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Greymass - Progress Update for October 2021

Two months has past since our last update with a large amount of progress from our team. The goal of this post is to summarize all of our various updates and give you a sense of where the Greymass team is at and what we have been up to.


Account Creation + Anchor

We have hit major milestones for account creation across all supported EOSIO chains (EOS, Proton, Telos, WAX). Along with the updates to the account creation platform we have also updated all versions of Anchor (Android, desktop and iOS) in order to support these new features:

  • In-app account purchases on mobile
  • A new web portal for account creation via credit cards (https://create.anchor.link)
  • Support for Owner Key Certificates creation and recovery across all versions
  • The ability to purchase accounts securely for others

It’s easier than ever now to purchase a non-custodial account for yourself or someone else and get started with Anchor today. For all the details, we’d invite you to check out our announcement post:

Unicove - Our EOSIO Web Wallet

For the past few months we’ve been iterating on branding, concepts, and the design of our new web wallet. Recently we revealed the new name for this product as well as it’s new logo. The design work for the actual site itself is coming together, the features we want to include are becoming more well defined, and we’ll be looking to ramp up dedicated development efforts towards Unicove soon!

Eden, and sharing our larger vision

Aaron, one of our founders, recently participated (and won!) the first Eden election within the EOS community. Leading up to this election Aaron spent some time trying to decide what initiatives Greymass has explored to run on, the winning idea being to expand account creation beyond just Anchor and out to any EOSIO based application.

The ideas he took and ran on were outlined here:

That wasn’t the only idea he considered running on. Most of the ideas spawned from our team are huge initiatives which just wouldn’t have fit within the scope of Eden today - but they are still things our team wants to accomplish, many of which he took the time to outline in the forum post listed below:

Owner Key Certificates as an open standard

Along with the launch of account creation, we have also open sourced a number of new libraries to help facilitate the adoption of new account creation techniques as a standard. A formal EEP specification for these will be published in the future and for the time being, all of the code to create and use it is readily available:

Any wallet is free to incorporate these techniques as a means for users to easily backup their accounts.

Webauthn Support in our client libraries

As our new Javascript library, @greymass/eosio, continues to increase in adoption with developers, our goal has been to be reactive to meet the needs of these early adopters. Recently technologies around webauthn have increased in demand and to help with these initiatives we have released a new library as well as updated all of our other SDKs to add this support.

A library for working with webauthn and @greymass/eosio was released:

Sharing knowledge around network resources

Our team has spent a lot of time trying to make network resources as easy as possible for both users and dapps to work with, with the end goal again being to publish a standard. In the past few months we’ve taken and tried to share this knowledge with examples and working code samples. Here are a few of the recent things we’ve released to help developers navigate this complex challenge:

Progress on the next generation of history APIs

Quietly for the last few months we have been working on our existing custom history solution. These are the APIs many wallets, block explorers, and applications use when showing you any sort of information from the past. Development and optimization is in progress, which has resulted in a new open source library:

With the progress we have made improving our solution, we are now capable of performing full history replays in parallelized environments, have further optimized the processing/storage techniques used, and are exploring the best approaches for creating an entirely new way to access this historical data.

As an example of the performance gains we’ve seen, using these new techniques we were able to rebuild the transaction index on the Jungle 3 blockchain in around 5 minutes. This previously took hours to complete.

This history solution also finally has a name… :hamster: Roborovski (or “Robo” for short).

Standardizing Anchor session communication

In an effort to continue making the technologies behind Anchor a public good, we have created a new client library to facilitate the communication between apps and wallets. The server implementation is known as Buoy (https://github.com/greymass/buoy-nodejs), and recently we released the client library for it:

The session management library (https://github.com/greymass/anchor-link-session-manager) that both Android and Desktop use are now updated to also integrate with this new client library.

SDK Updates

Along with the other updates above, we have also issued a number of other updates to the SDKs we continue to maintain. Listed below are some of these changes:


Previous Report

Our previous report can be found here:

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