umbra

Umbra v2 Prototypes And Designs

In January 2024, we announced the Ethereum Foundation had funded ScopeLift's work to advance stealth addresses in the Ethereum ecosystem for six months. Since then, we have shared two more updates on our progress. Now it's time for us to publish our final update on this phase of our work.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

A Flexible Voting Money Market on Compound V3

This post will explain how we added flexible voting support to Comet, as well as some of the abstractions we created to make this kind of work easier for smart contract devs of the future. It will also cover some of the other work we're doing to help the DAO governance ecosystem benefit from flexible voting.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

Introducing Scopelint and a new Foundry Template

Smart contract development is a sensitive task that demands secure, high-quality, and easy-to-read code. To help developers reach this goal, we have previously worked with other top engineers to come up with the Solidity and Foundry Best Practices. Now we're announcing two new tools to further help developers write safe, clean code: Scopelint, and a Foundry template.

Matt Solomon

Dir. of Engineering

optimizoors

Calldata Optimizooooors: Saving Gas on L2s by Reducing Calldata

Layer 2 (L2) networks share security with mainnet by publishing transaction data on Layer 1 (L1). As a result, L2 users still pay some L1 gas costs when executing transactions. Since L1 gas can be >25,000x more expensive than L2 gas, paying for L1 calldata dominates L2 transaction costs. With custom contracts that use less calldata than standard methods we significantly reduced transaction costs for users."

Matt Solomon

Dir. of Engineering

umbra

Umbra OG: A Collectible NFT for our Supporters

This support, in particular, means an enormous amount to us. For so many individuals to give organically toward the development of more private payments on Ethereum has consistently blown us away. It motivates us to keep pushing Umbra forward. Today, we want to offer a small gesture of thanks.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Stealth Payments with Umbra Now Available on Optimism and Arbitrum

The ScopeLift team is excited to announce that Umbra is now available on the Optimism and Arbitrum Layer 2 networks. The two rollup networks mark the third and fourth networks where users can now use Umbra to send privacy preserving payments, joining Polygon and the Ethereum Mainnet.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Disclosure: Rare Bug in Umbra Resolved

This post is a disclosure of a bug in the Umbra web client which, in a rare set of circumstances, may have resulted in the loss of user funds.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Umbra Frontend Bug Disclosure User Action Recommended

This post is a disclosure of a now-patched bug found in the Umbra frontend. The bug could have resulted in Umbra being configured incorrectly for users in rare circumstances. As a result, these users would not see funds on 'Receive' page that were sent to their account.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Umbra is Live on Polygon

We’re excited to announce that Umbra is now available on the Polygon scaling network. Users can simply select Polygon from the network selector to use the app there.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Umbra Upgrades its Registry and Moves Out of Beta

Today marks an important milestone for Umbra. With our deployment of a new and improved stealth key registry system, we are officially moving the project out of its Beta phase. What does this mean? Put simply, Umbra is ready for production use.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Umbra Receives MolochDAO Grant

We are grateful and excited to announce that Umbra has received a grant from MolochDAO. Since we launched the stealth address protocol to the Ethereum mainnet in June, we’ve been learning from our early adopters and making small improvements to the system around the edges. This grant will enable us to accelerate the work of pushing Umbra forward.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

Decentralizing Public Goods Funding with Gitcoin Grants

One of the amazing things about being a dev shop in the crypto ecosystem is the incredible founders and teams we get to work with. The space is filled with highly motivated builders who are genuinely striving to create something better than the status quo. Gitcoin is a shining example of this ethos, and we’re proud to have worked with them over the past year and half to help improve Gitcoin Grants.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

Zeneth Launch: A First Step Toward Democratizing Gasless Transaction Bundling

One month after it debuted as a prize-winning finalist at the ETHGlobal Scaling Ethereum Hackathon, Zeneth is available for public use. Zeneth democratizes direct-to-miner transactions and lets anyone interact with Ethereum without spending their precious Ether on gas.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Umbra is Live

We are thrilled to announce, after many months of work, that Umbra is live on mainnet and available for public use. In fact, the protocol was soft launched two weeks ago to a small group of testers who diligently acted as our guinea pigs. We're grateful for all the feedback they provided.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Umbra Audit Updates

