Summary
Motivated by recent forum discussions, we start providing more regular updates on roadmap changes. Here is the June 2022 summary.
(Note: this is the first time we are doing this, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated)
DFINITY’s main focus is:
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BTC integration: This initiative is composed of multiple features such as Threshold ECDSA signatures, Canisters holding bitcoin, and ckBTC. The Chromium milestone will be declared achieved once we have a beta version of the BTC integration available to developers on the IC. The beta version will interface with Bitcoin’s test network. This is a major milestone as it enables developers to start building smart contracts for Bitcoin. In a subsequent step, we will drop the label “beta” and interface with the real Bitcoin network. So far, the DFINITY team has released an early developer preview in February 2022. Since then, the team has successfully integrated Bitcoin’s testnet into the IC and is testing the implementation. We provide regular updates on our progress, e.g. on Twitter. The engineering team estimates that we will achieve the Chromium milestone in late June or early July. The Bitcoin mainnet integration and ckBTC will follow a few weeks later, possibly around the same time that we release the SNS.
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SNS: The SNS initiative is driving the Carbon milestone. The work is progressing well. First demos have been published. Two essential building blocks that received a lot of attention during the past weeks were SNS’ initial token swap and the IC token standard defined by the Ledger & Tokenization Working Group. Another piece of the puzzle is a user-friendly UI that allows one to participate in token swaps and participate in the governance of SNS-tokenized dapps. We are extending the NNS Frontend dapp to provide these additional functionalities. With the recent rollout of the Svelte re-write of the dapp, we created the foundation to introduce a new user interface that will greatly improve useability. We to launch the first SNS and tokenize a first real-world dapp in Q3 2022.
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Platform security and robustness: The team is not only working on features that provide new functionality to developers, we also spend significant efforts to further improve the foundation of the IC blockchain network. Recent upgrades included canister sandboxing and state sync improvements. Moreover, we established a weekly release cadence for IC upgrades, announcing releases ahead of the NNS vote on the forum, e.g. release 3b5d893. The dashboard shows the impressive number of subnet upgrades performed on a daily basis.
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Developer experience (DX): During the past weeks, we have allocated more resources to improve developer productivity on the IC. We plan to soon release a more detailed dfx roadmap that is heavily influenced by developer requests. Recent improvements include better error messages for dfx, a complete overhaul of the developer documentation on internetcomputer.org and a set of new sample dapps available in Motoko and Rust. In parallel, we work on deterministic time slicing, a precondition for re-architecting canister upgrades and Motoko garbage collection. Finally, we are also improving the end-user experience. For example, the recent change of Internet Identity, requiring less steps to authenticate
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Decentralization: During the past months, we have been working on a new node provider (NP) and node onboarding process that will allow NPs to independently setup replica nodes and propose their addition to the network by means of NNS proposals. While the integration into the NNS FE dapp is work-in-progress, onboarding instructions using command line tools have been published and successfully used by first NPs. In addition, we are working on a more decentralized architecture for boundary nodes and look forward to presenting our plans in the coming weeks.
Features were we didn’t progress as fast as planned:
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People parties for validating personhood: we struggled with various technical problems, mainly related to webRTC. We remain committed to people parties and are currently building an engineering team and exploring the use of native dapps instead of a browser-only solution. While the feature is currently listed for the Carbon milestone, we don’t know for sure when we will be ready with a robust release.
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Rosetta extensions for Neuron management: this is another feature that we postponed repeatedly because discussions with exchange partners are dragging on and because we prioritized the IC token standard higher than this feature.
