Dev Report February 2022

Core Wallet report

As the main wallet is running rock solid, we’re just maintaining the infrastructure in the background, keeping it up and running and up2date. Some improvements were put in place as we hit the limits of a virtual machine, which is used to create the bootstrap archives day by day.

Thx to the feedback from our community, we get notified about this problem and could fix it very fast. As our lead dev Tek stepped back, we’re on the search for Blockchain developers with a passion and skill for privacy projects. For any further development or implementation of new features, this is a mandatory requirement to fulfil beforehand.

Light Wallet Report

Desktop Light Wallet was launched successfully end of last year and has so far been downloaded more than 150 times since then. Everything working smoothly with no complaints whatsoever. At the moment there are no updates or new features planned but whenever real good ideas or bad bugs emerge @Spectrocium will provide necessary updates.

At the moment this is only valid for minor things such as adding the feature of typing in the amount as the alternate currency (USD, EUR and etc.) for example, while bigger upgrades like cold staking or private transactions are currently halted. It should be mentioned that the light wallet could be turned into a browser plugin for Firefox- or Chrome-based browsers with relatively little effort as the whole code is based on JavaScript. The same holds true for a mobile version (Android & Ios).

Both would be without Tor support as @Spectrocium had trouble making the wallet work over Tor with Android. The only option with Tor (Android only) as of now would be to install the Orbot app to allow the light wallet to communicate over Tor. To make Tor finally work for Android & Ios an external expert would be required which may cost from 500$ up to 5,000$ (worst case) to make it run.

Progress with the Alias testing suite

We are slowly making progress with preparing unit tests for Alias. These are automated tests that are used during development to make sure that the behavior of the core wallet does not change while making changes to the source code. Having such tests makes development more efficient and secure because problematic changes will be detected early.

Furthermore, having a working testing suite is a prerequisite for migrating the wallet to a more recent codebase, later. Currently, this development is taking place on the feature/reactivateUnittests branch on Github. Running the unit tests uncovered two potential bugs in our codebase, of which one has already been fixed. This shows that using unit tests not only supports development but also help to increase the overall stability and correctness of the Alias codebase.

If you would like to help with test development, please get in contact with @Helix and @Gandalf on Discord (#development channel)! All of our developers are working on this project in their free time, which can be very limited depending on what life brings to us. The more high-quality unit tests we have, the easier future development will become.