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Developer weekly update March 27, 2024

March 27 2024

Hello developers, and welcome to this week's developer weekly update! This week, we have an update on Threshold Schnorr signatures, the ICRC-4 standard, and a new dfx beta release. Let's get started!

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