Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open-source reporter from the Insider Edition.
In this week update we feature the latest release of the Cashu Development Kit (CDK), which introduced a new BDK on-chain payment backend based on NUT-30.
We also cover the effort from the Marmot protocol team to draft a new set of specifications to improve the reliability of the system.
We finally present some interesting news from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Notably, Bark by Second available on mainnet, a new vulnerability found in Bitcoin Core, improvements on splicing, and a draft BIP for a new testnet.
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem
I spent 10+ hours in open-source developer calls in the Bitcoin ecosystem last week. Here is what caught my eye:
v0.17.0 of CDK was released.
During the weekly call, on Wednesday 10th, CDK contributors announced that the latest version of the Cashu implementation was close to be published. The release was officially pushed some days later, on Saturday 13th.
The main highlight is the introduction of an on-chain backend for minting and melting ecash tokens. Based on NUT-30 specification, the new features leverages BDK under the hood to provide on-chain functionalities.
Other changes includes a deprecation notice for LNbits as a backend, improvements to improve recovery and reliability, and the possibility to have multiple mint backends for different currency units. The latest release is also available for Kotlin JVM, Go, Dart, and Swift though language bindings.
Marmot v2, the new set of specification for the Marmot specifications, is currently being drafted.
During the monthly community call, on Tuesday 9th, Marmot maintainers announced that they were working on a second version of the protocol specifications with the aim of improving the reliability of the system. The new specifications are being drafted in the darkmatter specs repository, organized in modular surfaces with dedicated directories and clear ownership.
One of the most important focus of the new specifications is related to how the group reaches consensus on state change. As of today, each member of the group processes commits independently, which could result in potential forks of the group. Marmot v2 would provide hard-coded parameters to allow users to get to the same group state deterministically.
Another focus of the new specifications is to make the protocol transport-agnostic. While the original specifications put Nostr at the center, v2 aims to provide the possibility to use Marmot with many different transport layers, such as FIPS.
A BIPs Update
There was no newsworthy update in the last days in the BIP repository. We’ll provide new updates as soon as a new BIP gets published or gets assigned a number.
Other News from the Bitcoin World
Bark is on mainnet: Second announced on Monday 9th that Bark, their Ark implementation, was finally available on mainnet. Second released the Ark server, the Bark SDK, and multiple wallets to try. In the following days, Bark announced that AlbyHub had integrated Bark as a possible backend option for their node, and that the Bark Wallet was available on Umbrel. Unfortunately, it also had to deal with two vulnerabilities found by Bitcoin developer Floppy, which were soon patched by Second’s team.
Vulnerability in
-privatebroadcast: The Bitcoin Core organization disclosed on Thursday 11th that a privacy bug had been found in the newly-privatebroadcastfeature introduced in v31.0. The bug may cause the originator’s IP address to be revealed to a peer. A fix is expected soon in v31.1.Splicing out into a channel open: Dusty Daemon, the mind behind splicing, announced that he was able to make the first splice out into a channel open on regtest. In other words, he was able to remove funds from an already open channel, and put them in a brand-new one.
Testnet5 is coming?: Pol Espinasa posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a draft BIP to replace testnet4 with a new testnet5, with the aim is to improve reliability of the testnet. Testnet5 would include the same consensus rules as mainnet, plus activation of BIP54 (great consensus cleanup).
Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Nairobi this June 17- 19 to talk about working in public in open-source!