Topic: [GHOST] Ghost Development Update (YTD) August — 2021 (Read 75 times)

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Over the past six months+ the Ghost team has been hard at work to progress the project forward and meet road map deliverables. In the following text we’ll analyze the team’s progress and the difficulties the team faced.

In January the GitHub and a good portion of community funds, were still under the management of the previous lead developer Reborn. Be that as it may, @GhostVeterans, @test_net_online, and @Tizymandias were elected to lead this project and spared no time in doing so. The team presented to the community an updated road map for 2021 which outlined key deliverables mentioned in the original whitepaper. With the community’s approval of the new road map, the team polished the outline and published it to corresponding websites.

Given the state that Ghost was in before the aforementioned team was elected, there was plenty of work to be done in order to repair previous relations with strategic partners. The team tirelessly worked to repair countless relationships with previous developers, exchanges, social platforms — and the image of Ghost as a whole. The desktop wallet for macOS users received an update pertaining to code signing & notarizing. The team honored all ERC-20 swaps that were eligible, thus finalizing the swap portal. To learn more about the ERC-20 swaps check out our post here. Over the past half year, the team added three new exchanges to the list and successfully intervened to prevent any imminent de-listings. At the beginning of the year, Ghost was only listed on two exchanges. This brought the total number of exchanges to five. Furthermore, Ghost successfully implemented a mobile wallet for iOS users. You can read about this here. Of course, with the previous management team, months went by without updating or establishing regular communication between CoinMarketCap (CMC) & CoinGecko (CG). Thus, after the election the team was able to establish regular updates about the project and correct all displayed information on these websites. This new establishment of updates allowed the team to be listed on Blockfolio Signal which the community had been asking for, for quite some time.

With respect to the Ghost whitepaper, research & development for Dandelion++ was actually an ongoing process before the current custodians took office. However, development was halted due to the disruption by previous management. Nevertheless, this allowed for more research on the ground breaking tech which helped pave way for the team to deploy it on-chain here very soon. Learn more about the Dandelion protocol here. As for Ghost Veteran Rewards (GVR), development for automation is approx. 95% complete. We’re very excited to share this with the community once we’re finished. This will further decentralize Ghost as GVR will no longer need to be manually processed. Support for hardware wallets was something the original management team began implementing, but difficulties with communication made development come to a screeching halt. That being said, the community continued to voice their demand for support on hardware wallets and the new team listened. The work on hardware wallet support for Ghost is also basically done, so very soon users will be able to store and stake their coins on Trezor & Ledger. Ghost is looking to expand hardware support on Bitfi as well.

The implementation of trustless on-chain governance is the foundation of any decentralized project. After researching new and existing models the team was able to begin developing the very parameters of this system. This ensures the governance stays decentralized and won’t be subject to bad actors or any external threats. A draft of this model has already been released to the Veterans. This deliverable will undergo further discussion before finalization, and ultimately our last vote amongst the Veterans via the current interim governance model.

Indeed, in the background of current operations GVR has been processed each month on a consistent, zero-error basis, with a provable perfect record of no misappropriation of funds. In late Q1, research began on Bulletproofs+ (B+), which is a more efficient version of the current Bulletproofs protocol and will serve as a drop-in replacement. B+ further reduces the size of range proofs and offers a speedup in verification. More to come on this later. The team is constantly interviewing and only hiring known developers that share the same passion for Ghost as we all do — a very demanding standard to meet.

At block height 296,000 we will undergo a hard fork which resolves the exploit mentioned above. With this fork, full Anon & Blind transactions are going to be restored, as well as the successful implementation of Dandelion++. In the coming days we will release a full technical write up explaining the underlying fixes to the code correcting the exploit.