Category: Technology

In April I entered (and won!) the NuCypher+CoinList hackathon. I didn’t actually know much about the NuCypher tech before I got started but once I had built my DApp it was clear this is really interesting stuff and it’s stuck with me ever since as something interesting to build on.

Proxy Re-encryption

The NuCypher solution will eventually provide a decentralised privacy infrastructure but during the hackathon I was mainly making use of a subset of the tech, Proxy Re-encryption.

Proxy re-encryption is a set of encryption algorithms that allow you to transform encrypted data. Specifically… it allows you to re-encrypt data — so you have data that’s encrypted under one set of keys, you can re-encrypt the data without de-encrypting it first, so that now it’s encrypted under a second, different set of keys —NuCypher co-founder MacLane Wilkison

So What?

To understand why this is pretty awesome imagine I have some encrypted data I want to share with Bob, what are the options to do this?

Crazy way – I just give me private encryption key to Bob (who I’m sharing the data with) who can use it to decrypt the data. But now Bob has my key and who knows where this ends up.

Inefficient way – I decrypt the encrypted data then rencrypt it using Bobs public key. This is more secure for sure but I have to do a lot more work. What if I have to do this many times? What if the encrypted data is stored and accessed over a network? Hows the information all being shared? Intensive!

How about the Proxy Re-encryption way:

With Proxy Re-encryption I encrypt the data once.

The encrypted data can be stored anywhere — Amazon, Dropbox, IPFS, etc. I only need to upload it once and provide access to the Proxy service (eventually this will be a NuCypher decentralised service)

The Proxy can rencrypt the data for anyone else I choose (provided I have their public key) efficiently and without ever having access to the decrypted data.

Bob decrypts the data using his own key and resources.

If the data I’m sharing is a stream, i.e. a Twitter feed, then I can enable/revoke decryption access whenever I want — i.e. I can stop someone seeing the data.

NuCypher will eventually provide a decentralised privacy infrastructure which will replace a centralized proxy with a decentralized network. A really good overview of the NuCypher solution is here.

Combine all this with decentralised smart contract as a source of access — very cool!

My DApp — thisfeedisalwaysforsale

My DApp was innspired by Simon de la Rouvieres This Artwork Is Always On Sale where he implements a Harberger Tax on the ownership of a digital artwork. In my app, instead of an artwork, access to a feed of data is always for sale. NuCypher is used to encrypt the data and only the current Patron can decrypt (using NuCypher) to get access. Anyone can buy this access from the current Patron for the sale price set when they took ownership. Whilst they hold ownership they pay a 5% fee to the feed owner. In the demo app the data is a Twitter like feed but the concept could be extended to have more than one Patron and could also be used for other kinds of feed data such as sensor data, camera/video feeds, music, etc.

I was super happy to get a mention in Token Economy as Stefanos favourite entry!

Why Vyper?

Vyper is a contract-oriented, pythonic programming language that targets the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Vyper is a relatively new language that has been written with a focus on security, simplicity and audibility. It’s written in a Pythonic way which appeals to me and as a more secure alternative to Solidity I think it has a lot of potential. I plan on writing more about working with Vyper in the future.

Truffle — Too Much Of A Sweet Tooth?

I’ve recently finished working on a hackathon project and completed the 2018 ConsenSys Academy and during that time, for better or worse, I’ve become pretty accustomed to using the Truffle development environment for writing code, testing and deploying— it just makes life easier.

So, in an ideal world I’d like to use Truffle for working with Vyper. After a bit of investigation I found this ERC721 Vyper implementation by Maurelian who did the work to make it Truffle compatible. I thought it might be useful to document the build process for use in other projects.

How To — Vyper Development Using Truffle

Install Vyper

The first step is to make sure Vyper is installed locally. If this has been done before you can skip — you can check by running the $ vyper -h command. There are various ways to install, including using PIP, the docs are here. I’m using a Mac and did the following:

Set up virtual environment:

$ virtualenv -p python3.6 --no-site-packages ~/vyper-venv

Remeber to activate the environmet:

$ source ~/vyper-venv/bin/activate

Then in my working dir:

$ git clone https://github.com/ethereum/vyper.git
$ cd vyper
$ make
$ make test

Install Truper

Next I installed Truper, a tool written by Maurelian to compile Vyper contracts to Truffle compatible artifacts. It uses Vyper which is why we installed it previously. (See the next section for details of what it’s doing). To install run:

$ npm i -g truper

Compiling, Testing, Deploying

From your project dir (you can clone the ERC-721 project for a quick test).

Run ganache test network:

$ ganache-cli

Compile any Solidity contracts as usual using:

$ truffle compile

Compile Vyper contracts using the command:

$ truper
* this must be called from the project dir and you must have the virtual environment you built Vyper in running.

Truffle tests can be written and run the usual way, i.e.:

Use artifacts in test files:
const NFToken = artifacts.require('NFToken.vyper');

Run tests using:
$ truffle test

Truffle migrations also work the usual way. For example I used the following migration file to deploy to ganache:

2_deploy_contracts.js

const NFToken = artifacts.require('NFToken.vyper');
const TokenReceiverMockVyper = artifacts.require('NFTokenReceiverTestMock.vyper');

module.exports = function(deployer) {
  deployer.deploy(NFToken, [], []);
  deployer.deploy(TokenReceiverMockVyper);
};

$ truffle migrate

What’s Going On

Truper uses Vyper which is why we installed it in the first step. If we look at https://github.com/maurelian/truper/blob/master/index.js we can see Truper is creating Truffle artifact files for each Vyper contract and writing them to the ./build/contracts folder of the project.

