Hello, Masterminds!

As each week comes to a close, I like to see all the various pieces of the Mastercoin project pointed in the same direction, and this week was no disappointment. The team released a new Omniwallet milestone release and continues forward towards our next Master Core release.

We’re extremely fortunate to have an internal integration team for Master Core: Omniwallet is a great use case for what web wallets and exchanges need from Master Core in terms of functionality and visibility. The collaboration between the teams has helped refine our priorities and schedule, and with additional feedback from 3rd-party integrators, our targets for each Master Core milestone becomes more clear.

This week our focus has been on several fronts: the new database backend for Omniwallet, OmniEngine, the RPC layer of Master Core, the persistence engine behind Master Core, the MetaDEx internals, the Master Core UI, and a new asset issuance type.

For Omni’s database, we’ve been parsing and importing blockchain data and are creating the queries to pull the data. Having the blockchain data accessible in this fashion will enable some impressive visualization and information tools (such as an enhanced block explorer) as well increasing responsiveness.

The RPC layer of Master Core continues to get additions, guided by Omni, exchanges and requests from experienced traders. The MetaDEx RPC template is a work in progress.

On persistence, we’ve made progress exposing some of the state values from internal parsing operations so that users can get more atomic data. We’ve also worked to more elegantly handle blockchain reorgs and orphans here.

The Master Core UI continues to progress, with work on the Balances screen and updated iconography. Our target for the next release will include the ability to see token balances and to send transactions for any Master Protocol token.

Of note, we have updated the Master Protocol spec to include a new asset issuance type which can have tokens perpetually created and destroyed by the issuer as necessary. Asset-backed issuers will find this extremely useful to maintain a token count on par with the assets they are using to back the tokens. Now that this pull request has been merged we can start development of this extremely useful feature.

Next week, we’ll be coming up with the first milestone-based bounties and defining our target features for the next Master Core beta release.

Questions? Ask me anything! Want to get involved? Get in touch!

The more masterminds the better!

Craig Sellars

CTO, Mastercoin Foundation

craig (at) mastercoin.org