Ravencoin — Update 2020–12–23. The Code Security Audit
By: Tron Black
Tags: Ravencoin, Updates, Security, Rvn, Bitcoin

The Code Security Audit

The Ravencoin community raised funds to do a code security audit. The funds, totaling USD$40,000, were collected in four Ballet wallets held by trusted members of the Ravencoin community. The firm Independent Security Evaluators https://ISE.io was selected.

More about the security audit: https://tronblack.medium.com/ravencoin-third-party-code-audit-4a32ffd62edd

Proposal: https://betterproposals.io/proposal//index.php?ProposalID=J9rmZ_WtOnY0NSIrSh-ew2E5GoOCg4bYiMwNfLHrYZw

The security evaluation has been going. We’ve been told the report will be ready between December 28th and December 31st. Once the report is released, it will be made public for the benefit the Ravencoin community. Thank you to everyone who contributed.

The Legal Fund

Early in Ravencoin’s history, exchanges required a legal opinion on whether RVN is a security in order to list the RVN crypto-currency. Funds were raised and held in a 3 of 5 multisig by Ravencoin community members. Ultimately those funds were not needed as Doug Pepe voluntarily provided the detailed analysis that was needed without taking accumulated funds. These funds have been sent to the Ballet wallets of the four trusted community members, and are currently expected to be used for future security code audits should they be needed.

The Ravencoin Foundation

Medici Ventures is stepping back from paying developers to work on Ravencoin. Medici Ventures is helping to form and initially fund The Ravencoin Foundation. $125,000 will be available to the foundation at the beginning of 2021. Seed-nodes, API cloud servers, and some network monitoring servers will transferred to the Ravencoin Foundation starting in January of 2021. The Ravencoin Foundation is a non-profit established in WY (crypto-friendly jurisdiction) and is filing for 501(c)(6) tax status. A small temporary board of directors has been set up, and a website is being created. The goal of the Ravencoin Foundation is to support the open-source Ravencoin project, and to educate about Ravencoin’s many uses. More info on this to follow in the new year. The Ravencoin Foundation does not own the open-source Ravencoin project, it exists to support the project, help connect Ravencoin resources (developers, projects, issuers, code, HODLers, miners), and benefit the Ravencoin ecosystem.

Dev Meetings

The dev meetings have been moved to every Friday and take place in the #development-meetings channel of the Ravencoin Community Discord at 2pm MT or 4pm ET. https://discord.gg/Qf4cguZ55D. Everyone is welcome to lurk or participate.

Stability of Ravencoin’s Consensus Protocol

Ravencoin has reached a stability level in its core consensus code. Unless bugs are found, it is unlikely to be changing at the consensus level. This doesn’t mean there aren’t improvements to be made in wallets, rpc calls, zmq, qt, gui, 2nd tier, etc. The exposure of the messaging and memos in mobile wallets, and GUI core are still needed.

Infrastructure Decentralization

In the transition from Medici Ventures to the Ravencoin Foundation, the goal has been to make the Ravencoin project less dependent on any entity. The IP addresses of publicly accessible nodes from around the globe have been added in to Ravencoin 4.3.2.1, and the same IP addresses have been added to fall-back domains which should never be needed in ordinary circumstances. This is simply getting back to the design that Bitcoin uses, which was unable to be used during Ravencoin’s launch, but is the preferred way to run a fully decentralized open-source system.

Ravencoin Foundation Website

The website is in-progress. It will contain links to Ravencoin resources around the globe, and help visitors quickly understand what Ravencoin is, and how it can be used for creating, and transferring assets.

Ravencoin Meetups

There are some meetups being scheduled. Follow @RVN_Foundation or @TronBlack for more information as these are scheduled, we will re-tweet the details.

AlphaPoint Integration

Ravencoin asset awareness is being added to AlphaPoint which will allow exchanges using AlphaPoint as the technology foundation for their exchange will be able to easily integrate Ravencoin assets.