DigitalCash.dev

AJ ONeal November 3, 2024 Git Source Suggest Edit

Develop P2P & ZMQ Web Explorers

Fund the Development of Dash Network Protocol Explorers for:

These will be similar to the Dash RPC Explorer (https://rpc.digitalcash.dev), but focus on the P2P and ZMQ protocols.

Why

The P2P and ZMQ protocols are fairly technical, but could be also very useful if made available on the Web.

The benefit to making these more accessible to and explorable by Web Developers is that they’ll be able to better understand the Dash Network - and therefore can take advantage of the best parts of it more easily - and get much better performance both in the browser and on the server.

Having unobstructed access also opens the ability to create finely-tuned customer experiences.

Having the ZMQ messages on the Web will be particularly beneficial to Merchants - it will make it painless to detect incoming payments.

Bringing P2P from TCP to Web

The Dash P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Network is already fully public on the Internet, it’s just not accessible from the Web (because it’s a TCP-only protocol).

The easy part of getting it on the Web is a simple 1:1 WebSocket layer, which is mostly built.

The difficult part of getting it on the Web is writing the packers and parsers for the binary protocol such that it can be easily representing as Value Objects (i.e. JSON, structs) in different languages.

The good news is that the JavaScript packers and parsers can work on the client and the server.

I’ve already done some of the heavy lifting protocol work as part of my efforts with CoinJoin. This project will leverage that work, and bring it up a layer to where developers can easily explore it for other purposes, including arbitrary hex messages.

There are a few simple security guards that need to be put in place for this, such as white listing and/or disabling messages for MNO- and ENO-hosted servers.

Bringing ZMQ from localhost to Web

The ZMQ Notifications are accessible via the ZeroMQ protocol - which is TCP-only and not currently exposed publicly, but easy to expose - just like the RPC Proxy.

I plan to implement the ZQM proxy using Server-Send Events (SSE) - since it is a very simple, easy-to-understand-and-use protocol with Baseline browser support for 5 years.

I’ve done some work with this in both Node and Go, so I’m already familiar with how to adapt it. Again, due to my work with CoinJoin, I have a pretty good idea of how to structure the explorer and allow for updating subscriptions on-the-fly.

This is also very simple to secure by white-listing the read-only message types to the documented public types - almost exactly the same as the current Dash RPC Explorer

Software Development

  • server code will be written in Go, as it is both safe and performant
  • suitable client code will be written as JavaScript libraries
  • the Explorer UIs will be implemented in plain JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

Hosting by DNOs (MNOs, ENOs, and FNOs)

I will also create self-install scripts so that any DNOs (Dash Node owners) of all types can bring the value of these tools to the whole Dash Network.

These will be similar to the DashCore Daemon installer I created previously.

Funding Development vs Public Hosting

Requesting 200 DASH total: 100 DASH / month for 2 months for documented, deployable deliverables.

  • The basic scope will be met at this cost
  • I’ll request more if some features extend beyond this scope.

Once developed, the continued funding for hosting these will be part of https://digitalcash.dev/proposals/dcd-1-rpc-web-proxy/.

Unused / Excess Funds

Surplus funds, if any, will be put towards future Dash SDK, Explorer, Proxy, or Payments work.

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