Greymass Update - November 2021
The Latest from Greymass
Hey, everyone!
It’s been a full year since we’ve sent out one of these newsletters! We’ve moved most of our updates to the EOS Community Forums. Going forward, we’ll be doing bi-monthly updates across this newsletter and the forums.
There has been a lot of really exciting updates in the EOSIO community over the past few months that we’re excited to share with you below.
As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions, comments, or feedback!
Anchor
We continue to work on building out Anchor across iOS, Android, and desktop. Anchor continues to be our flagship product, and we integrate it directly into everything else we’re building.
You can download the latest versions for all platforms here. In our August community update, Aaron shared some early details about future plans for Anchor, available here.
Account Creation
At Greymass we’ve long had a goal of enabling quick and easy account creation for EOS. We’ve now built a tool to make this possible, which you can check out at this link.
The vision for enabling account creation goes beyond what currently exists with this service. You can read full details about our vision for account creation (which is now being funded via Eden) on our Eden proposal post.
We plan to build out a number of features, integrations, and payment options to enable maximum ease of use and flexibility for both end users and app/service developers.
Unicove
Last month we formally announced a project we’ve been quietly working on for quite some time— Unicove!
Unicove is Greymass’s new web wallet— we like to think of it as your portal to EOSIO blockchains.
We published a detailed write-up about Unicove and our future vision for the project. You can read through it here.
Eden
The first ever Eden on EOS election was held recently, and Aaron from our team was elected Head Chief among a number of delegates.
We’re proud to represent the EOS community in this way. Aaron’s initial proposal focused on our initiatives around account creation. He later put together a much more detailed proposal around the larger vision for various tools and services, and how those might fit into the Eden process. It’s worth reading in its entirety to get a sense of the vision of both Greymass and Aaron as Eden Head Chief.
Aaron was also interviewed by Dan Larimer after the election. You can watch the interview on YouTube below.
Coffee with Greymass
We’ve kicked back off our Coffee with Greymass podcast! We decided to do a special episode to discuss Aaron’s recent election as Head Chief of Eden. We discuss Eden, new Greymass projects, and a bunch more. You can listen to the episode here or on your favorite podcast app. More episodes to come soon!
Pomelo Grants
Greymass recently submitted a proposal for a Pomelo grant— we are one of the first entities to do so for the primary round of funding.
Our proposal focused on our work around APIs. It includes an overview of our existing work, as well as our proposed roadmap and timelines for future contributions. You can read through the entire proposal (and contribute) here.
Technical Updates
Webauthn Support in our client libraries
As our new Javascript library, @greymass/eosio, continues to increase in adoption with developers, our goal has been to be reactive to meet the needs of these early adopters. Recently technologies around webauthn have increased in demand and to help with these initiatives we have released a new library as well as updated all of our other SDKs to add this support.
A library for working with webauthn and @greymass/eosio was released here.
API Progress
Quietly for the last few months we have been working on our existing custom history solution. These are the APIs many wallets, block explorers, and applications use when showing you any sort of information from the past. Development and optimization is in progress, which has resulted in a new open source library:
Fast EOSIO primitives for Go: https://github.com/greymass/go-eosio 2
With the progress we have made improving our solution, we are now capable of performing full history replays in parallelized environments, have further optimized the processing/storage techniques used, and are exploring the best approaches for creating an entirely new way to access this historical data.
As an example of the performance gains we’ve seen, using these new techniques we were able to rebuild the transaction index on the Jungle 3 blockchain in around 5 minutes. This previously took hours to complete.
This history solution also finally has a name… Roborovski (or “Robo” for short).
Standardizing Anchor Session Communication
In an effort to continue making the technologies behind Anchor a public good, we have created a new client library to facilitate the communication between apps and wallets. The server implementation is known as Buoy (https://github.com/greymass/buoy-nodejs), and recently we released the client library for it.
The session management library (https://github.com/greymass/anchor-link-session-manager) that both Android and Desktop use are now updated to also integrate with this new client library.
SDK Updates
Along with the other updates above, we have also issued a number of other updates to the SDKs we continue to maintain. Listed below are some of these changes:
@greymass/eosiohas been updated to include key support for webauthn as well as improvements to API response/error handling https://github.com/greymass/eosio-coreUAL updated to the newest features available in Anchor: https://github.com/greymass/ual-anchor
Upgraded the ESR library with the newest versions of
@greymass/eosio: https://github.com/greymass/eosio-signing-requestUpgraded the Anchor Link library with the newest version of
@greymass/eosio: https://github.com/greymass/anchor-link
Owner Key Certificate Standard
Along with the launch of account creation, we have also open sourced a number of new libraries to help facilitate the adoption of new account creation techniques as a standard. A formal EEP specification for these will be published in the future and for the time being, all of the code to create and use it is readily available:
Encrypted private key standard: https://github.com/greymass/eosio-key-encryption
Generating and consuming encrypted private keys: https://github.com/greymass/keycert-js
Creating PDFs for encrypted private keys: https://github.com/greymass/keycert-js-pdf
Any wallet is free to incorporate these techniques as a means for users to easily backup their accounts. You can see some of this in action at our website’s account recovery page.
As always, you can find us on Twitter, Telegram, EOS Community Forums, and at our official website.
If you like this newsletter and want to support this (and other work we do), please consider voting for us on-chain, and supporting our work via Eden and Pomelo!