The Next Generation Wallet is released
The time has arrived to begin the token distribution for Unigrid! We're excited to announce the new arrival of our wallet code named Janus.
Janus from Greek mythology, was the God of doors, gates, and transitions who represented the transitions between stages in cycles. We found this fitting as we move away from an old method of using QT to handle the GUI front end of our wallet.
We've worked very hard to make running and working with this wallet as user-friendly as possible. With all things we do, this is not a final release by any means. You may find some bugs or have suggestions on how we can improve it.
Token Distribution
The distribution of tokens will be a two-step process. We ask that everyone who purchased tokens download this new wallet so they can provide us with an address. After the wallet has started and fully opened (the approximate setup time for a new wallet is 5-10 minutes), click on the receive button.
On the Address screen simply click on the clipboard to copy this address.
The next step is to log in to the sale portal and enter your address. If you purchased via the sale email then you will need to create an account associated with the email you used to purchase.
The distribution process will begin after we have received all addresses and upgraded the wallet with auto-updates.
The new versions of the wallet will run on Windows, OSX, and most flavors of Linux. It can be downloaded from the official project page below;
unigrid-projectThis initial release does not contain an auto-update feature yet. We thought it would be best to get this released now to progress with the token distribution. The release that will follow this one will contain some major updates, including the auto-update feature.
Issue reporting
If you do come across any issues or have suggestions, we ask that you please post them on the GitHub issues page of the project;
unigrid-projectHedgehog
Parallel to wallet development we have also been working on Hedgehog - the next generation daemon for the Unigrid network. Hedgehog will host all the future features of the network and will extend and build on top of the legacy daemon at an initial stage, allowing us to deprecate and replace the components of the old daemon a little bit at a time. We are currently on the fourth rewrite (or refactoring) of this daemon as we work and get comfortable with the underlying frameworks.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
During the early development and testing of Hedgehog, we based the network code of the daemon on top of Apache MINA. While MINA is a really nice framework, we ultimately came to the conclusion that it is too high-level for our needs and that we needed more control than that which MINA could easily offer without a lot of extra work. One choice would be to directly use Java NIO. While this would certainly work, NIO is a very rough and direct low-level API that would require us to do our own communication framework on top of it. The alternative we finally ended up using is Netty. The big advantage of this framework is that it is relatively low-level and close to NIO while at the same time being very popular in the Java community. This saves us a lot of work (and will likely save us even more work in the future), as there are ready-to-use modules implemented for almost any popular protocol you can think of.
