GitHub Activity
Note: The following list only covers roughly the past 2 weeks worth of activity.
Major Core Wallet Release
- v3.3.0 was released on 6/18/2019 and was the first major wallet release this year.
- It disabled zPIV minting and enabled efficient spending of zPIV (v2) to PIV.
- Hard fork successfully occurred on 7/1/2019 without any issues. More info here.
- v4.0.0 development is now in full force and is targeted to be released before the end of Q3 2019 with numerous updates listed below along with more that are yet to be published.
Zerocoin Protocol
- PR #936 “[zPIV] PublicCoinSpend v4 – Coin Randomness Schnorr Signature” has been submitted and is currently under review. This will enable the spend of legacy v1 zPIV that were minted before May 2018.
- Current status of the libzerocoin library remains the same and thus the zPIV minting will remain disabled until its cryptography is fixed and reviewed.
Staking (PoS)
- PR #916 “Don’t assert if we were beaten to the block” by CaveSpectre11 has been merged to master.
- A brand new Cold Staking feature is currently being developed with status recently moved to “In Progress” in the Miscellaneous Feature Requests. This new feature will allow another hot node wallet to stake on behalf of the coins owned by a cold wallet.
Cryptography
- More work has been ongoing on PR #643 “[Crypto] Use stronger rand for key generation”
Core
- PR #939 “[Wallet] Remove (explicitly) unused tx comparator” was recently submitted and is currently being reviewed. It should fix issue #510.
GUI (current)
- PR #895 “[Qt] Options UI cleanup” by Alko89 has been merged to master.
- PR #933 “[Qt] Add blockhash + datadir to information tab” has been merged to master.
GUI (next generation)
- This will be a brand new UI/UX wallet, in collaboration with Krubit team of professional UI designers, UX experts, and frontend developer with core developer furszy leading the project.
- PR will be submitted as early as next week with a testnet wallet to follow soon after.
- It is targeted to replace the current GUI starting from v4.0.0 release.
Mobile Wallet
- PR #9 “Added support for Face ID” has been submitted by yakubbaev for iOS wallet and is currently being reviewed.
- Android wallet has been updated to 3.1.2 on the Play Store and includes bug fixes and an updated DNS server.
Refactoring
- PR #941 “Move ThreadStakeMinter out of net.cpp” has been submitted and is up for review.
Travis
- PR #943 “Show functional tests progress” has been submitted and has just been committed to master with 8 new commits.
Scripts & Tools
- PR #20 “Add github-merge.py script” has been submitted and is up for review.
- PR #947 “Sync github-merge.py with upstream” has been submitted and is up for review.
Issues
- Numerous GitHub reported issues (and feature requests) are currently being reviewed and worked on in parallel.
Now to a topic which many would be very interested in.
Future of PIVX Privacy
Due to the unforeseen vulnerabilities of the libzerocoin earlier this year, we had to halt zPIV minting in order to prevent out-of-spec inflation. Now, in preparation for the possibility that the libzerocoin does not get fixed by the original or global cryptographers, research for the next privacy protocol to replace the current Zerocoin implementation is ongoing by the PIVX core development team. As much as we would like to announce something more specific right now, this area is not something we can afford to act on in haste.
One potential option for the short-mid-term is the new advanced privacy protocol (no code name yet) that PIVX core developers have been developing in-house since 2018 based on Jonathan Bootle and Mary Maller’s research. This in-development protocol utilizes a new cryptographic accumulator, range proofs, and allows for a trust-less setup. Range proofs used will be the Bulletproofs that we developed and released late last year. However, this protocol still needs a lot of work along with a thorough review of its cryptography before it could even be considered as a viable option. We hope to hear more on this from our core developers sometime after v4.0.0 is released near end of Q3 2019. For now, the recent FAQ posted still stands.
Meanwhile, all other privacy protocols currently known in the market will also be thoroughly reviewed to determine our best options for the long term future of PIVX. There has been some great discussions and suggestions made in the PIVX Discord’s #next-privacy-protocol-chat channel and our developers are keeping a close eye on what is being said there. So all things are being considered and we hope to have a core-developer-written technical update / opinion piece on this major topic sometime in the near future.
This development update is the beginning of new things to come for PIVX. An improved communication about our development and being more open about what is happening without needing for people to dig through our GitHub repositories. We hope that this will give a good insight to what PIVX developers are doing and how dedicated they are to make PIVX one of the most solidly developed cryptocurrency project on the market. Thank you. - jakiman
