VSC - 2023 In Review

Greetings fellow Hiveians. In this article we will be reviewing all the work that has been done for the VSC project over the last year. 2023 was an exciting year for this project. What started out as just an idea has now blossomed into a serious project. And within the community it was just a mere rumor. In 2024 we expect to accomplish even more.

HiveFest

At HiveFest 2023, our founder @vaultec presented VSC publicly for the first time ever. To our surprise and delight, VSC was met with strong support from many members of community. Whether it was the idea of feeless smart contracts, or fully decentralized Bitcoin wrapping, one way or another many people were interested in the project. Shortly after HiveFest, we officially released our very first DHF proposal to fund the development of this project. Within only a few weeks our proposal was approved by many individual community members and numerous large whales. VSC became alive.

Proof of Concept testnet

In May 2023, we released our early stage prototype of VSC for public use. While prototype was an extremely basic smart contract L2 on Hive, and had several major bugs, it allowed us to demonstrate what was possible and gave us a clear vision for what our proposal would entail.

Those bugs even prevented us from demoing at HiveFest as initially planned, but nonetheless it has lead to massive improvements of reliability. One such issue was Hive API reliability. This issue alone has many facets to it. From the libraries being used to APIs themselves, each played a major role in stable operation.

To solve this we've wrote our own custom block streamer and load balancer. The load balancer in particular is capable of forwarding 5+ Hive APIs to the client. Meaning if one node is down it can immediately redirect to an operational node. As a result the network went from being unreliable most of the time, to being more reliable than nearly all Hive frontends. Even despite recent API outages, VSC remained operational. For a smart contract network, a reliable network is critical. Going forward reliability will only improve as we solve bugs and do rigorous testing.

Fast forward to now, this original prototype network is being sunset in favor of the new testnet coming up soon. The testnet brings a series of major changes from Webassembly smart contracts, to highly efficiently consensus. It marks major point in time between a prototype and becoming a production ready network.

Bitcoin Wrapping & DeFi on Hive

In late November, we released our Bitcoin wrapping demo and proof of concept for all to see. Within the first few hours hundreds of people received wrapped BTC using VSC smart contracts. While this was a major focal point of the community for several days, it was only a demo. We are now focusing on migrating the original prototype smart contracts to something production ready. Any remaining balances will be airdropped back to any users that have participated. Aside from smart contracts, decentralized Bitcoin wrapping is the #1 goal of this project.

On a related topic, a few of you have heard about the DeFi frontend we are working on. In fact, many of you have already used it. The Bitcoin wrapping we initially showcase will slowly evolve into a full fledged DeFi interface. DeFi on Hive has been extremely limited between only a few platforms with a complete lack of diversity for frontends. We aim to build a clean, fully functional DeFi interface for VSC. Initially, we will target wrapped Bitcoin and HBD/Hive, however, as communities create their own tokens on VSC those will become supported as well. This frontend is akin to how tribaldex is to Hive engine.

The work for this is already well under way and we provide several UI screens below for community review. The UI will mainly consist of wrapping/unwrapping, swaps, LPs, plus transaction view with filtering and a few others. Over time we will expand the feature set as necessary and upon community demand.

Swap interface between BTC and HBD

Manage Liquidity Pairs

Main Dashboard

in progress login flow

Aside from the above, we are also working on building developer documentation that will become available around the same time as testnet launch.

Next Steps & Final Thoughts

Some of the work we've done, but we will will not go into depth due to boring technical details:

• Implementing webassembly smart contracts
• Intercontract calls & smart contract structure
• BLS in BFT style consensus
• Native offchain accounts & Ethereum interop
• Sharding/horziontal scaling research
• IPFS offchain storage.
• Numerous others.

Our work is not only just VSC focused, the VSC project has even made a proposal to the Hive core team to improve multisigs. Not just for VSC, but any L2 wanting to build on Hive. See links below for more detail.

• Vaultec's multisig proposal to BlockTrades dev team
• The future of Multisigs & cryptography on HIVE

Overall, we've made a tremendous amount of progress in 2023, and in 2024 it will only increase. The future continues to look bright for VSC. Hive as a whole will significantly benefit from our efforts as a result. We are looking forward to the testnet launch coming up soon and production Bitcoin wrapping. Keep a watch out for our next DHF proposal shortly thereafter. The time is now to get involved in VSC as many others begin to get involved. Run a VSC node, promote on social media, maybe even write a smart contract, it all helps grow this project and Hive as a whole.

Let's build the future of Hive.

Socials

Website: https://vsc.eco

Twitter: @vsc_eco

Hive: https://peakd.com/@vsc.network

Github: https://github.com/vsc-eco

Vote for VSC Proposal here

Read more:

• Announcing the VSC block explorer
• Call to action - Setup a VSC devnet node
• The Crypto Maniacs Podcast - Episode 213 w/ Vaultec
• Virtual Smart Chain: Bringing Smart Contracts To Hive