<DevTalks: /> August 2019

by Nathan Worsley

Hi everyone, welcome to our <DevTalks: /> August edition. We are currently in the process of moving towards our major non-custodial feature launch, so most of our workload this month has centered around Blockchain and wallet development.

We plan to launch our non-custodial trading initially with Bitcoin, Ethereum and all ERC20 tokens, and after our launch we will add back Dash, Monero, Lightning Network, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and any of our other originally listed currencies.

You may have heard certain rumours that non-custodial trading is not possible in Bitcoin, and only in Bitcoin Cash - through the OP_CHECKDATASIG opcode. Happily we can report that this assertion is false, and we have already succeeded developing a proof of concept for a completely non-custodial Bitcoin trading process.

This non-custodial Bitcoin trading model neatly abstracts to Dash, Litecoin and several other UTXO cryptos, and for Ethereum non-custodial trading we will utilize a decentralised smart-contract (dAPP).

The development of non-custodial trading revolves around two new components we are adding to the site: a multi-currency web-wallet, and a decentralised trading interface.

The non-custodial trading interface will look quite similar to our current interface, with a few minor modifications to reflect the fact that trading now involves two interactions with the Blockchain (escrow funding, and release).

The web-wallet component is a completely functional and standalone multi-currency wallet, that does not allow LocalCoinSwap to access your private keys or funds. Private keys are stored in a special container encrypted with your password, just like other popular online web-wallets (Blockchain.info, Metamask, MyEtherWallet, etc). This means that even a total hack of all LocalCoinSwap systems cannot result in any funds of our customers being lost. LocalCoinSwap users can also export their private keys from the web-wallet to use in their preferred wallet software.

Another bonus is that withdrawal delays and other issues that come from securing a hot wallet and cold wallet will now become irrelevant. We hope this will lead to a greatly streamlined user experience.

A massive advantage of abstraction in our web-wallet system is that it will allow us to develop hardware wallet plugins more easily, so advanced users can keep their cryptocurrency in their own wallets while trading on our platform.

I would like to invite users to let us know what their favourite hardware wallets and Blockchain explorers are so we can ensure they are supported in the web-wallet. Do you have a preferred hardware wallet? What is it and why is it your favourite?

Whilst development on mostly anything not related to non-custodial trading is paused at the moment, we still found time to do a UX update to the searching interface, which involved fixing a number of minor bugs users have raised. If you get the chance, play around with the search filters and let us know if you have any additional feedback which we are continuing to collate.

We've also fixed an annoying bug raised by users that caused advertisements to be paused after posting if the maximum and minimum limits were the same.

Thanks again to the community for your ongoing support throughout this migration to non-custodial trading. More information to come so please stay tuned!

Happy Trading!
Nathan Worsley
CTO & Co-Founder, LocalCoinSwap