BitGo’s Blockchain Team: Q1 2019 Retrospective
It has been a busy few months for the Blockchain Development Team at BitGo. We’ve been shipping quickly and wanted to highlight features that customers and followers of BitGo’s Engineering Blog may have missed.
Mainnet Coin Support
BitGo’s Blockchain Team added support for two new mainnet initiatives this quarter.
Bitcoin SV (BSV) Support
BitGo protected customers through the contentious BCH / BSV hard fork last November. This February, we launched full support for BSV to make it possible our clients to access their forked funds. Details on that launch as well as how we’re supporting that coin can be found here.
Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)
In collaboration with partners Kyber, AirSwap, Ren, and MakerDAO (among many others)— BitGo launched tokenization + custodial services for WBTC. This was a critical step towards tokenization as a service. Details on the token itself and our merchant partners can be found here, while details on the minting flow can be referenced below.
Bitcoin Upgrades
As important as it is to add mainnet coins to our platform, it is just as critical to improve support for existing coins. We’re proud to highlight these Bitcoin specific upgrades added in Q1 2019.
Native SegWit
Native SegWit is a modern and efficient Bitcoin address format that generally decreases transaction costs. These addresses are especially interesting for customers with high transaction volumes and those who send and receive small amounts. You can use this new address format to instantly decrease your transaction costs by sending change outputs to Native SegWit addresses. You can read about the feature in detail here.
Child Pays For Parent (CPFP)
CPFP is a Bitcoin specific tool that enables users to “bump” stuck transactions by creating a separate, but coupled child transaction that:
- Specifies the parent transaction as an input
- Uses a higher fee rate on the child transaction to incentive miners to include both transactions in a future block
This functionality is currently only available via our SDK. Documentation around usage of the feature can be found here.
Other Interesting Releases
Key Recovery Service (KRS) with Digital Asset Insurance
Key Recovery Services are third party vendors who securely manage customer back-up key(s). BitGo has historically worked with a single vendor, Keytern.al to support Bitcoin key recoveries. We recently partnered with Digital Asset Services to offer support across all of our coins with the goal of providing clients optionality when selecting their key recovery solution.
Ledger Re-Spendability
Ledger recently added Wrapped SegWit support with the v4.21 release of their Nano-S firmware. That enabled BitGo to add similar support for customers using v1 Bitcoin wallets created with Ledger devices. Contact support@bitgo.com for details on this update.
Transaction Performance Improvements
Finally, we tuned the performance of one of our most critical endpoints (transaction sends) by 90%. While this patch was motivated by a single customer, our entire user base benefits from this massive improvement. Show below is the dramatic drop in latency after the patch was introduced.
The really interesting work, however, is happening under the hood. Customers will experience the benefits of these changes over time as our platform continues to scale.
