December Newsletter — Weeds
tldr; We have posted a blog-post about the technical difficulties to build responders, the WatchTower BOLT for public feedback, and we have been pretty busy at meet ups about off-chain scalability.
At PISA Research, our goal is to build the missing components for an off-chain, open-source, global and permissionless financial system. Over the past few years, we have helped set the foundation for off-chain scalability and now our task is to ensure that crypto, via off-chain, is adopted by billions of users.
🚀 Responders: Bitcoin vs Ethereum 🚀
As everyone is aware, at PISA Research we are building:
- Relayer: Improving transaction delivery on Ethereum,
- Responder: Relaying transactions when triggered by an on-chain event.
Our responder is built for Bitcoin (BTC-WatchTower) and Ethereum (any.watcher). Both implementations are pretty close to an MVP and for live test use by companies.
To reflect on how far our implementation has come, we wrote a blog post to cover some of the technical challenges that arise in both platforms. While you would think something like a responder is pretty easy to build, in fact it is non-trivial for both platforms.
One example includes transaction fees. In Bitcoin, we cannot guarantee a quality of service as we cannot bump the fee (without using child-pays-for-parent) and instead must rely upon the client picking a “good fee” in advance. In Ethereum, we can indeed bump the fee, but we need to carefully load balance transactions across multiple wallets due to limits on the number of pending transactions per account.
Of course, we advise reading the blog post. But it is crazy to think most projects actually need to replicate this functionality for their dapps (by the way, applicable for most dapps that are not off-chain related).
This is why we will shortly begin offering transaction delivery and blockchain interaction as a service.
🚀 WatchTower BOLT #13 draft🚀
Thanks to the hard work of Sergi Delgado, we have finally posted a draft BOLT for a WatchTower standard to the lightning network mailing list.
Several implementations have popped up for watchtowers (including LND and electrum), so it feels like the right time to start coming together on a standard specification for a basic watching service.
The BOLT includes how to set up the encrypted blob, the communication protocol between the client and watchtower, and also how to add a signed receipt to every request (e.g. quality of service).
p.s. it was also included in the weekly lightning newsletter which you should checkout.
🚀 Boston Meetup 🚀
Thanks to Fidelity Labs for organising an off-chain scalability meet-up moderated by Amanda with panelists Warren, Tadge, Stacie, Patrick & Ethan.
There is no recording of the meet-up. But several cool topics came up including the lightning network, why self-custody is important, are sidechains really off-chain, and why academics are leaving university to pursue startups.
🚀 Technical Deep Dives 🚀
Thanks to ChainLink for sponsoring and hosting a meet-up for us at crypto_nyc. Patrick McCorry gave a 2-hour lecture which is probably the most in-depth technical talk yet about off-chain protocols.
The slides are here. It is a bit of a mishmash of previous talks with additional content around commitchain rollups. It covers the history of channels, channel networks, why payment channel hubs are awkward, why it is likely most service providers will run some form of commitchain and what the hell rollup is all about.
Why do we bother with technical talks and meet-ups? Companies I am in touch with are excited for off-chain protocols. They want to get their hands dirty in the lightning network, plasma, etc.
The problem is that most companies lack the expertise to fully understand what is going on, they do not have any confidence in the software (in fact, most companies are just trying to keep their house in order never mind run close-to-alpha software) and they also assume it is a scaling solution that must come first before they can use it.
This is why at PISA Research, we are changing the narrative around off-chain protocols.
For the past ~10 years, most people have used an off-chain protocol. The problem is that most implementations today are custodial and require us to trust the service provider.
But service providers can’t be trusted and not because they are malice, but keeping $bn keys secure is a titan-task.
So off-chain protocols like channels and commitchains, will hopefully, let us have a similar experience to the custodial solutions deployed today, but with an emphasis on protecting the user and letting them maintain full custody of their funds.
But large service providers are not going to start running $1bn lightning channels, plasma, or any other off-chain solution from day 1. Instead, we need to get back to basics, which is why we are focusing on transaction delivery as a service, as it is a fundamental building block for any off-chain protocol.
When that is working, we’ll help move our industry, step by step, towards a self-custody future.
This is indeed the future of finance. Let’s go.
