Last week in bitcoin (Sep 22- 28)
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem...
Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent last week at Bitcoin++ Istanbul — Scaling Edition. The event brought together developers and researchers that are currently working to scale Bitcoin. Here is what caught my eye:
Stratum V2 v1.5.0 has been released, bringing a refactored Translator Proxy and Job Declarator Client.
During the weekly developer call, Stratum developers announced that the reference implementation was ready for a new release. The new version was distributed on Thursday, September 25th.
This version brings a refactored and enhanced Translator Proxy, a module that serves as a bridge between older SV1 mining setups and the newer protocol, enabling compatibility and a smoother transition for miners. Moreover, it upgrades the Job Declarator Client (JDC), the component that is in charge of submitting a miner’s custom block template to the pool.
What’s cool about the tech: The upgrades of v1.5.0 are helping increasing the decentralization of mining, both by allowing older devices to better work with the new protocol and by making block template submission more efficient.
CDK v0.13.0 has been released, introducing FFI bindings for native mobile development, new metrics collection, improved HTTP transport, and more.
During the weekly call, on Wednesday 24th, CDK developers announced the release of the latest version of the e-cash development kit, distributed on GitHub on Tuesday 23rd.
The highlight of the new version is the official release of the cdk-ffi crate, which allows to easily bring the Cashu protocol in native mobile applications using Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android) through UniFFI-based bindings. All the major functionalities are supported, including BOLT12 payments, multi-mint support, and P2PK conditions.
More functionalities were released, such as advanced mint metrics collection through Prometheus crate, an improved database layer and an enhanced HTTP transport with proxy support and BIP-353 DNS resolution.
PR288 is bringing new Spending Conditions to Cashu specifications with NUT-XX, leveraging STARK-proven computation to enable user-defined arbitrary spending conditions with strong privacy guarantees.
During the Cashu monthly call, on Thursday 25th, developers showcased the new NUT proposal, demoing how STARK-proven computation would allow users to send tokens redeemable only upon successful execution of a Cairo program. Cairo is a Turing-complete programming language, specifically designed to be used with STARK proofs.
A sender can add a spending condition, specifying the hash of the Cairo program and the hash of the output condition. The receiver will be able to spend the token only after executing the program and generating the STARK proof to be verified by the mint. The e-cash mint only stores and verifies the hash of the Cairo program, thus it has no real knowledge about the condition itself.
Developers have already created NUT-XX compatible forks of well-know Cashu mint implementations, such as CDK and cashu-ts, and of the cashu.me wallet to be able to demo the new NUT.