Weekly Dev Update #64

Summary

The team worked to bring Bitcoin to an internal testnet, as well as the necessary features to support a native chain.

Confirmation Counting

ConfCounting is the practice of waiting for a number of confirmations to take place before crediting a user’s deposit. For Bitcoin, this is typically 6 confs, which appears to come from a single 2012 paper on Double Spending written by Meni Rosenfeld. However, waiting an hour for a swap to take place from Bitcoin to another asset is untenable.

The solution is to delay swaps by a number of blocks that match their value in block rewards. The maths is simple, if a number of blocks create $X in revenue for miners, then over time (assuming an efficient market) then roughly $X is the investment required for an attacker to pull off a re-organisation of those blocks. More reading on this here.

Thus THORChain first counts the revenue per Bitcoin block (currently around 6.25 ~$70k per block), then seeks to wait an equivalent number of blocks before reporting a transaction, based on its size. This means, for the vast majority of swaps under 6.25 Bitcoin, they will be processed in a single confirmation.

This raises the question of *natural* re-organisations — where the network is naturally bifurcated with two competing blocks. Firstly, since THORChain has very good coverage of the network (each node runs their own Bitcoin node), it is unlikely that all nodes will be on one side of the bifurcation. Secondly, natural re-orgs do not undo transactions, so this does not affect what THORChain sees. The Bifrost can handle natural and recover from malicious re-orgs by posting in errata transactions to the state machine in order to socialise losses and return solvency if a malicous re-org would ever occur.

Releases

Midgard V0.2.1 was released with some improvements and updates.

THORNode

Work also continues to build out Bitcoin. A feature to allow UTXOs to be signed in parallel (for faster TSS execution) was also added.

• [feature] Select vault by security
• Update seed endpoint lambda functions
• Resolve “ADD: Confirmation Counting”
• Resolve “[FIX] absurdly-high-fee issue on BTC”
• [bugfix] Ygg vaults ignore native coins
• [feature] When recieving/sending funds, take Asgard vault security into account
• Resolve “ADD: TSS sign UTXO in parallel”
• Resolve “BUG: Invalid slash event”
• fix yggdrasil get slashed issue

Midgard

Fixes and tweaks for stability, as well as releasing V0.2.1.

• Resolve “ADD: assetEarned, runeEarned, poolEarned to poolDetails for simple view”
• Update testnet
• Resolve “Fix pool cache for fetchAllPoolsFees”
• Fix poolCache issue in testnet
• Resolve “Update Midgard version to 0.2.1”

Clients

BEPSwap Client

Numerous UI/UX tweaks based on community feedback

ASGARDEX Client

Work continues to prepare the client for Chaosnet. Bitcoin and Ethereum have been integrated.

Community Work

The following tools receive regular updates:

Telegram Bot

@thornode_testnet_bot

@thornode_chaosnet_bot

Twitter Bot

https://twitter.com/thor_bot

Delphi Defi Dashboard

https://defi.delphidigital.io/thorchain/chaosnet/network

THORChain Network Explorer

https://thorchain.net/

THORChain Official Block Explorer

https://viewblock.io/thorchain

Audits

A final security audit is being completed.

Next Milestones

Bitcoin testnet.

Community

To keep up to date, please monitor community channels, particularly Telegram and Twitter:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thorchain_org
• Telegram Community: https://t.me/thorchain_org
• Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/thorchain
• Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/thorchain
• Github: https://github.com/thorchain
• Medium: https://medium.com/thorchain