sBTC WG: Sprint Sync Thread

[AshtonStephens]

Sprint 7 ➡️ 8: October 17th, 2023

Sprint 7: Wins

🌐 Summary

Over the past two weeks, we have made significant progress on polishing up the work for sBTC in preparation for the hackathon. In the first week, we finalized many of the core engineering pieces, and in the second week, we focused on the softer engineering pieces, such as the documentation and API interfaces.

✅ Unlocks

• sBTC infrastructure automatically deployed and updated connecting to testnet
• @kenrogers completed his demo web app
• Releasing Romeo out into the wild allows us to hard pivot to the real sBTC
• @janniks putting together the stacks.js sBTC api in preparation for the hackathon
• @stjepangolemac resolving undetected API connection issues
• @friedger many documentation updates

📢 Shoutouts

• @stjepangolemac picking the sBTC work back up so quickly after getting covid
• @friedger for finding many small and intricate ways to improve the sBTC effort that would never have gotten a ticket
• @radicleart Improving the bridge api library so it can be used as a fallback for stacks.js
• @CAGS295 reviewing sBTC changes quickly
• @wileyj for ever present infrastructure support

Sprint 8: Goals

🚢 Shipping-Related Goals

• Complete finalization of Romeo, never to be touched again.
• Edits, review, and approval of the sBTC SIP end of sprint.
• Beginning of an ownership model for the facets of sBTC

🥅 Teamwork-Related Goals

• Everyone on sBTC will be working together to create a plan and roadmap.
• Prep for NYC Hackathon in November!

Sprint 8: Blockers

🛑 Internal Blockers

• Romeo support and last minute fixes could hold back timelines.

🚨 External Blockers

• None at the moment

[AshtonStephens]

Sprint 8 ➡️ 9: October 31st, 2023

Sprint 8: Wins

🌐 Summary

Over the last two weeks we released hosted a hackathon for sBTC and finalized the details in the SIP. The details can be found here

✅ Unlocks

• sBTC hackathon completed
• sBTC released on testnet
• sBTC Romeo active development done
• All sBTC SIP Research has been completed: concluded research topics

📢 Shoutouts

• Everyone who tested the dev environment before the hackathon
• @friedger and @radicleart for hacking away at getting the sBTC testnet up and running last week!
• @soju-drinker @jcnelson @andrerserrano @friedger @FriendsFerdinand @xoloki @setzeus @stjepangolemac @radicleart and everyone else who was on the research meetings, great job and thanks for sticking in there and great research everyone!

Sprint 9: Goals

🚢 Shipping-Related Goals

• Finalized sBTC designs for individual components and features
• Final sBTC timeline proposal

🥅 Teamwork-Related Goals

• Begin syncing work between sBTC / Nakamoto

Sprint 8: Blockers

🛑 Internal Blockers

• None at the moment

🚨 External Blockers

• None at the moment

[AshtonStephens]

Sprint 9 ➡️ 10: October 31st, 2023

Sprint 9: Wins

🌐 Summary

This week we mostly finished the design portion of sBTC and the task breakdown. We've found that sBTC is complex
on a protocol level but simpler on a coding level; this means there's been a lot of opportunity for protocol level
improvements that each drastically shrink the implementation time.

This week we've been able to drastically shrink the amount of work needed to implement sBTC with some key feature changes:

1. Having a single wallet UTXO
2. Removing support of OP_RETURN in favor of OP_DROP
3. Agreeing to cap signer weight
4. Removing planned reveal transaction to an API that can do the same functionality without payment

The hiccup we're seeing with sBTC milestones is that Nakamoto and sBTC are coupled in the ability to deliver
testable artifacts; an sBTC milestone cannot be effectively tested without a sister milestone in Nakamoto.

