Hello everyone, we are PolyCrypt GmbH, cryptography- and blockchain-/cryptocurrency-focused company located in Darmstadt, Germany, with close ties and origins in the technical university of Darmstadt. We are currently building our blockchain-agnostic state channel protocol, Perun as a canister on the IC as part of the grants program, and we hope to receive a follow-up grant to make it feature-complete and fully usable.
What is Perun?
Perun is a scaling solution, allowing fee-less, 0-latency off-chain P2P transactions, ranging from simple transfers to smart contract execution. Our blockchain-agnostic state channel protocols have been formally proven secure in peer-reviewed research and our client software, go-perun currently has back-ends for Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, and more. If you’re interested in hacking with go-perun, check out our tutorials. Additionally, we are in the process of adding another back-end for Hyperledger Fabric and Cardano. We also want to expand into the Dfinity world, where we need your engagement and support to realize our ambitions!
Perun on the IC
In a previous grant last year, we built the basic on-chain logic for our payment channel adjudicator, but ICP handling for canisters was not available back then. We are currently finishing up a follow-up grant in which we extended to handle ICP tokens and have already built the first component (key management and signatures) for client-side integration with go-perun. We see great promise in the IC ecosystem and actively engaged with Token standards and the development team in efforts to help the IC grow in a developer- and user-friendly direction. In the future, we seek to receive follow-up grants that complete the client-side integration for the IC in our library and want to bring full state channel support to ICP. This will allow for the creation of blockchain games that can massively scale, bringing data privacy while keeping the reliability of the IC.
General future outlook
We are currently working on cool features, such as cross-chain payment channels, for which we already have a demo web-app (alternatively, we have a video). This will allow writing off-chain dApps that do not confine users to a single blockchain. There are also cool side projects to look forward to, such as a proof of concept of a card game running in a state channel currently being developed by students of the TU Darmstadt.
Perun AMA
In this thread, we want to say hello to everyone in the IC community officially, and do an AMA on PolyCrypt and especially the Perun protocol. We hope to create connections with existing or upcoming IC projects, discuss how your projects could benefit from the technology we provide and receive feedback or wishes of other developers or users regarding features you would like to see.
You can also check out our Perun discord, where you can connect with us if you require a more private, one-on-one discussion with our staff. Please note that I cannot make official decisions, as I am only a core developer, but I can refer you to the appropriate people if you contact me directly on discord.