Truffle Artifact Files

These *.json files contain descriptions of their respective smart contracts. The description includes:

• Contract name
• Contract ABI (Application Binary Interface — a list of all the functions in the smart contracts along with their parameters and return values). Created by Truper using: $ vyper -f json file.vy
• Contract bytecode (compiled contract data). Created by Truper using: $ vyper -f bytecode file.vy
• Contract deployed bytecode (the latest version of the bytecode which was deployed to the blockchain). Created by Truper using: $ vyper -f bytecode_runtime file.vy
• The compiler version with which the contract was last compiled. (Doesn’t appear to get added until deployed.)
• A list of networks onto which the contract has been deployed and the address of the contract on each of those networks. (Doesn’t appear to get added until deployed.)

Maurelian describes it as a hacky stop-gap but it works so thank you!

Well that’s been a fun and productive couple of months!

ConsenSys Academy 2018

I’m now officially a ConsenSys certified dApp Developer 👊! (Certificate apparently on its way)

The ConsenSys Developer course was definitely worthwhile. I covered a lot of Blockchain theory while following the course lectures and taking the quizzes. The real learning and fun came from the final project where I actually had to build something.

Colony Hackathon Winner

I also managed to bag myself a prize in the Colony Hackathon for my decentralised issue reporting app. I got the Creativity Honorable Mention which was pretty cool and I used my winnings to buy a Devcon IV ticket ✈️ 🤘!!

The Learnings

I came across a few things that I wanted to do while I was #BUIDLING but couldn’t easily find the info on so I’ve been keeping a kind of cheat sheet. Hopefully it might help someone else out there.

https://github.com/johngrantuk/dAppCheatSheet/blob/master/README.md

The Future Is Bright

The last few months I’ve confirmed to myself that the Blockchain/Ethereum world is something I want to be involved in. There’s so many different, exciting areas to investigate further, now I just have to chose one and dive further down the rabbit hole!

I’ve been working on a rock, paper, scissors Ethereum DApp using Solidity, Web3 and the Truffle framework. I hit a few difficulties trying to replicate functionality that would normally be trivial in a non blockchain world so I thought I’d share what I learned.

My first thoughts for the DApp was to display a list of existing games that people had created. Normally if I were doing something like this in Django I’d create a game model and save any new games in the database. To display a list of existing games on the front end I’d query the db and iterate over the returned collection. (I realise storage is expensive when using the Ethereum blockchain but I thought trying to replicate this functionality would make sense and would be a good place to start.)

Solidity

Structures

While investigating the various data types that could be used I found the Typing and Your Contracts Storage page from Ethereum useful. I settled on using a struct, a grouping of variables, stored under one reference.

struct Game {
   string name;
   uint move;
   bool isFinished;
   address ownerAddress;
   uint stake;
   uint index;
}

That handles one game but I want to store all games. I attempted to do this in a number of different ways but settled on mapping using the games index as the key. Every time a new game is added the index is incremented so I also use gameCount to keep count of the total games.

mapping (uint => Game) games;
uint gameCount;

struct Game {
        string name;
        uint move;
        bool isFinished;
        address ownerAddress;
        uint stake;
        uint index;
    }

To add a new game I used this function:

function StartGame(uint moveId, string gameName) payable {
      require(moveId >= 0 && moveId <= 2);
      games[gameCount].name = gameName;
      games[gameCount].move = moveId;
      games[gameCount].isFinished = false;
      games[gameCount].ownerAddress = msg.sender;
      games[gameCount].stake = msg.value;
      games[gameCount].index = gameCount;
      gameCount++;
}

I also added a function that returns the total number of games:

function GetGamesLength() public returns (uint){
   return gameCount;
}

Returning A Structure

Next I want to be able to get information about a game using it’s index. In Solidity a structure can only be returned by a function from an internal call so for the front end to get the data I had to find another way. I went with the suggestion here — return the fields of the struct as separate return variables.

function GetGame(uint Index) public returns (string, bool, address, uint, uint) {
    return (games[Index].name, games[Index].isFinished, games[Index].ownerAddress, games[Index].stake, games[Index].index);
}

Front End

On the front end I use Web3 to iterate over each game and display it. To begin I call the GetGamesLength() function. As we saw previously this gives the total number of games. Then I can iterate the index from 0->NoGames to get the data for each game using the GetGame(uint Index) function.

When my page first loads it calls:

getGames: function() {
    var rpsInstance;
    App.contracts.RpsFirst.deployed().then(function(instance) {
      rpsInstance = instance;
      return rpsInstance.GetGamesLength.call();
    }).then(function(gameCount) {
      App.getAllGames(web3.toDecimal(gameCount), rpsInstance);
    }).catch(function(err) {
      console.log(err.message);
    });
  },

Web3 – Promises, Promises & more Promises…

The getAllGames function calls GetGame(uint Index) for each game. To do this I created a sequence of promises using the method described here:

getAllGames: function(NoGames, Instance){
   
   var sequence = Promise.resolve()

   for (var i=0; i < NoGames; i++){(function(){  
         var capturedindex = i
         sequence = sequence.then(function(){
            return Instance.GetGame.call(capturedindex);
         }).then(function(Game){
            console.log(Game + ' fetched!'
            // Do something with game data. 
            console.log(Game[0]); // Name
            console.log(Game[1]); // isFinished
         }).catch(function(err){
            console.log('Error loading ' + err)
         })
      }())
   }
}

Conclusion

Looking back at this now it’s all pretty easy looking but it took me a while to get there! I’m still not even sure if it’s the best way to do it. Any advice would be awesome and if it helps someone even better.