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
In this post, we'll share our preliminary conception of an architecture that will support stealth payments even better than Umbra v1 does, but is also flexible enough to support many other use cases.
Ben DiFrancesco
CEO & Senior Engineer
We share our progress on stealth address ERCs, Umbra improvements, and future goals, fueled by an Ethereum Foundation Grant.
Ben DiFrancesco
CEO & Senior Engineer
We're excited to announce that ScopeLift has received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to advance stealth address standardization on the EVM and begin work on Umbra v2.
Ben DiFrancesco
CEO & Senior Engineer
DAO voting with Governance tokens on Ethereum mainnet is expensive. Gas costs can be prohibitive for small to medium sized holders, or delegates who have received voting power but don't have a strong incentive to vote on a given proposal.
Alex Keating
Senior Engineer
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
In April, we began to build calldata-optimized routers for several gas guzzling protocols on Layer 2 thanks to a grant from the Ethereum Foundation.
Alex Keating
Senior Engineer
On Aprli 4th, 2023, ScopeLift released v1.0.0 of Flexible Voting, our extension to the OpenZeppelin governance contracts used by many DAOs. The release had been audited by OpenZeppelin.
Ben DiFrancesco
CEO & Senior Engineer
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
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
ScopeLift is very grateful to have been recently awarded a grant by the Aave Grants DAO to add flexible voting to that list.
David Laprade
Senior Engineer
ScopeLift is excited to announce that Seatbelt now supports OpenZeppelin Governors. This comes in addition to Governor Bravo, which has long been supported.
Matt Solomon
Dir. of Engineering
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
In February of this year, ScopeLift received a grant from the Uniswap Grant Program (UGP). The high level goal of our grant was improving the safety, resilience, and accessibility of Uniswap DAO's Governance. Our aim was to do so in a way that would also benefit the broader ecosystem. In this vein, our work was focused on two tasks.
Ben DiFrancesco
CEO & Senior Engineer
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
On March 31st, 2020, Vitalik Buterin tweeted about the need for a stealth address scheme in the Ethereum ecosystem. Less than two months later, we’re excited to announce Umbra, a protocol for simple stealth payments on Ethereum.
Ben DiFrancesco
CEO & Senior Engineer
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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