Testnet-4 is live, the Ethereum bridge is already on Rinkeby and Görli and… it is beginning to look a lot like mainnet!

If this is your first time visiting our monthly updates, welcome! For some general background on Witnet and our technology, please read this 3 minute primer, take a look at our whitepaper, or check out our project’s “must-reads” digest.

🏗️ Development Update

Testnet-4 is already live, and there is a Docker image for running your own node. This is a huge milestone for Witnet, as this testnet will be the first with bridging capabilities. What does that mean? Long story short: Witnet is already connected to Ethereum. As soon as we release our Solidity libraries — conveniently packaged into a Truffle box — any Ethereum developer will be able to make their contracts use Witnet to retrieve and aggregate data from any external source.

This Witnet Testnet-4 brings us closer than ever to the eventual release of the Witnet Mainnet:

• We kept improving the Witnet<>Ethereum Bridge, which enables querying the Witnet Decentralized Oracle Network from Ethereum smart contracts. Many of the contracts involved in the bridging are already live on Rinkeby and Görli. Over the next weeks, you will see the first Ethereum testnet contracts relaying on Witnet for trustlessly querying data from external APIs and data sources. The bridges are best described in this other blog entry.
• We released the witnet-requests Javascript library on NPM, which allows to compose Witnet requests from any website or NodeJS app.
• At the protocol level, we migrated from MessagePack to CBOR as the preferred bytecode serialization method for Witnet request scripts and result values. The reason is straightforward: CBOR is standardized as RFC 7049 and is becoming more widespread day by day.
• The visual Witnet requests editor in the Sheikah IDE is progressing at full speed, with an eventual release coming soon. New features included support for importing and exporting request templates, i.e. pre-made requests that can be easily tailored to your specific use cases without having to write them from scratch.
• The wallet backend that powers Sheikah has made incredible progress too, and it will be soon providing indexing of every incoming and outgoing transaction from your wallets. At-rest encryption has been improved too.
• We reflected on bribery and P+epsilon attacks, how they affect decentralized networks and how we fight them.
• We also took the chance to apply the elliptic curve multiplication optimizations that we introduced before into the elliptic-curve-solidity library.

👏 New contributors and bounties

We have kept publishing bounties on the Gitcoin platform, which is a great way to reward the effort of open source contributors.

Are you interested in contributing to the development of witnet-rust? We would be thrilled to have you! Visit our new contributing guide and development guide for more info!

We are also extremely interested and receptive to anyone curious about building a separate implementation of the Witnet protocol. Have a favorite language you’d like to try to build Witnet with? Let us know and we’ll be happy to support you!

💜 Team

The Stampery Labs team — which was commissioned by Witnet Foundation to develop witnet-rust and Sheikah — has been very active in the Ethereum community this August. We were delighted to attend Web3Summit and DappCon, where we received abundant feedback from other projects and kept forging strong ties with them.

The team has another huge piece of news to share this time: we are about to onboard a new Developer Relations / Community Manager, who will be joining in a couple of weeks. He will be the one publishing the next monthly report ;)

You can follow Witnet on Twitter and stay up to date on our blog.

For more info:

• Read the Witnet whitepaper 📃
• Read the FAQ ❓
• Join the community Telegram group, Discourse and Discord. 💬
• Follow @witnet_io on Twitter 🐦
• Discover other Witnet community channels 👥