Don't tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon!

— Paul Brandt

In September we invested a great deal of our brainpower into building the COMIT developer community.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

— Linus Torvalds, linux-kernel mailing list

Last month we doubled down on our efforts to improve COMIT's accessibility and robustness. Among other things we:

• Came up with a release strategy which will make Rust compilation optional for users.
• Investigated how we could use Miniscript to model our HTLCs.
• Took steps towards persisting swaps between restarts by starting work on adding a database to cnd and modifying btsieve accordingly.

Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.

— Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

July has been intense, our main focus was to make Bobtimus ready for Testnet. We implemented a custom algorithm for the rates, based on the wallet balances to ensure that (or at least help with) Bobtimus' wallets does not get drained. This is of course not to be used for mainnet but it was a good exercise to test the modularity of Bobtimus rate service. Ultimately, we want to make it possible for everyone to implement their own trading algorithm using Bobtimus.

Life is life
when we all give the power
we all give the best
every minute of an hour
don't think about a rest

— Opus

After months of hard work we are proud to present a live testnet version of COMIT. The description below gives you step-by-step guide of how to setup the COMIT Node daemon (cnd) on your machine and do a first swap against Bobtimus: an automated swapping bot on our side. He currently supports Bitcoin and Ether but will be extended in the future.

sknab rof tuoliab dnoces fo knirb no rollecnahC 9002/naJ/30 semiT ehT

— Satoshi Nakamoto

When I started at CoBloX a few weeks back, I faced a steep learning curve to master the RFC documenting the SWAP-Basic protocol. It's been almost a year that we published our original blog post. It described how HTLCs work and how they can be facilitated for atomic swaps between two blockchains. However, this blog post lacks the explanation of the Bitcoin HTLC, i.e. how the stack-based scripting language allows us to create HTLCs on the Bitcoin blockchain. Within this blog post I want to follow up on CoBloX's original promise:

To bring back knowledge and learnings back to the community.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

— Helen Keller

Lately, we have been very busy preparing for the TenX Genesis event that went down mid of June. All here at CoBloX were very excited to join our colleagues in Singapore for a full week of exchanging knowledge over beers and socializing events. We also gave a workshop on COMIT there, showcasing what we have achieved right until then.

RIP Waffle.io - 16 May, 2019

I hope it won't become a habit that good tools are closing down 😢

The first month of Q2/2019 is already over - it's fascinating how time flies when you're having fun.

First, an outlook to next week: On Wednesday, May 8 2019 we are celebrating our 1st year anniversary as residents of Stone & Chalk, 1 year anniversary of having Franck and Lloyd with us; and, since last month did not mention it: Thomas had his 1 year anniversary a few weeks ago. It's been an amazing journey so far and I'm looking forward to what will come.

RIP Google Inbox - 31st March, 2019

The only tool that lastingly changed the way I do emails.

It feels like we just started the quarter and here is already the 3rd dev update of this year, meaning Q1 is already over.

The goal of bitcoin is to get lots of utxos, earning a high score.

— The lit documentation

This month, Philipp and I attended 2019's The Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference in St Kitts. It was a fun, exciting and inspiring week. The people I met were not only incredibly smart but also highly motivated to do real research and invent new things.

New year, new resolutions.

After our first swap and making the whole COMIT code open source we thought you would enjoy regular updates of what is happening at CoBloX. Hence we will be starting a series of dev update posts, published roughly monthly, containing a summary of the latest COMIT advancements.