2021 was an eventful year for the Hyperledger Lab Perun, which is maintained by PolyCrypt GmbH and Robert Bosch GmbH’s project “Economy of Things.” Below we summarize developments and achievements for the project and the growing network surrounding it. We also provide a brief outlook on what’s to come in 2022.
This Hyperledger Lab aims at establishing an open-source project based on Perun channel protocols, which is a technology for scalability and interoperability of blockchains. The core components are the Go-Perun SDK and the Perun Node.
Virtual channels: The SDK now supports virtual channels. This allows opening channels with funds from other channels and therefore without any on-chain fees.
Reorg-resistance (Ethereum backend): The Ethereum backend now supports reorg-resistance. That is, it is possible to configure how many blocks are required in order to confirm an on-chain transaction. This improves the robustness of our library as it protects against chain reorgs.
External watcher: Go-Perun now has an interface for injecting a custom watcher logic. This means that SDK users can now implement their own watcher logic or use an external service for watching and reacting to chain events.
Perun Node v0.6: A new client that adds a text-based user interface for trying out Perun Node, support for ERC20 tokens and improved error handling.
Polkadot backend: We successfully developed a Polkadot backend for Go-Perun. This means that it is now possible to use Go-Perun on Polkadot chains. The backend is currently restricted to single asset payment channels.
Cosmos backend: We successfully developed a Cosmos backend for Go-Perun. The on-chain logic has been implemented in the form of a CosmWasm smart contract. This means that it is now possible to use Go-Perun on a Cosmos chain supporting CosmWasm. The backend is currently restricted to payment channels.
Dfinity backend (smart contract): We started the development of a backend for the Dfinity Internet Computer. This currently includes the Perun smart contracts for this network. We plan to continue the backend development later this year.
Perun Credential Payment: We have published a proof of concept implementation that shows how trustless and low-fee payments for verifiable credentials in the context of self-sovereign identities (SSI) can be realized using Perun State Channels.
Perun Tutorial and Protocol Documentation: We extended the documentation of our software. In particular, we added developer tutorials that explain how one can get started with using Go-Perun for developing their favorite state channel application. We also added a description of the perun protocols.
Talks: We have given several talks on the Perun Project:
Cross-chain interoperability: We will be working towards enabling cross-chain capabilities of the Perun Framework. This will enable, for example, asset swaps between different blockchains and more.
IoT Readiness: We will make the architecture of Perun Node more flexible, so that funding and watching services can be accessed over remote interfaces. We will also add an alternate client implementation that can be deployed on resource constrained embedded devices.
More blockchain backends: We will be looking into extending the feature set of our existing backends, for example, enabling generalized state channels on Polkadot. We plan to add more blockchains to our list of supported backends.
Building out the ecosystem: As development with the protocol and surrounding network continues, we will be working to further define the components of the Perun ecosystem and the communities working to advance these technologies.
If you want to learn more about the framework, please refer to the white paper and our last Hyperledger labs post or this Hyperledger presentation on Perun or reach out via our Discord channel. (New to Discord? Go here for more and to get signed up.)