Stratis CTO’s Developer Update

I am happy to report that Stratis has grown quite a lot these last two months, with many new exciting projects and technical challenges. Today I want to share with you some details on how we are organizing to make Stratis the leading blockchain platform.

We have hired several developers (full/part time), product managers and we are actively seeking for experienced testers and QA specialists to review our products and processes. To accommodate our growing team, we have relocated to our new office in WeWork Moorgate London (please, come say hi!).

We have implemented Agile and Scrum methodologies across all our teams, and I encourage autonomous and self-managing teams working towards sprint goals. We operate as a decentralized company as the team members are from all around the globe (setting meetings can be sometimes tricky, and I really appreciate the devs that stay out to participate in meetings at really late hours! Also I want to thank all collaborators for your valuable contributions). At this point we have dedicated teams in the following areas:

Full Node

Dev Leader: Jeremy Bokobza (@jeremy)

Developers: Pieterjan Vanhoof (@dev0tion), Robert Carr (@robertcarr), @aprogenia, @fassadir, @mikedennis and @someguy

Breeze Wallet

Dev Leader: Carlton Pringle (@carlton)

Developers: Jeremy Bokobza (@jeremy), Pieterjan Vanhoof (@dev0tion), Kevin Loubser (@zeptin), Dan Gould (@dangould) and just joined Adam Ficsor (@nopara73)

UI: Benoît Philibert (@bep42)

Stratis PoC

Project Leader: Cesar Castro

Developers: Alexei Kogtev (@kogot) and Igor Goldobin (@fenix2222)

UI: Benoît Philibert (@bep42)

What we’ve been busy on?

Stratis Full Node

Achieving higher code quality and getting to production ready (for enterprise standard). We have been conducting extensive testing, but we still need to have a larger percent of unit tests coverage.

Extensive documentation and refactoring of code (improve internal node components).

Improve the node performance (this may not be a big deal for new blockchains).

Extending the Stratis test network to run a network of C# nodes for a period of time.

Ideally we need to get our C# node on an exchange (how and what currency is not yet clear) and on a block explorer.

Breeze Wallet

We have been putting a lot of time and resources into achieve higher code quality for the Breeze Wallet and its underlying technology – Tumblebit – integration in order to get it production ready for enterprise standards. Soon we will be publishing a full update from the Breeze Wallet team itself with all the details. At this point I will ask your support in helping us conduct extensive testing of the upcoming Breeze Wallet with Tumblebit Alpha release and share your experience with us. The sooner we have Breeze wallet sufficiently tested, the earlier we can release with full functionality on the mainnet.

Stratis Identity

Our Proof of Concept team has been working in creating our first proof of concept application – Stratis Identity. Soon to be released on the app stores it will provide a working app, and most important, the building blocks for developers to start creating applications around identity management and provenance utilizing the Stratis blockchain.

Sidechains and Smart Contracts

The end goal for the fullnode is to make it THE blockchain framework where all C# developers go to when they need to build a blockchain. It is becoming evident that in the near future there will be countless blockchains (analogues to websites, but maybe not at that scale) and developers will need easy to use frameworks to develop blockchains on them. Stratis aims to provide such a platform, we will create out of the box templates of a Stratis hybrid sidechain. Next, I will be publishing a paper on our sidechains approach and unique features.

For smart-contracts I have joined with Jean Lehmann (https://www.cybercapitalhq.com/team.html) a cyber security academic to help with writing a paper on how we can securely deliver smart-contracts on the Stratis node. This is a work on progress.

Smart contracts enable applying logic over ownership of assets on the blockchain, we will need to change some core components of our fullnode to support smarter logic over assets, the node is built mainly on top of Bitcoin with a limited smart-contract support. We may need to change NBitcoin and the way the Bitcoin protocol stores UTXO (the UTXO set will need to be extended to allow contracts access to a key value pair storage among other things).

We are also exploring executing C# scripts directly in a node environment (smart contract scripts in C#) using the Roslyn compiler.

Last but not least, it is very important to notice that we have streamlined the development planning process with the addition of a Agile Project Manager – Paul Aderonmu (@paul_stratis). With his help we have been putting together a fresh roadmap that can provide better visibility and tracking to the community and all interested in our tech development process. We will shortly be releasing a reviewed roadmap and improved tracking tools for all to use.

With the Breeze Wallet and our first PoC release around the corner these are indeed very exciting times for Stratis. Stay tuned for the upcoming news!

These are exciting times to be a developer!

Dan Gershony