Congratulation to all SBC winners and many thanks to Stellar Developers Foundation: that's great to have such a way to support innovative and skillful developers! I discovered some interesting projects that I'm going to follow from now on. I'm especially excited about services offering to track the evolution of my portfolio.
I've been disappointed by my own result, though. I can't help but think my softwares didn't received the rank they deserved. The family of projects I presented is made of 10.000 lines of open-source code and comments, is documented, include two web applications already having its user base and two innovative protocols that can bring benefits to the whole ecosystem. The codebase have been extensively reviewed and tested by myself, and you'll hardly find a bug around. Having the whole thing packed at the end of the list was quite a bad surprise to me.
This is yet to be seen if I'll earn enough from this SBC to cover for development costs. This is critical as I'm not willing to compromise on paying myself fairly for the work accomplished. There's another 4 months of work to go and I need to be in a positive mindset to tackle those. Hopefully, we'll sort that out during the next couple of weeks and I'll reach my goal of bringing some ground-breaking tools to our dev community ?.
In the meantime, I'm going ahead following my roadmap. I also decided to update you monthly about how my projects are going on so you can get the big picture behind those repositories popping up on my git.
The CosmicPlus organization
I'll gradually move my git repositories under the CosmicPlus organization ('cosmic-plus' on npm). While developing the CosmicLink protocol, I felt that some libraries for things like hardware wallet or multi-signature support were missing.
The function of the CosmicPlus organization is to put together a few low-level open-source libraries of that kind. I'll focus on features that needs to be implemented at the ecosystem level, such as multi-signature utilities.
Cosmic Links adoption (long-term view)
The first Cosmic Link development cycle was about the proof-of-concept, and the second one about making it production-ready. As this cycle reaches its end, the major task for the following months is to trigger adoption. Those are the few main steps toward that goal:
- Providing tools to easily generate cosmic links (JS and web app).
- Decentralize further cosmic links handling.
- Launching a "killer app" based on cosmic links.
- Integrating new wallets as soon as possible.
- Stable release for cosmic-lib, Cosmic.Link website and Stellar Authenticator this autumn.
Adoption of the cosmic link protocol depends on a network effect. At that time, wallets have few incentive to implement it as no service are issuing the links, and no service is willing to build over it because only few wallets support it. As showed by this thread, staying in this situation is a net loss for each of us.
The key to start the movement is therefore to raise the number of cosmic links users. I'll have to publish a "killer app" of some sort - a genesis app - demonstrating the concept of cross-wallet application. Implementing a cosmic link editor is another step toward that goal. I'm also calling developers who are conscious of the benefits that this protocol will bring to help me bootstrap adoption by becoming early supporters.
Another key is to provide a way to go from service to wallet without having to rely on the Cosmic.Link website. Concerns have been raised about the importance of making the protocol properly decentralized and it's about time to handle that part. The service-wallet interface have to become as easy as possible to implement and to use.
A third key is to provide proper handling of the trickiest part in transaction validation: multisignature. In cosmic-lib stable CosmicLink.send() method will transparently dispatch transactions to validator, StellarGuard or signature collector service depending on what is relevant. This is a simple sentence, but it's quite a big deal to implement and a nice bonus for wallet developers. This is also a requirement for cross-wallet applications.
September Roadmap
First task: cosmic-lib beta-2
This is going to be the last major release before stable version. I'm in the process of rewriting big chunks of the lib in order to make it simpler to use. The main change is the implementation of transaction editing methods, making it a breeze to generate cosmic links. I'm also generalizing the underlying methods that retrieve and format data so it can be exposed by the library.
Second task: Cosmic.Link website new features
The next step is the implementation of a transaction editor into the Cosmic.Link website. Also, I would like to add an interface to easily share those transactions over mail, social medias and paper (yes, paper %(^*^)%).
Finally, I'll make the website configurable so that everybody can fork it for its own needs. An article will teach how to serve a custom fork on your own subdomain for free thanks to GitHub and CloudFlare.
Third task: validating SEP-0011
I published a draft for SEP-0011: On-Chain Signature & Transaction Sharing. Reviewers are welcome to share their views and help finalize the document. The protocol proposal is designed after the stellar-oc-multisig library and is already implemented and available.
Contribute
I'm always listening to comments, critics & suggestions: feedback from the community is critically important.
If you encounter any issue using my softwares, please let me know in the dedicated GitHub section. If you feel like contributing in this project in some way, please reach me so we can speak about it.
I'll soon need the services of a native English speaker in order to correct my mistakes (^.^).
