New Ecosystem Improvements
The Syscoin Community is always working to enhance and improve the ecosystem. Some advancements are noticeable to everyone such as wallet updates and new features, while some aren’t as readily noticeable yet fulfill very important roles.
In this Blogpost we’ll share some new advancements the Syscoin Platform and Blockchain Foundry developers have worked on in the last couple of months.
Fast Gitian
Fast Gitian is an extension of Bitcoin’s gitian build process. The typical Bitcoin gitian build creates binaries for various environments one by one, all built using a single host machine. The entire process can take many hours to complete on a fast computer and utilizes all of the machine's resources, making it useless for other development activities until the process completes.
The Fast Gitian project removes this development bottleneck while also reducing the time required to produce binaries. It achieves this by parallelizing the process for various platforms across a series of dynamic, configurable-scale cloud containers that are utilized only during build. These optimizations result in much faster gitian build times - average time goes from 6hrs or more per build to 45min or less. This enables developers to continue working in parallel with the build process rather than being blocked by it. Ultimately this means developers can more readily provide builds for multiple environments without sacrificing their own productivity, and produce them much faster!
Blockbook/Trezor Custom Integration
Blockbook is the backend service developed by Trezor and is a dependency of the Trezor hardware wallet and a number of hardware wallet products from other companies as well. Blockbook represents an industry-standard, high performance system for blockchain data storage, indexing and querying.
Cryptocurrency projects, due in large part to technical constraints, have not yet been able to match the convenient user experience provided by traditional banking applications. With Syscoin Platform’s custom integration with Blockbook, this becomes reality. Rich user experiences combined with high performance and convenience may be crafted on top, similar to the bank-grade experience most have adopted.
Blockbook will become integral to building wallets and applications on top of Syscoin Platform. It works with XPUB (HD wallets) and also supports SPTs natively. We have extended the functionality of Blockbook with our token layer in a general fashion allowing applications and users to leverage the complete set of APIs available. See it running at https://sys1.bcfn.ca/. You can query assets by symbol, and see asset information related to addresses and XPUBs as summaries through the API and explorer views. Our mobile wallet infrastructure is already leveraging this Blockbook API to serve information to users related to their HD wallets.
Features of Blockbook include:
- Index of addresses/XPUBs and address/XPUB balances of the connected block chain
- XPUB balances are useful for HD Wallet infrastructure
- Ability to filter based on pages, date ranges, token query filters
- Full support for Syscoin Platform Tokens (SPT) through indexing and filtering transactions
- Fast searches in the indexes
- Simple blockchain explorer
- Websocket, API and legacy Bitcore Insight compatible socket.io interfaces
- Support of multiple coins (Syscoin/Bitcoin and Ethereum type), with easy extensibility for other coins
- Scripts for easy creation of debian packages for backend and blockbook
There are not many open-sourced highly efficient XPUB APIs available today. Syscoin Platform has stepped-up by providing this much-needed technology.
Code available here: https://github.com/syscoin/blockbook
The new Blockbook backend and Trezor Explorer frontend provide a rich, accurate and fast blockchain exploration experience. This new Syscoin Platform Explorer is found at https://sys1.bcfn.ca/ - there is also a new Ethereum Explorer at https://eth1.bcfn.ca/. Appropriately, our current official explorer (https://explorer.blockchainfoundry.co/) will become deprecated.
Syscoin Bridge Agent Monitor
Agents, their availability and timeliness, are key to the functionality of Syscoin Bridge. Blockchain Foundry has built the Agent Monitor tool to help sysethereum-agents operators maximize availability and uptime, making it easier for them to monitor critical processes and details. Agent Monitor can push email alerts in the event of errors or potential issues, enabling operators to take action in a timely manner.
The service monitors several aspects of agent operation:
- Verifies syscoind, sysrelayer.nod, sysgeth.nod, and sysethereum-agents processes are running.
- Verifies local chain data matches remote chain data provided by explorer_url using data from getchaintips RPC.
- Alerts agent operators anytime the host machine restarts