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GRAFT Weekly Development Status Update November 5th, 2018

Hi everyone, this is our weekly update on GRAFT development activities.

RTA Alpha

GRAFT developers are currently launching RTA Public Alpha, which is targeted for November 12th, 2018, while preparing to start working on RTA Beta.

There are several goals for the RTA Public Alpha testing stage:

  • Find potential issues and bugs that cannot be found on a low scale network of closed alpha (about 50 participants/supernodes)
  • Allow supernode owners to get familiar with the supernode setup and maintenance processes so they will be fully prepared for the RTA Beta launch on the mainnet
  • Allow the supernode owners to estimate the earnings on the real network (the stimulus transactions will be running on public alphanet on the same or similar scale as they will be available on the mainnet after the Beta launch)
  • Most importantly, work on preparing the network for the mainnet launch by allowing community to discover any security holes and potential exploits

We would like to thank our community, and especially the alpha test group, for their continuous feedback, finding issues, and suggesting solutions – you guys ROCK!!

Anti-ASIC Major Network Update

Last week GRAFT network was successfully updated (“hard forked”) with a new version of GRAFT software that introduced a new variation of the PoW hash algorithm which prevents ASIC mining. The major network update has applied a new variation of CryptoNight hash algorithm (CN variant 2) which is currently ASIC-resistant.

The major network update (aka hard fork) in GRAFT mainnet was triggered on Wednesday, October 31st at block 207,700. As a reminder, major network update means that if you are running a GRAFT network node (graftnoded) you must upgrade to the latest software. If you haven’t done it yet, please do it ASAP, otherwise your node will be either disabled or connected to the wrong chain. Note that users of GRAFT mobile and desktop wallets are not affected by the hard fork and should not do anything.

Customer Facing Applications

While the core GRAFT developers were focused on RTA Alpha, other developers continued working on hardware payment terminal apps, exchange brokers, and payment gateway for service providers. More specifically, last week they were working on the following tasks:
  • Exchange Broker Bitcoin status monitoring
  • Payment Gateway Email service enhancement
  • Verifone Terminal app error handling
  • Verifone Terminal app new UI
  • Payment Gateway DAPI status monitoring

Please see below the screenshots of the new Verifone terminal app UI. The new UI, remastered for accepting payments in multiple cryptocurrencies, is being tested now before submitting to Verifone for recertification. Currently, both GRFT and BTC are supported on GRAFT and Bitcoin mainnets, with more altcoins coming very soon.

Finally, some in the community have expressed concerns about the issues they identified that are not getting addressed in a timely manner or being “ignored”. We would like to assure you that we take all the comments and pull requests very seriously. The timing of when those get addressed has to align with our development timeline though as each request has to be carefully evaluated, integrated, and set up for proper testing.

In terms of the team’s skill set, we want to assure everyone that we have one of the most capable teams we’ve ever had the privilege of working with over our longish careers. We have over 150 years of combined experience and education in the field among us and multiple PhD’s and professional certifications on the team. We have built very robust and secure systems at the core of Cisco, Sonicwall, NCR, and HP in the past. We study relentlessly and leverage the best known methods in the field and the latest research being done out of MIT and Stanford.

We take this project very seriously and pour our heart and soul into it, using everything we know, but most importantly – leveraging what already works. Payment-processing blockchain is not the place for wild experimentation.

With that said, we look forward to more pull requests in the spirit of a real community open source project.

Looking forward to another exciting week and Happy GRAFTing!

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Real-time Transactions – GRAFT vs Electroneum, etc.

Electroneum recently announced real-time transactions available as beta on their network. We wanted to take some time to shed some light on the difference in approaches between solutions like Electroneum and GRAFT.

With their approach, Electroneum is effectively following the centralized model of Bitpay, Coinbase, Coingate, GoUrl.io, and many other centralized crypto payment processing gateways in that they issue an authorization immediately as the transaction enters the transaction pool, without waiting for confirmations on the network. There is little innovation in this approach which is well-known to the industry. With centralized entity in the middle, the buyer and the merchant must rely on trusted party just like with traditional plastic payment processing, which means compromise on privacy, security, and a single point of control.

Unlike Bitpay and other centralized payment gateways, Electroneum shifts the risk of transaction not getting confirmed onto the merchant rather than absorbing it themselves.

The vendor does not get the cryptocurrency instantly, but our system acts as a trusted 3rd party to ensure the ETN or other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is sent (our patent covers ETN, Bitcoin and other cryptos). The vendor knows the payment is sent and will make its way to the blockchain, so they can allow instant checkout – and the customer can walk out of the store with their cup of coffee or checkout online etc.
https://electroneum.com/2018/06/12/announcing-instant-payment-beta-vendor-application/

This illustrates the fundamental difference in approach where GRAFT is decentralized and utilizes an independent authorization sample (selected from the distributed network of supernodes) to validate the transaction, and independent exchange brokers to handle off-network (alt currency) acceptance risks when handling real-time payments.

GRAFT’s approach not only minimizes the risk of real-time transaction processing, but distributes to remaining risk (and reward) to the right party. It also allows acceptance of alternative cryptocurrencies, where Electroneum’s current approach is limited to ETN currency.

Finally, but importantly, GRAFT builds a payment network eco-system as opposed to providing a single vendor solution, which is the essence of decentralization that’s at the very core of the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

*** Note that our intent is not to pick on Electroneum with this article – we’re merely trying only to bring some clarity in what sets GRAFT apart from other payment solutions, using Electroneum as one of the better representatives of this class of centralized solutions.