A security-first posture is one our core values at ScopeLift. The responsibility that comes with writing software that handles other people’s money demands it. That’s why we’re excited to announce two security audit updates related to Umbra today.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

Umbra Reaches Phase One on Road to Mainnet

Umbra has reached another milestone in our journey to mainnet. Today, we shipped our Phase 1 release of the protocol to the Rinkeby testnet. This release lays the groundwork for Phase 2, which should be done sometime in March. In fact, the version shipped today includes some of the updates that were originally earmarked for the second phase.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

umbra

An Update on Umbra's Funding and Future

In this post, we’ll give you an overdue update on the funding and development of the Umbra protocol. To start, let’s review what Umbra is.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

FakerDAO: An Exploration Of MakerDAO’s Governance Incentives

The MakerDAO project is one of the most interesting experiments in the crypto space. It pushes boundaries along multiple dimensions. Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of the project, at least until recently, is its governance.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

All In On Crypto: ScopeLift's Next Chapter

In 2013, I spent my holiday break building a GPU miner for a hilarious new cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. I fired it up for the first time on December 30th, 2013.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

Phoenix on Heroku: Our Experience Getting CoinRecap.io Deployed

Heroku is a powerful service that abstracts away most of the typical DevOps work one must do to deploy a modern web app to the cloud. It’s therefore ideal for getting a service off the ground quickly. But is it a good fit for Elixir and Phoenix?

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

360|iDev 2017: Swifty By Default

Another year, another excellent iteration of 360|iDev in the books! Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, was honored to speak there, and had a great time visiting Denver. And once again, it provided a great opportunity to take the pulse of the iOS developer community.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

The Developer Hiring Process is (Literally) Over Engineered

Widely used techniques for hiring, motivating, and measuring developers aren’t just ineffective- they’re very likely counterproductive to building a healthy team. To hire better developers, we need to stop fixating on technical skills in isolation from other factors. I’ve come this conclusion over the course of my career, but if you’ll bear with me, I have a particular anecdote from my first job out of school that helps explain why.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

Life After Git: Spitballing the Next Generation of Source Control

What kind of version control system will eventually replace Git? When I pose this question to fellow developers, I get one of two responses. Some are shocked by the idea that anything will ever replace Git. “Version control is a solved problem and Git is the solution!” Others imagine what I call Git++, a system that is essentially the same as Git, but with some of the common problems and annoyances resolved. Neither of these are likely to be the case.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

360|iDev 2016: It's Not Just iPhones Anymore

Last week marked my second time attending 360|iDev and my first time speaking. It was an absolute pleasure to do both, and as usual I feel like my head is still spinning from all the cool stuff I learned and awesome people I met. As such, it's worth taking a minute to reflect on the week and what I took from it.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

Introducing Bitsy: The First Language You’ll Implement Yourself

For the average user, smartphones and computers are black boxes, the inner workings of which are magical and intimidating. We— programmers— are the supposed magicians who know these dark arts. Sadly, most of us just push the mystification down a few levels. We know how to build apps! And websites! Below our slice of the stack? Oh, it’s black magic all the way down.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

A Practical iOS Primer for Web Developers

Last month I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Philadelphia branch of the New York Code + Design Academy (NYCDA). I spoke with a group of students just completing a three month, intensive boot camp in web development with Ruby on Rails and Javascript.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

Shipping KÜDZOO

Rewrites can be scary, and they shouldn’t be taken on without very careful consideration of the value of a working codebase, even if it is “legacy.” Still, sometimes they are necessary, and launch of KÜDZOO 1.7 to the app store proves they can be done successfully.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

What's love got to do with it? CocoaLove 2015

Love is a funny word. We use it to describe the deepest, most passionate of human relationships, but also how we feel about cheese fries.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

The Morality of Ad Blocking

iOS 9 was released yesterday and includes support for web content blockers. The internet is roiled in a debate about the “morality” of using ad blockers and I find myself disagreeing with some very smart people who I respect. As such I feel the need to think carefully about my position and lay it out clearly.

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer

A Case Study on Reusability in Interface Builder

I had the pleasure of giving a short talk at this month's PhillyCocoa meeting about implementing a simple screen that happened to contain some repetition. I reviewed four different approaches in Interface Builder and discussed the tradeoffs involved each. I hope you enjoy it!

Ben DiFrancesco

CEO & Senior Engineer