We have been making good progress with this feature in the recent weeks. Let me outline the next steps you can expect for this feature and threshold ECDSA, which both together allow for a full Bitcoin integration:
- The API for Bitcoin testnet being opened up to the public on IC mainnet (~late May, early June)
- Bitcoin mainnet being synced on IC mainnet (~late May, early June)
- Threshold ECDSA being activated on IC mainnet (on a 13-node subnet, not a subnet of the size for the production deployment) with a test key that will be deleted later on (~late May, early June)
Once the Bitcoin testnet API is open and threshold ECDSA is available with a test key, everything you need to develop dApps against is available in a testing environment.
DFINITY need to gain more operational experience on IC mainnet for both features before we can go live as everything needs to be bulletproof and we need high assurance of the correctness of both the feature before we allow everybody to store value with the feature. Such a conservative, security driven, approach should be in the interest of everybody interested in the feature. A lot of time now is being spent on assuring that everything is working as expected and ironing out minor issues in the code.
Further towards production, the following needs to be executed:
- Enabling the Bitcoin API for Bitcoin mainnet on IC mainnet
- Performing the full threshold ECDSA rollout on the NNS and second large subnet as explained in the following post: Threshold ECDSA Signatures - #163 by dieter.sommer
Once those steps have been performed, people can switch their smart contracts over from the testing environment (Bitcoin testnet API, threshold ECDSA test key) over to the production environment (Bitcoin mainnet API, threshiold ECDSA prod key). We expect this around late June or first half of July if no unforeseen difficulties come up.