Bounty update: Go Wallet progress
It’s happening, Go Wallet has arguably had it’s most reliable couple of weeks ever, since we did the Go Bounty. We’ve just migrated it now to a more permanent setup (So yeah, sorry about that little bit of down-time while that happened) and we’re looking all set for the future with it.
The main goals were:
1/ Server reliability, keeping it online, less down-time
2/ Redundancy, not just relying on a single server
3/ Standalone apps
With an “if we can” being:
4/ DAP address-prefix support
So far we’re making great progress and I want to update you on what’s happened so far!
DigiByte Service Status
This is a service monitor that allows for monitoring of specific aspects utilized by the Go Wallet, namely the Explorer Servers etc
This has been instrumental in the reliability, because we also know that in the future IF something goes wrong, then “the right people” are being notified about it ASAP.
Improving the underlying Go libraries
DigiByte Go is made up of a number of parts, the front-end, the back-end, a client interface library. They all have to work together nicely. This was how we inherited the code from the Copay developers, and as I’ve mentioned previously a number of blockchain projects use this Copay wallet base as their primary non-Core wallet, so it’s not too shabby. In addition, we’ve now upgraded the Go wallet to specifically use this DigiByte Service Status so that it is able to fail over between multiple servers that are already now redundant (more on that later), so the goal is to have redundancy of redundancy.
There’s more work being done on this, with certain aspects being tidied up, but it’s hopefully resulting in a tidier codebase to maintain moving forward as well.
As part of this, we’re also defaulting to Bech32 in the Go Wallet. This is hopefully something we will be mirroring elsewhere across all other wallets throughout 2020.
DigiExplorer overhaul
DigiByte Go relying on DigiExplorer was problematic with the issues it was experiencing. In addition to the Go Wallet, we’ve generously had somebody donate some DigiByte towards the server-fees to keep some of these services up and going.
We’ve migrated DigiExplorer from the single monolithic server it was previously and split it up in to a few geographically diverse servers. These are running in a load-balanced ip-hash configuration (A requirement of the Insight explorer due to the way it handles sessions) and so far everything is looking great.
We’re aware that over time if server utilization grows then each of the independent virtual machines may also need to have their hardware specs increased. This will naturally affect the on-going costs of running the servers, however we feel at this time the infrastructure has been a successful upgrade and there are certainly a number of growth options available to us.
Standalone apps
Work has been underway here to make a standalone package you can download for Windows, that will still utilize the same servers as the Chrome Ext does, however you can run this natively without Chrome.
Same for Android apps and we’re even seeing what’s involved with building out the iOS package. Yes, this would also include DigiAssets support too.
At this stage I don’t have an ETA on these, although they’re a “nice to have” on mobile, we’ve still got to work out the best way to educate newcomers in all of 1–2 lines about why they’d want to use one over the other.
So, to confirm: We have no plans at this stage to orphan off either Go or the Android / iOS wallets, and plan to maintain both concurrently into the forseeable future for as long as we can!
DAP Prefix support
There has been no work done towards this at present, we’ve been reviewing the possibility of adding support for this in to the Core Wallet as well, so this has temporarily been put on hold for reviewing later. This will most likely be picked up again after the next Core Release based on BTC Core 0.19 is out.
In closing
This has been great to see the community together to raise some funds for this, and I want to sincerely thank all those who donated, big or small. Same goes for Gary taking time off his day-job so that he could do some of these things for us.
It’s great to see the community rally behind such an idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens more throughout 2020!
