Announcing: DeVault's public BLS Signature Testnet August 15th!

DeVault

TL:DR Summary

DeVault is a fork of BCH (Bitcoin ABC) w/ many additional features.
The DeVault community recently voted to transition the network to aggregate BLS signatures.
We're having a limited public testnet to showcase our integration of BLS signatures and aggregate transaction technology.
BLS signatures are a superior alternative to schnorr signatures which BCH has integrated.
Test Binaries will be available for download August 15th on the BLS Testing page.

A little about DeVault (DVT)

Some of you might be familiar with DeVault and if so go ahead and skip to the next section, but for those of you who aren't here's a quick rundown:

DeVault is a young community & governance focused cryptocurrency network. The blockchain launched in June of 2019 and the codebase is a fork of Bitcoin ABC. While we have kept up to date with relevant updates from the Bitcoin ABC codebase since launch we have also diverged quite a bit from ABC and Bitcoin Cash.

First off our DAA has been LWMA from day 1. We recognized the serious issues with cw-144 early on and especially being a new minority sha256 chain we needed to be prepared for hash fluctuation. We also have a 2-minute target block time and completely removed base58 addresses from our network. We only use the bech32 (cashaddr) format.

We have a 1 coin = 1 vote community governance system for all network decisions, as well as for funding decisions from the Community DAO. All voting is done via message signatures to verify ownership of on-chain balances via our Community Platform.

We are the first and only cryptocurrency network to introduce Cold Rewards a unique distribution model that rewards holders of 25k or more coins. While still maintaining PoW network security user's are able to receive newly generated coins. All utxo's of 25k DVT or more will receive a portion of the coinbase reward after 21,915 confirmations (approx. one month). The current cold reward rate is 12% annually (1% per month).

We have a unique base inflation / mining reward model as well. Instead of the halving schedule introduce by Bitcoin we opted for an inflation model that gradually increases before peaking and then gradually decreasing from there. The starting block reward was 500 DVT, which peaked at 750 DVT and is now decreasing with a reward of 337 DVT per block at the time of writing.

We have many next-gen second layer services and wallets like DeVault ID (Cash Accounts fork), DeLight (Electron Cash fork), BitDB & much more. We're also in the process of introducing the DeVault Token Protocol (our token protocol) which will take advantage of BLS aggregation privacy as well.

Call to all Developers & Crypto Enthusiasts!

August 15th - Limited Public Testnet

Come help us test and witness the power of BLS aggregate signature technology!

The DeVault community in an open anyone can vote proccess unanimously voted in approval of integrating BLS signatures and (slowly) transitioning the network from ECDSA to BLS signatures.

We are having a public, everyone is invited, limited testnet to showcase the power of BLS signatures and search for any remaining bugs or issues that may turn up! Our small team of developers at DeVault have been testing our BLS integration and the network transition from ECDSA to BLS for the last couple months and feel we're ready to extend our testing base. This initial public testnet is going to focus on the network state post transition to BLS addresses. For more information please visit this page. This is also where binaries will be available for download on August 15th.

What are BLS signatures?

BLS signatures are quite honestly a superior alternative to Schnorr signatures. The simplest non-developer response is: BLS signatures allow us to mesh all transactions from each block into a single transaction, leaving only 2 transactions in each block. The coinbase transaction of newly created coins and then all other transactions from that block aggregated into a single transaction making the senders and receivers indistinguishable to blockchain analysis. The more transactions to be aggregated in each block, the stronger the privacy.

We at DeVault decided to not activate Schnorr signatures after realizing the advantages of full BLS integration. Now after a lot of blood sweat and tears from our lead developer Jon Spock (formally a PivX developer) we have fully integrated BLS signatures and the aggregate signature technology they enable. For more information on BLS signatures I suggest visiting the DeVault BLS testing page and reading the articles & write-ups from the DeVault developers. It's also worth taking a look at the original documentation as well as one of the earlier write-ups from a bitcoin developer / quantum physicist.

Remember this is a limited run testnet so don't wait to join in on the fun! Binaries will be available on August 15th and will be setup to connect only to this specialized testnet run. For those who would like to build themselves details on which branch to build from will be available on the BLS testing page.