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tags: CommunityUpdate
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# Farcaster: Community update June
Please find below the monthly update from the community-funded workgroup on Bitcoin-Monero atomic swaps.

## Taproot activation
We've already given Taproot a lot of airtime in the previous updates, but now it has been locked in with Speedy Trial and finally becomes a reality! Activation is automatic at block height 709632 - expected around November 2021.

Pieter Wuille on Taproot: “It's the first consensus change since Segwit activated in august 2017. It extends Bitcoin's script capabilities in ways that make certain things cheaper (especially more complex applications like multisig and layer 2 things), and somewhat more private by often hiding what the exact spending rules were.”

In our RFCs, we've taken a Taproot-first design approach for long-term viability, so this development comes as great news for the Farcaster protocol!! Atomic swaps without on-chain fingerprinting, here we go :)

## Node and software
We have now in place the backbone of all the microservices that make up the farcaster node:

- `walletd` (1 instance): where secret keys live, transactions are constructed
- `farcasterd` (1 instance): the swap manager, it is aware of all the running swaps, it is the message broker (the router) and orders all messages exchanged between the microservices, it exposes an API for the swap-cli client
- `swap-cli`: stateless terminal client that commands farcasterd
- `peerd` (1 instance per peer connection): handles the connection to an individual peer,
- `syncerd` (1 instance per blockchain, i.e. one for monero and one for bitcoin): interface for getting chain state and broadcasting swap transactions
- `swapd` (1 instance per swap): control centre for an individual swap - keeps track of the swap's state as it runs the protocol's state machine, and orchestrates the swap with peerd for communicating with swap counterparty, walletd for signing, and syncers for blockchain interactions.

Our microservice architecture makes it much harder to move fast, but the flexibility and extensibility it brings is largely compensated. This month we focused on walletd, integration tests, a refactor of core and the syncers.

### Research on tx chaining

As it turns out, Monero's current transaction format could be tweaked to accommodate for transaction chaining. After Lucas and Thomas from the COMIT team proposed changing what is being hashed in the signature algorithm to data that is available even for unmined outputs, the idea was fleshed out by Monero contributor UkoeHB. It now lives in an evolving issue on the [research-lab repository](https://github.com/monero-project/research-lab). We spent some brief time on a potential implementation in the monero core software and discussed details and optimizations of the proposal with the community.
We would also like to express our full support for UkoeHB's proposal. Chaining transactions before they are mined paves the way for building extremely useful protocols on Monero, such as payment channels or more conventional atomic swaps, for example.

Thomas from COMIT Network also published a [blog post](https://comit.network/blog/2021/07/02/transaction-presigning) on the topic and calling for support. Their interest is OTC services that sell bitcoin for monero, similar to xmr.to, but with atomic-swap backend. They also have a fresh [reddit post on the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/oc691b/whats_up_with_atomic_swaps_and_a_glimpse_on_what/).

The changes required to allow for transaction chaining in Monero are quite involved and will require a hard fork. Currently, we don't expect it to be deployed before Farcaster goes live with its first swap. But we are super excited for this new development and the features it unlocks though!

We'd like to thank all participants on the evolution of this proposal: Ukoe, Lucas, Thomas, TheCharlatan, h4sh3d and others.

## Thank you!
Would you like to contact us? Please reach out at `#monero-swap` on Libera.chat

We normally met every Wednesday at 4pm UTC, but during this summer the meetings are more inclined to be spread within the week and we changed the schedule to 12pm UTC, keeping Wednesdays.

The Farcaster workgroup