"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.", Jon Kabat-Zinn

COMIT's vision is to have an open financial system - truly inclusive, censorship resistant and non-discriminatory. And we believe that Bitcoin is the most promising platform for such an open financial system due to its decentralization and its censorship resistance.

Ultimately we would love to see such an open financial system be built on top of Bitcoin, however, as of today, Bitcoin lacks privacy and only supports a single asset (BTC).

As mentioned in Project Droplet, we believe that Liquid is such a platform allowing us to build a financial ecosystem around Bitcoin. We see the possibility to build products such as lending and borrowing, prediction markets (option/futures) and even saving products. All of these share a basic building block: trading.

Over the last 2 weeks we looked into Blockstream's sidechain Liquid. We explored its confidential transaction format [2] and built a little PoC which enables two parties to swap atomically 2 assets on Liquid [1].

A droplet is a small column of liquid, bounded completely or almost completely by free surfaces.

COMIT's mission is to have an open financial system - truly inclusive, censorship resistant and non-discriminatory. Such a financial system has to allow for exchange of funds between different market participants such as investors, lenders and borrowers in a trustless manner. Liquid [1] seems to be a promising platform for such marketplaces as it has built-in support for different assets in a single transaction while keeping amounts, addresses and assets confidential. These features used in combination allow us to create trustless and private atomic swaps, trustless loans and other financial products.

#Confidential Atomic Swaps on Liquid

We are kicking-off a new project to look into Liquid's transaction format which would allow us to do true atomic swaps between two assets. This would allow us to have true trustless BTC/USD (using L-BTC and L-USDT) while all amounts, assets and addresses are confidential. This is huge as it is one step closer to a truly trustless and censorship resistant financial system.

If deemed useful, this might be the start of a longer series of R&D projects focusing on Blockstream's sidechain Liquid.

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Niels Bohr

Are we on the verge of plummeting into the biggest recession since the big crash of 1929? And if so, are cryptocurrencies the answer, a safe haven to put your money in?

While we cannot look into the future and don't dare to predict it, we are inclined to believe that we are likely to see a high demand for crypto in the future, and an even higher one in the next few months. Time to get COMIT out there so you don't have to trust those central exchanges, but keep your private keys where they should be: in your wallet. Verify, don't trust!

Join us for a discussion around advances in crypto, trustless trading and - as usual - various tech related topics in next week Thursday's COMIT Community ☕️ - 7pm Sydney time!

The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.

— Jandy Nelson

Join us for today's COMIT Community ☕️ 7pm Sydney time, or listen in on youtube!

On today's community coffee we will reflect on the first quarter of this year with a focus on Lightning Network (layer 2) integration into COMIT. We will discuss technical challenges we encountered. Furthermore, we will discuss what we are planning to tackle in the second quarter, including decentralised order-book solutions.

Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.

— Santosh Kalvar

Join us for the next COMIT Community ☕️ on 02.04.2020, 7pm Sydney time, or listen in on youtube!

In this blogpost we first want to HALight - ahm, highlight - the recent effort to design and integrate the new protocol that adds Lightning to COMIT. COMIT consists of cryptographic protocols and communication protocols. Cryptographic protocols are currently defined as HAL, HErc20 and HALight - where HALight is a new protocol that defines atomic swaps using the concept of hold-invoiced in lnd. With the support of Lightning we come one step closer to supporting instant atomic swaps in COMIT.

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

— Stephen Covey

One could wonder at first how this quote applies to what we are doing at CoBloX.

While Stephen Covey's literature focuses on self-improvement with a justified emphasis on inter-personal relationships, I believe anyone who builds a product, platform or protocol for others, should also live by this quote.

We, at CoBloX, are building COMIT as an open-source protocol for anyone to leverage the power of atomic swaps in their own software. If we do not seek to understand first then how can we build something useful to you?

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

— Daniel Bell

December, the silent time of the year, was not that silent for us. By the end of November the CoBloX team was flying out to Singapore for Christmas at the TenX office. We had a wonderful time in Singapore meeting up with colleagues from all over the world.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Tomorrow the team takes off for Singapore (we are an Australian company and work out of Sydney but our parent company TenX is based in Singapore). We get together with everyone from TenX twice a year, its a lot of fun. There are late night hacking sessions and serious amounts of quality food.

Dance like no one's watching

— Clark & Leigh

In October we had two main focus areas:

1. Extending and improving the "getting started" projects we started in September,
2. Making cnd (comit network daemon) more robust by adding recovery after a shutdown.

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.

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.