Dev. Update — New Smart Contracts Architecture, In-app Wallet and Bitcoin Lending
By: Ernesto Boado
Tags: Crypto, Fintech, Ethlend, Blockchain, Bitcoin

In this article ETHLend shares what the development team is currently working on and updates on one of the most anticipated milestones — Bitcoin Lending — along with the redesign and implementation of the Smart Contract Architecture to reduce the gas cost and the creation of a native wallet.

Road from Kogia

With the release of Omura and the previous versions, the development challenge was the creation of the first and complete decentralized application in the Ethereum network, using the potential of the smart contracts to implement all the necessary logic.

After successfully delivering the first functional decentralized lending application, the objective was to improve all the smart contract infrastructure adding base functionalities such as: loan offers, collateral management and LEND as medium of exchange — to become the lending currency of blockchain. We took it further and decided to deliver all those new features while introducing a new User Interface to improve the experience using ETHLend.

Today, one month after the previous release, we continue to implement new functionalities and fixes in our decentralized application, looking forward to the features we promised and some other new ones.

Our Next Steps

1. Bitcoin Lending

The biggest milestone in the first part of 2018, and probably one of the most ambitious one in the entire ETHLend roadmap is the integration of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, which will allow users to place Bitcoin as collateral and to use it as medium of exchange.

Until now, working only with the native currency of the Ethereum Network (ETH) and with ERC-20 tokens, there was no limitation about what we were capable to do: from our ideas and previous experience, we implement the necessary logic within the boundaries of the smart contracts.

Introducing Bitcoin in our decentralized application is not as straightforward. The task involves interoperability between two different Blockchains — Ethereum and Bitcoin — that don’t have an established way to communicate between themselves.

During this past months we have been researching and testing different approaches to introduce the interaction between Bitcoin and Ethereum in the ETHLend platform. As in every research process, some of the ideas were valid and some others not. Today, we are thrilled to say that now we have a clear idea of the implementation and we are already applying it.

This implementation will be a great accomplishment for ETHLend as it will be one of the few working examples of decentralized financial applications covering Bitcoin, Ethereum and ERC-20 at the same time.

2. New Smart Contracts Architecture

One of the greatest advantages of having a fully functional platform is that it allows us to collect feedback from active users, which is a fundamental part in our development process.

From our community and early adopters insights, combined with our internal analysis, we noticed two main areas of improvement in Kogia:

Gas Cost . As consequence of our secure architecture based on independent smart contracts for each loan agreement — having them as isolated and fully logic containers — the overall cost of creating a new loan agreement is higher than we would want, depending of course, of the gas price in each moment.

. As consequence of our secure architecture based on independent smart contracts for each loan agreement — having them as isolated and fully logic containers — the overall cost of creating a new loan agreement is higher than we would want, depending of course, of the gas price in each moment. Number of Steps to Setup a Loan Agreement. With Kogia, after the more experimental first releases of the platform, we followed as close as possible the smart contract standards and good practices, looking to achieve higher quality in our code. That generated in some parts of the application a higher number of steps, increasing the number of transactions and sometimes, related with the previous point, the overall gas cost.

We are working in a complete redesign and implementation of our smart contracts architecture that will significantly reduce the gas cost. The fundamental idea is to split the smart contracts between Deposits — that will be independent for each loan agreement, containing the funds related with it- and Logic Containers — that will keep a register of the independent deposits and the logic to manage them-.

Our current measurements say that we can reduce the set up cost of the loan agreement from ~4 000 000 to ~200 000 gas, without specially affecting the cost of the rest of the loan steps.

In the new release, we will optimize the architecture of our smart contracts

3. In-App Ethereum/Bitcoin Wallet

We have noticed that the use of MetaMask browser extension creates a barrier to user adoption because, even if its use it’s pretty straightforward, it represents another moving piece of the system that the user needs to know.

To avoid that, we will be introducing a native wallet solution in the platform, conceptually similar to MetaMask, but completely tailor-made and integrated with our system.

With this new wallet system, the user will be able to interact with the functionalities of the platform related with both Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. And all of this without the burden of using other tools on top of ETHLend.

Other Improvements

We are also improving the current Kogia release with really important additions like:

The complete internationalization of the application.

Several changes in the user interface to improve the user experience.

Diverse bug fixes.

Complete, Secure and Easy to Use Lending DApp

In short, we are sure that Bitcoin Lending, the new Smart Contracts Architecture, the In-App Wallet and all of the others features we are currently working on, are completely groundbreaking. With these improvements, we will confirm ETHLend as the most complete, secure and user friendly decentralized peer to peer lending platform.

Keep in touch with us to get the latest development news.