The Chromium (aka Satoshi Release) Milestone has been moved to end of May 2022. This feature as well as the threshold ECDSA feature (Threshold ECDSA Signatures) are the essential parts of this milestone. The teams are working really hard on both of those features to meet the end-of-May timeline. To manage expectations: If everything works really well, we may meet this timeline, but there is a possibility of it slipping by some weeks. So Q2 (late May or June) is within very realistic reach and is clearly what we aim for, but if unknowns hit us and we lose time on things we have not been planning for, it may be Q3 (July).
Features of the size and complexity as the Bitcoin integration and threshold ECDSA are of exploratory nature and many difficulties have needed to be overcome during our implementation efforts. For this reason, they are just not as plannable as regular ācommodityā software development, thatās why we cannot give a definite deadline.
We will keep you all posted on our progress on the features and also give you updates on the timeline as we get closer to completion. Thank you all for your patience in awaiting the launch of the Bitcoin and threshold ECDSA features which will unlock a plethora of exciting use cases for the Internet Computer blockchain.
Exciting update: proposal 57849 turned on BTC testnet sync on subnet 2fq7c, so this is the first sign of BTC integration reaching mainnet! Note that you canāt use this yet (it isnāt responding to requests yet) but is mainly for us to see how this runs on mainnet and ensure everything works as expected.
Hello, I was wondering why the Bitcoin Canister is limited to only UTXO/balances data? Is other data not stored in the canister because of memory limits? Are there plans to provide more data in the future, such as past transactions? I think this would enhance the utility of the Bitcoin integration a lot.
Iām really curious what value this would actually bring to the network. You can wrap btc on icp, okay cool. I really hate the āunlocking a trillion dollars in liquidityā narrative itās so misleading.
Big bitcoin holders know ICP as a rugpull, why would they move liquidity here? To use on what defi platform exactly?
Fact is, the icp ecosystem is a confused mess right now with no defined future direction. āIntegrate with everythingā isnāt a sustainable design ethos. If anything, it shows a lack of confidence in your own network.
No wrapping is necessary. Giving smart contracts to native BTC exposes a lot of different use cases which, for competive reasons, will become obvious when btc integration happens.
There is not much confusion on the roadmap. Sure itās long and does not, in part, take the directions/priorities that i would like to see.
I just see it as typical software development program with a few gosh-darn-its along the way. Oh and then this crypto thing is just hard ; especially trying things that have not been tried before.
I do see a lot of quality thought being put into the design etc
Only having the UTXO has been decided to be the goal for the first version. We definitely think that it is useful to store all transactions on one subnet in the future. Depending on efficiency of data representation, this would currently consume roughly all of a subnetās storage. We did not want to launch the first version with such huge storage requirements as it would delay things further.
There has been a lot of misinformation spread about the Internet Computer and its ICP token unfortunately by various entities who get paid for this. I am convinved that our path of doing world-class research and engineering and building the future platform for running decentralized services will succeed over time and the market will decide about the success of DeFi projects. Some of the worldās best researchers, e.g., in the area of cryptography, are working on building the Internet Computer.
Thatās quite an unfair statement. Granted, we were late with allowing canisters to transfer ICP because of being conservative for security reasons, but that has been resolved. We do not have a globally-agreed token standard yet, but a working group comprising the leading community members is currently addressing this.
Otherwise, we have essentially the only network that can handle DeFi with some amount of scale beyond what a single computer provides in terms of compute and storage capacity.
DEX use cases (order book-based, not only the simple AMMs), lending etc. You can do real-world DeFi much better on the IC than most other blockchains.
Status update:
As you know, we have done a first sync of Bitcoin testnet on IC mainnet. During this, at some points the subnet stalled for a noticable duration. We could track down the behaviour to be caused by certain rare blocks on the Bitcoin testnet which have a transaction with 10s of thousands to 100K outpoints which causes the processing to run for an extended duration.
We are currently looking at potential solutions to address the issue.
This is EXACTLY what is needed. Precise engineering knowing where the peformance envelope will break (as opposed to āit compiles, letās ship itā).
You WILL get a lot of flak if you decide to delay the launch of the integration. But most mature audience completely understands the need to get it right with billions of $ of liquidity at stake.
Well this integration didnāt exist before so nobody will claim it is late, we should just donāt care if it is ālateā. Do things properly at the quality required pace, no mistake here will be forgiven.
