This month in Conceal (March 2019)

March and the lead-up to the month was a very busy and somewhat stressful time thanks to the fork. Read on for more of what went on, what we are working on, and what we have in store for the rest of the month.

Developer Updates

Cryptonight Conceal

The big news this month is the switch from Cryptonight Fast v1 to our own variant Cryptonight Conceal. The basic description of the variant:

The Cryptonight Conceal variant has tweaks that involve minor floating point math. This is not enough to prevent FPGA implementation entirely, as that involve significantly slowing down CPU mining, but it will discourage it. It also includes an accumulating constant to make sure that each transformation is done in order. The transformation is applied right before AES encryption.

The new PoW algorithm went live after block 195,765, which fell roughly around 1.00pm GMT/UTC on the seventh of March.

Conceal Cloud

There are more improvement coming to Conceal Cloud, our web wallet, courtesy of @Zemanel and @bomb-on. As we move to bring the product out of beta, we are fixing some of the rough edges and adding some new features in like an Address Book to store your most used contacts. We have a lot of new features on the horizon, so stay tuned. Sign up for an account if you haven’t already, and let us know what you think in our Discord.

Conceal Nodes

Another product on our roadmap that @katz is working on this month are fee-based remote nodes. Do you have a server idling? Or do you just want to make some extra CCX? Then you can run your own remote node that others can use to relay transaction, for a fee of course. The work involves upgrades to the Daemon, and the GUI wallet, along with a website that lists active open remote nodes. Here are a couple of screenshots with the daemon running with a fee-address set.

Conceal NodeGuard

The Conceal NodeGuard is a node based system written by @Taegus, that runs and monitors a Conceal Daemon and restarts the Daemon if it crashes, or stops responding to RPC commands and informs you through a webhook when it does fail and restart. If you want to run a highly available Conceal Daemon, then NodeGuard helps you monitor and keep it running. The NodeGuard is still in beta testing, including with the official Conceal Remote Node.