Update March 2018
I have being posting about several projects I am working on recently and just wanted to give an overall update on the state of them as much has been announced but little is publicly/production ready.
As many of you know Mandel Duck is something I do in my spare time and my day job is working on IndieSquare and Book of Orbs projects. Recently due to commitments with my day job I have been absent from working on Mandel Duck projects. In addition to this, updates I intend to make for Mandel Duck projects require certain tech and infrastructure to be developed in the bitcoin and counterparty ecosystem, however there is a shortage of developers in the space so I have also taken time out to try and help work on improving the ecosystem and help bring these new technologies to fruition.
Sarutobi Island
At then end of last year Sarutobi Island chapter II was released so it logically follows that the next step is Chapter III, work has begun on chapter III but due to commitments and my day job it may take some time to be released. Another factor is the new counterparty and bitcoin tech id like to use in the game such as cross chain tokens and lightning network is still underdevelopment and needs to be built. I am also working on these new technologies to help progress the infrustucture to a point where they can be used in projects.
Lightning network
As just mentioned Lightning network is something that I defiantly want to explore in sarutobi island however sarutobi island is a mobile game and the lightning network mobile technology is immature at the moment. Some of you may have seen the demo mobile lightning wallet I have been working on and this is something I am exploring under IndieSquare in order to help make it more available to general users. In the following months I would at least like to get a testnet demo of Lightning mobile wallet and game integration out for people to play around with. I also posted a while back a demo of a counterparty picopayment channel and whilst lightning technology would work for counteparty on a per token basis I think effort is best put into other fee lowering technology such as batching in counterparty, MCAT and crosschain tokens letting users use tokens on a cheap chain and atomically swap back into the bitcoin chain if they wanted to.
Atomic Swaps
Atomic swaps are another thing I previously posted about and theoretically performed a swap of a counter-party token. This work was again under IndieSquare and will be developed further in the near future to allow multi-chain trading and tokens we hope.
Ledger Nano s Counterparty app
I previously developed a webapp that allowed users to send tokens to and from their ledger nano s, however as the nano s could not decode the counterparty data the user could not confirm the transaction 100% on the device leaving it open to possible malware attacks. These past few weeks I have been working on a native ledger nano s and made progress decoding and showing a counterparty send transaction details on the device screen. I plan to finish the app but at the moment the app often segfaults so I need to read up on my pointer and stack smashes!
Takara
Takara is now owned by IndieSquare who are currently working on exciting things relating to multi chain, once developed we expect to add support for other chains tokens on takara.
Counterparty protocol/segwit
In preparation for takara and sarutobi upgrades I need to use counterparty with segwit transactions, I locally managed to create segwit counterparty transaction however it is not 100% supported by the counterparty protocol and leads to confusion when searching for transactions. I would like to work further on integrating segwit into counterparty but due to commitments with my day job and other projects and the fact that I am unfamiliar with the counterparty code base it is not an immediate thing I can look at.