This week and

✅ Unlocks

• sBTC implementation requirements greatly shrunk due to some key insights during the research discussions
• A number of task breakdowns for sBTC have been completed with tasks for ~2 months
  • sBTC Signer
  • sBTC Clarity
  • UTXO Consolidation - getting documented
    • [Feature]: Use protobuf 3 for signer communication sbtc#412
    • [Feature]: Bump the version of our stacks-core dependency sbtc#411
    • feat: extract sBTC transactions in block observer sbtc#410
  • OP_DROP - in progress
  • RevealerAPI - in progress

📢 Shoutouts

• @radicleart for continuing to host the testnet
• @jcnelson for his commitment to unblocking and parallelizing the work of sBTC and Nakamoto
• @jferrant's constant brilliant input in every meeting & phenomenal task breakdown.
• @xoloki, @soju-drinker, @kantai, @rafaelcr, @jcnelson @andrerserrano @friedger @FriendsFerdinand @setzeus and everyone else who was on the research meetings, great job and thanks for sticking in there and great research everyone!
• @jferrant @xoloki @soju-drinker putting together the branching document
• @saralab for enabling the SIP review process to begin for Nakamoto

Sprint 10: Goals

🚢 Shipping-Related Goals

• Complete signer work through ticket # 3 in signer tasks - https://docs.google.com/document/d/10C7ml8p1tEZb8vjcmjTUtL2bJb-Torbk4ap66GwCngc/edit#heading=h.2t6emr7n9i0y
• This will be updated later today

🥅 Teamwork-Related Goals

• Improve cross collaboration and transparency between Nakamoto and sBTC

Sprint 10: Blockers

🛑 Internal Blockers

• Need some more of the tasks broken down for OP_DROP and RevealerAPI

🚨 External Blockers

• Need to merge testing milestones with Nakamoto
• This will be updated later today

[AshtonStephens]

Sprint 10 ➡️ 11: November 29th, 2023

Sprint 10: Wins

🌐 Summary

Over the last week, Nakamoto work has been further ramped up by adding more contributors from the sBTC WG that were blocked on further Nakamoto progress anyway. We'll continue to accelerate Nakamoto while maintaining progress on sBTC in the form of clarity work and progress on the default implementation of the Revealer API required for OP_DROP functionality.

✅ Unlocks

• sBTC task breakdowns and refined design
• confirmed reallocation of resources

📢 Shoutouts

• All ICs for putting together the task breakdowns and designs
• @jferrant @soju-drinker @xoloki for the quick pivot to Nakamoto work

Sprint 11: Goals

🚢 Shipping-Related Goals

• Clear documented explanation of next steps for sBTC

🥅 Teamwork-Related Goals

• Continued work with Nakamoto workstream

Sprint 11: Blockers

🛑 Internal Blockers

• Existing unknown unknowns around protocol design

🚨 External Blockers

• Nakamoto needs to be finished for sBTC to be effective and tested

[AshtonStephens]

Sprint 22 ➡️ 23: May 14 2024

This is the first full sprint after all low level designs have been completed. This sprint is about getting the repository boilerplate and the beginnings of the functionality in place.

Sprint 22: Wins

✅ Unlocks

• Reviews completed on the LLDs
• Locally runnable mock API
• Nearly completed dynamic blocklist client
• sBTC Signer message serialization
• Beginnings of the CI for sBTC

🎏 Milestones, Status

• sBTC Signer: Beginning stages
• Deposit / Withdrawal Clarity: Beginning stages
• API: More than half way
• Blocklist Client: More than half way

📢 Shoutout

• @8marz8 for progressing on the blocklist client so quickly
• @netrome & @djordon for fast PR reviews
• @hstove & @setzeus adding the first stages of the clarity contracts along with robust styling and testing in the first go.

Sprint 23: Goals

• Complete API
• Complete Blocklist client
• Locally running regtest environment
• Round out the sBTC GitHub project organization

[AshtonStephens]

Sprint 23 ➡️ 24: May 28 2024

We're a month into implementing and all the work is working well but separately. This next sprint we're hopping to start piecing the bits together.

Sprint 23: Wins

✅ Unlocks

• UTxO Consolidation work finished
• Local development environment pushed

🎏 Milestones, Status

• Nearly code complete on blocklist client
• API: Local integration testing up and running
• First draft contracts are present in the sBTC repository link

📢 Shoutout

• @netrome & @djordon - keeping the signer work exactly on track and organizing some of the nebulous tasks into work that can get done
• @hstove & @setzeus - Pushing forward on the clarity work where there aren't many core clarity contributors to bounce ideas off of
• @will-corcoran starting to organize the sBTC audit
• @andrerserrano insisting on high standards for a default sBTC Web UI experience at launch

Sprint 24: Goals

• Complete API
• Complete Blocklist client
• Complete and test first pass of all clarity contracts
• Local integration testing with actions against the dev environment