According to ColonelClink on Slack, refunds have been completed for the prior WYVCORP entity.
So, as previously mentioned, I'm interested in taking over this project - just for fun, because the name is cute, and as an experiment; I'm not taking investment / payment / anything of that sort.
I'm personally interested in core development - working on the Wyvern core protocol, daemon, and potentially framework-level web interfaces / wallets - others would be welcome to develop mobile wallets or gaming-related website integrations as WYVCORP originally intended to do, and I'd be glad to coordinate with anyone interested in this, but I don't plan to do so myself.
In order to provide utility to the cryptocurrency development space in general, and to provide a unique value proposition for the coin itself, I think Wyvern should pursue one or multiple specific verticals in developmental direction that have not yet been explored. I have a few ideas, but I'm also open to suggestions.
Early-stage ideas:
1.
Value pool-based zkSNARK anonymityZcash implements zkSNARKs to provide privacy-preserving transactions, but does so in a way which requires any user of Zcash, regardless of whether or not they use z-addresses / shielded transactions, to trust the integrity of the trusted setup - if the trusted setup were to have been compromised, the party which compromised it could mint unlimited Zcash without ever being detected (or caught - the "fake" Zcash would not be traceable).
A conceivable alternative implementation, as alluded to in the "Privacy" section of the
Tezos overview paper (probably among other sources), would be to have two "kinds" of the asset, in this case Wyvern, shielded and unshielded. Unshielded Wyvern could be transacted as normal, publically. Shielded Wyvern could be transacted privately using zkSNARK-proofs. Shielded and unshielded Wyvern could be converted to and from one another - however, the total amount of conversion would be tracked to ensure that no more unshielded Wyvern could be created than was previously shielded. Thus, users of unshielded Wyvern would not be vulnerable to fake Wyvern created by a party which compromised the trusted setup.
Additionally in this vein, I think there is room for quite a bit of innovation with trusted setups - for example, writing a setup in such a way as to support a higher number of participants, or even putting part of the setup itself on-chain.
2.
Proof-of-stake developmentThe proof-of-stake algorithm presently used in Wyvern is probably not sufficiently secure against
the nothing-at-stake attack - this isn't immediately an issue, as the current implementation uses fused PoW / PoS until a later block, but it will be in the future and should be resolved as soon as possible. Either Wyvern could continue fused PoW / PoS, changing the block reward scheme slightly to preserve the original total supply, or research could be done into possible PoS implementation not vulnerable to the nothing-at-stake attack, possibly in similar directions as the PoS algorithms of Ethereum Casper / Tezos.
3.
Lightning-network assetsFurther development of the
Lightning Network specification could be pursued and implemented in Wyvern, with the goal of supporting off-chain lightning transactions with arbitrary on-chain assets, perhaps using some version of the
colored coin protocol. This might be useful for companies or individuals issuing gaming-related assets on the Wyvern blockchain who would need to transact quickly, perhaps in-game or on some kind of website, using said tokens, and could provide useful testing for the Lightning network protocol.
Let me know what you all think of these possibilities and any further ideas you may have.
Poll
