Dev Update August

Jul 28, 2019PIVX Development Update – 2019 July Week 4

*Please note that this update may not include every work by every developer as it may have been simply missed or are currently worked on private repositories.

GitHub Activity

GUI (next gen)
  • PR #954 [GUI] [Model] New Wallet UI – has been submitted by core developer furszy and is currently being reviewed / worked on. This will be a brand new UI/UX wallet, designed in collaboration with Krubit UI and UX designers and written from scratch in Qt by core dev furszy and Krubit front-end developers. It is targeted to replace the current GUI starting from v4.0.0 release. More info and a full demo video can be seen HERE
Staking
  • PR #952 – [Minting] Prevent potential negative out values during stake splitting – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and is being reviewed / worked on.
  • PR #955 – [Core][Script][Wallet][RPC][Tests] Cold Staking – has been submitted by core developer random.zebra and is currently being reviewed / worked on. This customized staking feature (name subject to change) allows a mutually agreed online wallet to stake coins from an address that it has been given delegation to stake from. This provides extra security for stakers while still requiring a full node online wallet. More info on Cold Staking can be found on its Wiki and there is an ongoing forum discussion as well.
  • PR #958 – [Staking] Modify miner and staking thread for efficiency – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and is being reviewed.
Core Wallet
  • PR #956 – [Core][Qt] Add HD Wallet support – has been submitted by community developer akshaynexus and is currently being reviewed / worked on. This is a highly requested feature where it provides users an option to backup and restore the entire wallet (all associated addresses and their balances) using a multi-word seed phrase instead of more complex file-based or private-key methods.
Zerocoin Protocol
  • PR #936 “[zPIV] PublicCoinSpend v4 – Coin Randomness Schnorr Signature” has been submitted by core developer random.zebra and is currently being reviewed / worked on. This advanced function will allow spending of legacy zPIV v1 (minted prior to 3.1 release) back to PIV. Functional tests on regtest for this change is being prepared.
Qt/RPC
  • PR #950 [Qt] [RPC] Fixup budget proposal URLs that are lacking scheme – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and is being reviewed.
  • PR #953 – [RPC] [Wallet] AutoCombineRewards fixes and Improvements – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and is being reviewed / worked on. This enhances the AutoCombineRewards function allowing the user to configure how often to run the scan, and the amount to combine each time it executes; as well as adding a One Shot option to just run it once at startup.
  • PR #957 – [Build] Add info about ‘–with-unsupported-ssl’ – has been submitted by core developer Warrows and has been merged to master.
  • PR #963 – [WIP][RPC] Add PoS support to transaction utilities – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and is being reviewed.
  • PR #964 – [Refactor] Combine parameter checking of budget commands – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and tracked by Issue #966.
  • PR #965 – [RPC] Correct issues with budget commands – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and tracked by Issue #966.
Secure PIVX Masternode Tool (SPMT)
  • New Release! SPMT version v0.5.0 with new Trezor support is has been released! This tool allows you to setup PIVX masternodes with the collateral safely stored in a hardware wallet such as Ledger Nano S and Trezor Model One and Model T.
iOS Wallet
  • PR #19 [Build] Add basic TravisCI support – has been committed to master.
Scripts & Tools
  • PR #20 [Tools] Add github-merge.py script – has been committed to master.
  • PR #947 [Scripts] Sync github-merge.py with upstream – is being reviewed.
Tests

Editor Note

We’ve had some significant development happening the past two weeks with numerous new features and fixes being submitted including numerous contributions by our community developers CaveSpectre11 and akshaynexus. It is really awesome to see some new synergy happening between the core and community developers and I hope more developers will join in our venture. Remember, PIVX is open source and welcomes all contributions, not to mention having some dedicated budget portion in the core dev proposal set aside for community dev work!

The stance on privacy for PIVX has not changed. What this means is that the importance of transaction privacy for PIVX remains a top priority. However, we first need to ensure that we do not leave anyone behind.

What we mean by this is that we need to make sure all current zPIV held by all users are able to be safely spendable back to PIV. With our last 3.3.0 update, v2 zPIV spending was enabled and this resulted in our network zPIV balance to drop from 4.7 million zPIV down 1.58 million zPIV in less than 3 weeks! 

[Side note] Guessing where the converted 3.1 million zPIV went; since July 1 when zPIV v2 became spendable, total masternode count increased by approx. 260 and our average network staking difficulty has also seen an increase from around 180k to 190k. So there seems to be some correlation that a lot of the converted zPIV may have been put back into our network as either new masternodes or staking. 

chart fromPIVX Explorer

Now the question would be, why do we still have 1.58 million zPIV remaining unspent? This may be due to lost/deleted wallets, being locked out (forgot password), many users still unaware that it is now spendable, wanting to keep them private (if eligible), and/or are legacy v1 zPIVs that are not yet spendable (until v4.0 wallet release with PR #936) etc. 

Once v4.0.0 is released with all zPIV spendable, thus ensuring all users are now able to transfer their coins freely, then the developers will finally be able to really start researching and working on the privacy function of PIVX, followed with a formal write up on what is proposed and why.

But for now, the sheer amount of work that our core & community developers are putting into PIVX is simply astounding and provides strong reassurance of how well PIVX will continue to be developed for the times to come.

Major Development Target Dates

2019 Q3 

  • V4.0.0 wallet release (mandatory update)

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