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Developer weekly update March 27, 2024

March 27 2024

Hello developers, and welcome to this week's developer weekly update!

Threshold-Schnorr protocol​

Threshold-Schnorr signatures are coming to ICP! Schnorr signatures are popular on blockchains due to their simple and efficient design. They allow for easy aggregation of multi-signatures and threshold signatures.

For ICP specifically, threshold-Schnorr signatures will enable canisters to obtain their own Schnorr public keys and addresses, request ICP to compute Schnorr signatures for arbitrary messages, and support both BIP-340 and Ed25519.

Opening the door for canisters to engage in these workflows also allows for further developments on ICP, including BRC-20 trading, certificate signing, and potential integrations with other chains that use Ed25519 variants like Solana, Polkadot, or Cardano. Additional multi-chain possibilities include additional chain-key tokens, like ckBRC20 and ckSOL, and enabling canisters to hold additional multi-chain assets like SOL, XRP, or ADA.

To implement threshold-Schnorr signatures on ICP, there are several prerequisites that will need to be completed, such as latency and throughput improvements to t-ECDSA.

You can learn more and participate in the conversation on the ICP developer forum.

ICRC-4​

The ICRC-4 token standard is nearing finalization! ICRC-4 will specify a standard for processing batch transfers for tokens compliant with ICRC-1. The motivation behind this standard is to facilitate optimized batch transfers within DeFi applications that commonly use multi-party settlements or token distributions.

ICRC-4 will extend the ICRC-1 standard to enable multiple subaccounts owned by a principal to transfer tokens to multiple recipient accounts within a single ledger call. This method will provide reduced latency and cost when compared to traditional multi-account token transfers.

Check out the ICRC-4 standard and participate in the discussion about ICRC-4 on the developer forum

dfx v0.19.0 beta​

dfx v0.19.0 has been released for initial beta testing! This new release of dfx comes with several exciting new features and improvements:

  • Support for the highly anticipated cycles ledger. Stay tuned for a dedicated blog post where we interview the team behind to cycles ledger to learn all the details about this feature.

  • Hyphenated project names are now supported.

  • The dfx canister call command now supports the flag --output json.

  • dfx canister call/install/sign and dfx deploy commands now support the flag --always-assist where dfx will enable the Candid assist feature for optional arguments rather than providing a null value by default.

This release includes several bug fixes as well, including:

  • The output of dfx ping is now a valid JSON format.

  • Fetching canister logs are now grep and tail compatible.

  • Canister logs can now be called using a query call to the method fetch_canister_logs.

You can read the full release notes for more information.

That'll wrap up this week. Tune back in next week for more developer updates!

-DFINITY