RIF Name Service (RNS) was designed to make the user experience more friendly by providing an architecture which enables the identification of blockchain addresses by human-readable names or aliases. It can be used to identify other personal resources, such as payment or communication addresses.

Centralizing the access to multiple resources associated with a human-readable name, improves the blockchain platform user experience. Along with the “ease of use” by adding a name resolution service, or “alias”, the probability of errors is significantly reduced. As resource names may change over time, the system needs to be flexible to support frequent changes. Up until now, RIF Name Service only supported addresses built on the RSK Network but currently, users can manage multiple types of coins and assets.

Visit the RIF Name Service for more information.

Although it doesn’t happen very often, we do planned fresh restarts of the RSK Testnet blockchain. This means that all account balances go to zero. A Testnet reset has been recently executed, so there is no way to recover Testnet funds once this is done. RSK Faucet still exists and you can get Testnet RBTCs and also Testnet RIF – tRIF.

General information: Lumino

The RIF Lumino network is already available to the general public. (for more information visit: RIF Lumino)

Having said this, making Lumino a user-friendly internet of value is one of RIF’s main priorities. For that reason, Lumino has already been integrated with the RIF Naming Service (RNS) which simplifies significantly the usability for non-technical users.

Also, the Lumino light-client is ready and we are working on the Development libraries to facilitate the integrations with wallets and exchanges.

The IOV Labs team is also working on developing solutions for banks and organizations willing to use RIF Lumino for their business needs.

Blocks per second, time to finality, tps and cost per transaction? Can people build on Lumino already? Which projects are building on top of it?

The number of transactions per second that Lumino can achieve depends mainly on the actual network topology and the amount of coins participants lock in their channels. Also, from the tech perspective, the bandwidth and latency of the computers participating in the network are also key for providing a responsive system. Additionally, the capabilities of the network will depend on the network usage patterns of its users. It seems that there are still too many unknowns. However we can simulate certain expected patterns from small networks to larger and larger networks and get useful metrics about the network growth and number of successful payments, the payments settlement times, and the average costs. Taking into account the merging of the scalability improvement proposals already developed by RSK Labs for RSK, the obtained metrics shows us that Lumino can scale to 60M active users without problems, with costs and response times that are competitive with other payment networks. To scale more, we see resource bottlenecks that would need to be addressed.

There are several projects integrating their wallets and solutions with Lumino which will be announced once ready in the following months.

If you want to be part of the network, the Lumino repository is open and in the repository you can find instructions about node configuration and management.

We are working on new RIF Payments components to be launched soon as well as RIF Storage Protocol. By the end of the year we plan to count with a full suite of RIF OS services that will showcase how the full stack will work together.

The RSK platform was launched with a federation of well-known and respected community members (blockchain companies with high security standards) (the Federation). Each federation member, also referred to as a functionary or notary, is identified by a set of public keys, one used for Bitcoin multi-signatures, and others used for authentication and private communications. The conditions to become a Federation member have been established, including security policies, backup procedures, and legal requirements. In 2020, the Federation migrated to a new security model called PowPeg. Under this system, a functionary does not have access to their multisig private key, which is controlled by an HSM, while they do maintain control of other authentication private keys.

Currently the PowPeg Federation’s only role is to secure the two-way-peg. Each functionary has the responsibility to keep the HSM physically secured and connected to the RSK network. The federation does not participate in production of new blockchain blocks. In the future, the functionaries may provide additional services to the network. Some of the services that have shown to be valuable to the community are:

Two-way peg with Bitcoin

Two-way pegs with other cryptocurrencies

Oracling services

Checkpointing services

A requirement for being part of the PowPeg Federation is the ability to audit the proper behaviour of the software that powers the node, especially regarding the correctness of the component that decides on releasing BTC funds.

There have been proposals for alternative solutions to the sidechain two-way-peg problem, but currently no other satisfactory solution is available, either because it requires a Bitcoin soft or hard fork or because it requires the creation of a new token to use as security bonds. The RSK community is committed to decentralize the federation if a satisfactory solution is found, and the intention to do so is clearly stated in the RSK foundational whitepaper.