Dear community!
Let me share this week’s highlight w.r.t. work on this feature with you. We had the first “Bitcoin Community Developer Workshop” yesterday with some of the core DFINITY folks working on the Bitcoin and threshold ECDSA features as well as many of our most active and interested community members on those topics joining online for two hours. We had around 15 forum members participating as well as 9 folks from DFINITY. The minutes will be made available early next week.
It was an extremely productive conversation where on the one hand our community members could get questions answered by DFINITY folks on details regarding the API, concepts and implementation and on the other hand DFINITY could get insights on what the community members think and what they would like to see being built in addition to what has been planned.
Let me highlight the following points that I consider major outcomes of the meeting and the project’s status:
-
Testing against BTC mainnet and testnet - Regarding the testing of canisters that want to use Bitcoin, the community suggested that we should provide the option of letting a canister choose whether it wants to work with the Bitcoin mainnet or testnet. This would allow for easier testing of canister code without needing to perform transactions on the Bitcoin mainnet.
-
Threshold ECDSA and BTC integration - The Threshold ECDSA feature will most probably slip into 2022, but it may be possible to avoid that this also delays the rollout of the Bitcoin integration feature: Our community has suggested that we should provide them access to the Bitcoin functionality without Threshold ECDSA if it is finished earlier in order to allow for implementing against it already and mock the ECDSA functionality during development. This would help reduce the time to market for Bitcoin-related features.
-
EVM on the IC - Our community stressed the importance of being capable of running EVM code on the IC so that smart contracts authored in Solidity could be run on the IC without reimplementing them. The reasoning behind this is that it is a huge effort to rewrite substantial smart contracts and there is the risk of introducing vulnerabilities into a time-tested smart contract through such a rewrite.
We are now internally discussing those points that have been brought up and will keep you posted on updates.
Have a nice weekend!