Last week in bitcoin (Oct 20 - 26)
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem...
Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent 10+ hours in open-source developer calls in the Bitcoin ecosystem last week. Here is what caught my eye:
Arkade was officialy launched on mainnet during the Plan ₿ Week with the aim to become the new base layer for the financial infrastructure of tomorrow.
During the Arkade Activation Day, Ark Labs CEO Marco Argentieri stated that the team had officially launched their implementation of the Ark protocol on mainnet. He demoed a payment from their brand new PWA wallet to Coinos, which was confirmed instantly.
According to the company’s manifesto, Arkade wants to become the foundation of a new financial ecosystem, with a whole new ecosystem of applications built on top of it. To accompany the mainnet launch, companies such as Lendasat, Hodl Hodl and Boltz, are actively integrating Arkade in their applications.
Arkade launches with 3 different SDKs - Rust, Go and TypeScript for building apps. It also comes with an enterprise-level wallet, Fulmine, and a mobile wallet, provided as a Progressive Web App (PWA). Integrations with BTCPayServer, Lendasat and Boltz are already available. Moreover, a MetaMask snap is available to bring Bitcoin, Lightning and Arkade to a broader user base.
Fedimint v0.9.0 “Smooth Operator” was released last week, promising to make running a federation easier.
During the weekly call, on Monday 20th, developers announced that the new version of Fedimint was nearly ready. The goal of the v0.9.0 release is to make running fedimint easier, with improvements to LN Gateways, federation management and networking over Iroh.
The new release simplifies running a LNv2 Gateway by implementing LNURL pay, adding swaps between LNv2 and LNv1 to serve any invoice type and lowering fees. Moreover, federations’ guardians are now able to configure fees, change password with atomic re-encryption and download a backup configuration.
Finally, many optimizations and stability improvements were introduced on the network side to make it easier to connect over iroh, including connection reuse, optimized join times, and enhanced monitoring.
Simulation results testing the performances of a reputation algorithm for channel jamming mitigation were recently published on Delving Bitcoin by Lightning developer CarlaKC.
During the BOLT specifications meeting, on Monday 20th, Lightning developer CarlaKC announced that she had published the results of her work on an updated reputation algorithm for Lightning nodes on Delving Bitcoin. The goal of this algorithm is to mitigate channel jamming attacks on the Lightning Network.
Channel jamming is a denial-of-service attack against the Lightning Network that reduces the network’s reliability. The aim of the attack is to consume all the available resources of a target channel to prevent it from forwarding payments.
The obtained results are based on a simulator. It implements the reputation algorithm, tracked in PR1280, and tests it against both resource and sink attacks. According to CarlaKC, results are very promising in protecting nodes from channel jamming.
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