Current Status of the Utreexo Project

Abstract: In this short piece, 100x Group grantee Calvin Kim provides a quick update on the development of the Utreexo implementation. Calvin is now looking forward to focusing on performance, integration with existing Bitcoin implementations, and adding robust tests to the codebase.

Last year, when my first PR was merged, the Utreexo project was just past its proof of concept stage. For the past year, a lot of the work has been focused on the implementation of a working Utreexo node with signature verification. This was completed in July of this year with various performance improvements and bug fixes coming along the way. Since then, there have been more brainstorming and work towards a fully-featured accumulator. With the merge of  https://github.com/mit-dci/utreexo/pull/192 which revamps the disk-storage for Utreexo bridgenodes, I believe we’re a step further in completing our implementation of the Utreexo project.

It’s exciting going forward since we can now put more time and focus towards performance, integration with existing Bitcoin implementations, and adding robust tests to the codebase. While there are still many things to be done before we can introduce Utreexo into the real world, I’m happy to say that the project is heading in the right direction.

If anyone is interested in contributing to the project, do check out github issues (https://github.com/mit-dci/utreexo/issues) and discussions about the project on #utreexo on freenode. We welcome any new contributions with open arms.