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After a summer break, things are back in full swing with the Global R&D highlights. This month’s edition brings you the winners of the vetKeys bounty contest, the sunset of the Service Worker, a new Ethereum RPC canister in the making, and more…
Written by Angela Harp
Congrats to the vetKey bounty winners
1:22 (video timestamp)
What are vetKeys and why do we need them? In a nutshell, vetKeys facilitate the function of cryptographic keys and open up new possibilities for developers to build privacy-preserving applications on the Internet Computer in a decentralized environment with features such as time-lock encryption and MEV prevention. Adding vetKey functionality that allows canister smart contracts to derive strong cryptographic keys and users to safely retrieve keys to sign and encrypt, would greatly increase data privacy as well as simplify user management of encryption keys within decentralized applications.
As a first step towards the development of vetKeys on the Internet Computer, a mock implementation was released as a prototype for developers to start experimenting and building before the feature release. A mock version also allows the community to give feedback on the feature and the API, and to have a say in how it should be further developed.
Taking things a step further, a bounty program was then announced back in May of this year to encourage developers to try it and build dapps that could continue to flourish beyond the feature release. With a prize pool of $24K and four categories — Identity-based Encryption, Group Sharing, Timelock Encryption, and Blue Skies — the project submissions were quite impressive! Here are the results:
Congratulations to all the winners! Go to the Forum for more details about each of the winning projects. We’re looking forward to seeing how they all develop.
Out with the Service Worker, in with ICXÂ Proxy
11:59 (video timestamp)
The Service Worker is an implementation of the HTTP gateway protocol, which allows standard web browsers to interact with the Internet Computer blockchain similar to the way they would a standard Web2 browser. How does it work exactly? Basically, it converts standard HTTP requests into a format that’s readable by the Internet Computer, waits for responses from the Internet Computer and verifies them once received to make sure the responding replicas are not acting maliciously. In a last phase, the Service Worker then transforms the responses from the Internet Computer into standard HTTP responses.
While this approach to the HTTP Gateway Protocol has supported convenient and secure adoption of web applications built on the Internet Computer Protocol, it also causes major pain points. Most notable is the fact that trustless loading is not feasible. As the Service Worker is loaded from a remote server, you have to trust that server is not giving you a malicious one. Other pain points include poor user experience and a difficult developer experience that has resulted in many community complaints, bug reports and increased complexities that require high maintenance.
For these reasons, the DFINITY Foundation has proposed sunsetting the Service Worker in favor of ICX Proxy on the DFINITY-hosted Boundary Nodes. The ICX Proxy is to become the HTTP gateway implementation. ICX Proxy, as a remote HTTP Gateway can provide a seamless onboarding experience for new users with superior performance and end user experience. Security and decentralized conscious end users will still have the option to continue working on a local HTTP Proxy that they can run themselves. The Service Worker would also still be available for community members to host their own HTTP Gateways if they wish to do so, but it will no longer be supported by the DFINITY Foundation.
Read the blog for further details about the implementation roadmap
Ethereum RPCÂ Canister
21:05 (video timestamp)
Engineering teams at DFINITY are currently developing a so-called Ethereum RPC Canister that will facilitate Ethereum-based integrations on the Internet Computer. Simply put, it’s a managed service that acts as a gateway into EVM-based smart contracts. The aim is to alleviate some of the challenges developers are facing when building cross-chain dapps with HTTPS outcalls and API keys. The RPC Canister will be controlled by the NNS DAO and have a simple, easy-to-use interface to which developers can point their canisters. This means developers could avoid excess rate limits or 429s.
Of course, this could be solved with an API key, but having an API key poses other problems. In this scenario, developers need to get a subscription from providers such as Cloudflare or Alchemy, but this puts them in control of the account and makes the dapp less decentralized. Keeping the API key away from prying eyes is also an obstacle. Lastly, many applications are security sensitive and don’t want to rely on a single RPC to tell the truth. Getting around this requires canisters querying multiple providers to ensure they all agreed before accepting the same truth. While this is perhaps a more decentralized approach, developers would have to subscribe to more providers raising costs, and the barrier to entry significantly.
The proposed RPC Canister will manage the API keys and represent a number of different providers. Developers tapping in this canister will not have to worry about subscriptions or managing API keys and keeping them safe. The canister will also take care of decoding and encoding requests, so developers can focus on building the fun stuff. In addition to the canister, engineering teams will also create libraries to allow developers to build their own RPC canisters.
The RPC canister will expose two methods: request and verify_message. Watch the video presentation or go to the forum post to learn how the RPC canister works. And don’t forget to tell us what you think in the Forum.
Stable Structure: BTreeMap V2
29:00 (video timestamp)
A new version of the BTreeMap was released that supports unbounded keys and values. Previously, Stable BTreeMap required specifying max key and value sizes, which always allocated the max size. This is not only limiting for developers, it also wasted memory usage. Redesigning the internal memory layout of BTreeMap allows for more efficient memory usage and types to be bounded or unbounded. Migration from V1 to V2 is expected to be smooth and seamless.
Oisy Wallet
37:17 (video timestamp)
The source code for a new kind of wallet called Oisy was recently made available for the developer community to experiment with. Oisy, which stands for Open Internet Services-y, is a novel, multi-device Ethereum wallet hosted on the Internet Computer. It is designed to run natively on the Internet Computer, which means it runs fully decentralized, is capable of interacting with Ethereum smart contracts, and can hold and send native ETH and ERC-20 tokens via HTTPS outcalls. Unlike existing wallets, Oisy does not need to rely on browser extensions or centralized custodians as it can directly communicate with the Ethereum network.
The Oisy Wallet is an alpha version that showcases what’s possible and encourages the developer community to explore various use cases for ETH/ICP transactions.
Fork the repo, and start hacking around with Oisy
Catalyze
53:19 (video timestamp)
This time around, the community spotlight went to Catalyze, a decentralized social platform for event management, community-building, task and fundraising management. The platform aims to bring true community to Web3 overcoming today’s common issues such rug pulls, low engagement, user distrust and unreliability. Catalyze envisions itself as a platform where self-sustaining networks, rich engagement with tokenized incentive and disincentive systems, data-driven decision making and comprehensive analytics can help decentralized social media flourish.
Recently, Catalyze was successfully turned into an SNS DAO, leaving the direction of its development in the hands of the community. Users already enjoy features such as direct and group messaging, calendar view and event management, token and neuron-gated communities and wallet functionality, including support for other ICP wallets. New features in the pipeline include tipping, task management, airdropping, AMA tooling and video conferencing. Catalyze currently has 320 active communities from various backgrounds, specifically gaming and NFTs, with a total of, 6000 users and growing.
Be sure to give Catalyze a try and follow their progress on X: @catalyze_one
Catalyze - Premier Web3 Discord Alternative for Community Engagement Growth
That concludes the September highlights. We hope to see you at the next Global R&D in October. Check out the full recording:
Follow the tech developments of Internet Computer: @DFINITYDev
Start building on the Internet Computer:
Developer Docs | Internet Computer
Global R&D: September 2023 Edition was originally published in The Internet Computer Review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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