But when the testnet appears, it will be slightly more visible, I suppose. Yeah, so plenty.

Michael Bille: Awesome Ben. So there’s plenty more in line for Mintlayer as we are getting closer to TGE and mainnet launch, which both are on track and scheduled for Q1 next year.

And I can advise from the business front that we are planning on bringing in calls with new partnerships as well, to give an understanding on how Mintlayer will bring value to these partners and vice versa.

So, I hope you guys out in the community will like these calls as well to see what great things we’re working on from the business side too here at Mintlayer. Also, next year we will also go to some selected blockchain and Bitcoin events around the world. So, feel free to meet us there - it’ll be a pleasure for us to see you and talk to you regarding Mintlayer as well in person. And we will, of course, advise you in advance which conference we will be participating in.

Well, that’s all we got time for today and all on our list today. Ben, as always, appreciate your time and your hard work.

And for all of you who joined us, thank you for your great support and interest in Mintlayer. Don’t forget to spread the word. We are very active on Twitter and Telegram. So, let’s wrap it up. Feel free to send us question to our Telegram channel, both Ben and I will be there and answering your questions. And our good team is always active there, so always reach out to them on Telegram.

Thank you so much for today. I’m Michael Bille, thank you for your time. Look forward to chatting you with you again soon. Ben, have a good day and thank you for joining me.

Ben Marsh: Yeah. Cheers.

Michael Bille: Exciting things ahead. Bye for now guys.

That rounds up our community call recap for this month. Follow us on socials, and join us in our Telegram community to stay up to date with the latest from Mintlayer.