By: Geeq  on Dec 16, 2020

It’s been a long, hard year throughout the world in 2020, but we Geeqs have made it through, launched the Geeq token, made new friends and forged many new partnerships.

Developer Video Update

As the end of the year approaches, Geeqs Kieran and John caught up on Zoom to discuss all that has been going on in development behind the scenes and to talk about the milestones the core dev team is working toward for Q1 2021.

Conversations between Geeqs who work in different areas and time zones are often by purely electronic means, so it was fun to see Kieran and John chat with each other in person. For the full experience, please enjoy their conversation below!

Starting with Application Requirements in Mind

As they discussed, Geeq’s design objectives are to maximize security while minimizing computational, bandwidth, and storage cost. The core dev team chose Cap’n Proto (a more precise version of Protobuff) for message and data templates and Rust for creating rigorous, exploit resistant, client code. These tools also lend themselves well to the use of RPC for messaging which allows for the implementation of very efficient IoT use cases, and more efficient communications in general. On the cryptography side, they chose Goldielocks488 as the elliptic curve approach and Blake256 for public keys and hashing. This combination offers computational efficiency while providing much higher security levels and quantum resistance.

Production Code – How it’s Made

As any developer will tell you, there has been much more going on than has met the eye. Translating Geeq’s workflow and unique network structure has meant defining exactly what network actors can and can’t do, as well as keeping track of what they say, and precisely how they say it. Even more problematic in distributed consensus systems is specifying what to do when actors don’t say or do anything when they should.

All of this is critical for determining if they are behaving honestly within the network and for creating a blockchain where users can prove for themselves the honesty of nodes and the correctness of the ledger. The most time-consuming exercises have gone into working out the exact specifications to write data templates for the nodes, and translating every requirement into Rust, which has taken painstaking collaboration.

The Persnickety Nature of Rust

The entire team are fans of Rust, however. Among the reasons:

Rust can be compiled to WebAssembly which means node and user clients can safely run in sandboxes in a web browser. This means two things. First, the clients are portable and will run identically in any chip architecture or operating system. Second, from a user perspective running a node, using Geeq, or an application built on Geeq, will be as simple as installing an add-on.

The positive security and privacy properties of being able to run Geeq node and user clients in sandboxes automatically, regardless of browser or OS, are that the processes and information are separated from the rest of the machine and the sessions terminate as soon as the browser is closed. We’re sure the UI/UX team and end users will appreciate these choices as well!

Declarative Code

In case you missed it, the issue of how to run Geeq identically in any setting has been on John’s mind for more than a year. He wrote a blog post about the need for declarative code here, which he would probably feel much happier re-reading now that the core dev team has written checks on validity that can be checked quickly. Fast, efficient checks such as those are all parts of the Geeq protocol that have had to be built from the ground up, in order to later provide definitive information to the end user about the collective validity of blocks that have been written by each node.

To revisit the last section, the Geeq stack’s efficiency at ensuring clients are portable and will run identically in any chip architecture or operating system are critical in order, ultimately, to give all users the security (and proof) that Geeq blockchains follow “code is law”.

Kieran and John’s conversation provided a good look into how the nature of Geeq development on the foundational code has had to be frontloaded. A spontaneous analogy, that Geeq is in the process of building a new engine technology akin to a Tesla, resonated with the rest of us.

Easter Eggs!

We learned the core dev team has expanded its plans to include features in the foundational code such as multisig transactions, as well as the capabilities for Geeq’s bearer and certified tokens. The protocol documentation for these is 100% complete, coding is in progress.

Summary:

The general takeaway from the Geeq core dev team is that they feel they have tackled and nearly finished the heaviest lift, with a plan for a full cloud launch of the hard coded testnet in Q1 of 2021. From there, the momentum and visibility of Geeq will increase significantly. We all are looking forward to sharing the acceleration of Geeq’s growth path in the new year.

Thank you for all your support, and we wish you a peaceful and safe holiday, full of Geeqy cheer.