What a rollercoaster year it has been for Bitcoin Cash. We encountered a risk of a damaging hard fork, started by a lead developer gone rogue, then successfully averted it.
We made history in being the first blockchain to successfully replace a lead implementation without it splitting or damaging the ecosystem, proving the strength of Bitcoin Cash's decentralized nature, and its prime value proposition for being the world's global money.
Along with this, BCH stakeholders demonstrated the strength of voluntary funding by successfully using a revolutionary decentralized crowdfunding app called Flipstarter to raise 5963.73 BCH (valued at 2 million USD at the time of writing) in 45 projects, funding multiple node developers, marketing campaigns, wallets, games, infrastructure and more in less than a year.
In the background, all this time the SLP Foundation has been hard at work in the background to deliver substantial upgrades to the entire SLP ecosystem.
In part 1 of a 2 part series, we present an overview of all that has happened for SLP in 2020. Combining both the SLP Foundation's work and collaboration with all the amazing people who work day and night to make SLP the best plug and play token solution there is in the crypto industry.
Post Office Protocol Server Release
Let's start with the big announcement first! For those who don't know, the Post Office Protocol allows wallets to send SLP tokens without BCH as gas. So if you sent USDT, you would no longer need BCH to send it, and the fee will be deduced as USDT. Eliminating the need for the base layer token completely for token transactions.
The Post Office Protocol Server, first funded by bchinjim, then fully funded by the SLP Foundation is now available for alpha testing.
For this project, the team has gone above and beyond in delivering substantial features to the server, which we think many business builders will find useful to work to develop their own post office protocol servers.
As with any SLP Foundation funded project, it is entirely open-source and available to all.
Check out a front-end here, and the code here.
Features Implemented:
Works with BCHD with SLP integration to prevent token burns
Allows live updating of price from CoinFLEX, Coinex, and Bitcoin.com Exchange
An automatic splitting tool to create stamps
Code configuration
Apply custom rules to price data
Multiple token support
Usability, Stability and Speed
When the SLP Foundation was funded, usability, stability and speed were the core tenets of what we want promised to deliver for SLP 2020.
In our last recap, we covered substantial improvements made to SLP-DB's performance. Unit tests, fuzzing suites using AFL and the graph search server built. Launching SLP decoder, SLP Parser, and the now highly used SLP Metadata Maker.
Since then, the SLP Foundation has funded maintenance and continued improvements on SLP-DB over the course of the year.
Various additions to NFT functionality have been made, such as additions of NFT commands to SLP-JS and other libraries. An NFT faucet that uses the new BCHD SLP API was funded and made by the SLP Foundation.
Graph search (GS++), the all important C++ validator built by our lead developer JT "Blockparty" Freeman, has undergone significant optimizations, adding differential and graph fuzzing features. This has been used to find hard to spot inconsistencies in other SLP implementations.
Graph search (GS++) was also implemented in the BCHD SLP indexer, so now we have two graph search implementations, one in C++ and one in Golang.
This improvement was vital in providing high-level tools to facilitate wallet improvements to no longer rely on a single source of truth. The increased speed of graph search means the speed of crawling the DAG for SLP transactions has increased greatly.
Island tools such as slp-parser and slp-metadatamaker was ported to Dart and Go, and can be ported to more, and flexibility of where the origin of truth comes from has been incorporated into many examples, allowing developers to freely switch from bitcoin.com's rest API and BCHD's new SLP indexing.
Enhancement and Infrastructure
We completed SLP-Light a super easy to use wrapper for creating SLP transactions that was successfully used to integrate Tether's USDT in a collaboration with bitcoin.com's developers to onboard USDT onto Bitcoin Cash.
One of the most significant improvements made this year to SLP is James Cramer leading the addition of SLP indexing into the BCHD full node.
Credit for the entire SLP upgrade goes to: JT Freeman, Ekliptor, Josh Ellithorpe and Chris Pacia.
BCHD node's new SLP Native Indexing can now be used as REST API or as a GRPC client connected a BCHD node, giving a new fantastic option to developers on easily interacting with SLP on the blockchain.
Some of the cool things this allows:
Receive SLP metadata on transactions, tokens, all from one source. This allows you to do one query and not have to worry about synchronizing issues like when using SLPDB.
Burn Protection -- you can be sure that you aren't burning any SLP tokens due to a bug in your software. If you do want to burn some tokens that still works too, just enumerate them. You can check SLP validity prior to broadcasting or during broadcast.
Parse and create SLP metadata. You can use this inside your application when constructing your transactions.
Subscribe to all transactions involving specific tokens.
BCHD is self-funded independent from SLP Foundation, and SLP Foundation provided collaboration in the form of implementation help and testing tools. We give a great shoutout to the BCHD team for making SLP on BCHD happen!
You can check out the swagger-UI which documents the REST API on BCHD for SLP here (test REST calls immediately!). You can check out the gRPC client to BCHD implementation here. It's all ready for use!
If you are adventurous you can also spin up the SLP branch of BCHD yourself as well.
Following this, James Cramer created SLP Comps, an extremely useful tool that tests the validity of transactions by pinging more than one source of truth. We will discuss more about SLP Comps in part 2.
Promotion, Workshops, and Documentation
The SLP Foundation together with the Bitcoin Cash community-funded a game-changing hackathon called Block Hack Global 2020 with big education and investment partners. A serious curriculum and had many prizes.
Blockhack 2020 had 312 attendees, 122 participating hackers, and 30 workshops.
Some notable innovations are offline SLP payments, SLP negotiation protocol, SLP smart contracts allowing cross-chain swaps, and trustless jobs escrow application that works on SLP.
Full details can be found here.
Additionally, for the Blockhack, the SLP Foundation produced many SLP workshops which will serve as great videos to onboard future developers to SLP.
We will be starting an SLP Foundation video channel soon alongside our new website, details in part 2.
We have been adding to SLP.dev as well, our awesome one-stop documentation site.
Want to find out more about SLP 2020?
Don't miss out on part 2. Where we will be talking about the SLP Foundation's brand new website, our research into federated validation for SLP, more on SLP Comp, new apps coming to the ecosystem and more!
Wow! That's some great work coming through the pipeline. Jan is going to be HUGE for BCH 💪