2022 Mintlayer Year In Review

The Mintlayer team has been hard at work since the beginning of the year. We made some major changes with the move off substrate approximately a year ago, and have still made incredible progress this year.

Completion of New Node Codebase and Architecture

2022 has been a year full of progress and for Mintlayer as the engineering team moved the project off of substrate and began the development of our own architecture and codebase. The team completed due diligence on every aspect of the new architecture to ensure that development would be as efficient as possible.

This progressed into months of work developing the core cryptography, overall architecture, mempool, proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, database storage layer, P2P networking, chainstate and token standards. We now have stable versions of all the major components, except the consensus mechanism.

Altogether, the team has contributed approximately 100,000 lines of code to the Mintlayer core repository.

Launch Mintlayer Mobile Wallet

We launched the Mintlayer mobile wallet for iOS and Android this year. Since then, we’ve made several performance improvements and expanded our testing protocols.

Integrate Lightning Network

In September we launched Lighting Network integration for our mobile wallet. This allows users to send and receive Lightning Network payments. The Lightning Network is many orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to transact on than even traditional networks.

Web Browser Extension Alpha Testing

To ensure that our products are as stable as possible, Mintlayer tapped into our community of crypto enthusiasts to help perform alpha testing on our new web browser extension. 267 users took part in alpha testing and 42 provided feedback. We plan to release the browser extension in the near future.

Automated Testing Development

To free up manpower and increase both the quality and quantity of functional testing, we developed methods, standards, and tools for automated functional product testing. This will speed up development in the future, help troubleshoot new features, and help Mintlayer release stable products as quickly as possible.

MLS-01 and MLS-03 Standards Merged

The development team integrated token standards for MLS-01 and MLS-03 tokens (NFT). There will be other token standards integrated in the future, but MLS-01 (which represents utility tokens) and MLS-03 (Non-Fungible Tokens) will lay the foundation for the first generation of projects to be developed on Mintlayer.

Research and Planning For Consensus Mechanism

One of the more ambitious aspects of the Mintlayer protocol has been deciding on the most elegant, efficient, and effective way to integrate our proof-of-stake consensus mechanism with Bitcoin’s blockchain. Our engineering department has researched all the most obvious routes to rule out solutions that will not work or pose problems.

The proof-of-stake consensus mechanism is currently under development and is the last major component we will release before the testnet launches to the public.

Lovelace Testnet

As mentioned, we have stable versions of almost every component of the blockchain. The testnet was scheduled to be released in Q4 2022, but the team has made the strategic decision to postpone the release of the Lovelace testnet to Q1 2023.

What’s Coming In 2023?

We have a long list of milestones we are on track to hit in 2023. These include:

• Launch of the Lovelace testnet
• Node wallet becomes available
• Token launch event the 21st of March
• Mainnet launch
• Integration of ML token into the mobile wallet
• Public staking
• Web Assembly Pools
• Basic atomic swaps

Conclusion

In contrast to other projects in recent months, we have continued making tremendous progress on the Mintlayer core.

We expect 2023 to be even more productive as our team has grown recently. We are looking forward to a big year ahead.

Follow us on Twitter, and join us in our Telegram community to stay up to date with the latest from Mintlayer. For questions, you can reach out to us directly at: support@mintlayer.org