Hi all! I just wanted to take a moment to quickly outline what I intend to focus on this year for Grin’s development. As always, there’s more to do than I can handle (hint, hint), but my goal is to keep things simple and focus on a few key areas that I believe will make the biggest impact. Here’s a breakdown of what I’m planning to work on.
1. The “Core” GUI wallet - (Or basically just Grim if possible - see below.)
2. Achieving a working mwixnet – I think this is now a critical piece to enhance Grin’s privacy and usability.
3. Further experimentation with the wallet’s contracts branch – While not a top priority, this is a promising area I’d like to explore as time allows.
4. Exploring Agentic AI Interactions with Grin – This might be a bit of a surprise, but I’ll explain below.
## Core GUI Development Update
I’ve put a lot of time into developing the Core Grin GUI over the past couple of years. It’s been a valuable project, especially as a testbed for experiments like the contracts branch. However, I’m not entirely happy with the current technology stack. The iced-rs framework, while promising, has caused more headaches than I’d like:
* It moves very, with frequent undocumented breaking changes
* Debugging can be painful, and resource requirements are heavier than expected
* Basic widgets often need to be implemented manually, which is time-consuming
* Custom widgets tend to break with every update
That being said, I think we have a much better alternative in the new grim wallet, developed by @ardocrat. I’ve spent some time reviewing and auditing it (caveat: not exhaustively), and I think it ticks all the boxes for what we need in a core GUI wallet:
* It’s a pure Rust implementation
* It uses our core Grin libraries directly
* It supports both embedded and external node configurations
* It’s already very feature-complete, especially compared to my version
* It’s well-documented, easy to use and already has good cross-platform support
I need to talk to @ardocrat about how we can do this, but I’d very much like to explore how we can focus all of our GUI efforts on Grim.
## MWixnet Integration Progress
I’ve invested significant effort into getting mwixnet into a workable state. Last year, I focused on containerization through the grin-docker project, which has helped with testing and deployment. While we’ve seen some community engagement and testing progress, there are still issues that need addressing.
The good news is that we now have mwixnet request functionality in the Grin wallet API. (I’m particularly excited about the possibility of integrating this into grim, which would give us a user-friendly way to interact with mwixnet. This integration would be a significant step forward in making Grin’s privacy features more accessible to users.)
## Existing experimental work - Contracts branch and Payment Proofs
A lot of work has been done on the Grin wallet contracts branch, contracts workflows and the payement proofs they enable in particular. Depending on where we go with Grim, I’d like to move these into Grim in a ‘experimental’ mode and continue testing on them.
## Grin and AI
You might have noticed people using terms like “AI” or “LLM” over the past little while :D. While Grin has always been about simple, private, human-to-human transactions, it’s worth thinking about how it might fit into this emerging world. This is all highly speculative and based on a version of the future that might not come to pass, but I think it’s worth considering.
In particular, there’s a lot of buzz around ‘Agents’ and agentic workflows. These are e scenarios where autonomous AI agents perform tasks and interact with other agents or systems. Think of things like:
- AI purchasing cloud computing resources for itself.
- AI agents collaborating on projects, compensating each other for contributions.
- AI agents simply exchanging the costs of LLM calls with each other.
Personally, I’ve heard some buzz around the merging of cryptocurrency with AI, and I think Grin could fit very well into this world, particularly due to its inherenet privacy and multy-party transactions being a core feature.
I’m not saying AI is the future of Grin or that we need to pivot everything in this direction. But given where technology is headed, it seems worth at least exploring how Grin might play a role in this space. There’s potential here to position Grin as a tool for new types of use cases and maybe spark some fresh interest in the project along the way.
For instance, we could look into ideas like:
1. Wallets that AI agents can use autonomously - or “The LLM Wallet”. It should be possible to do this securely using local LLMs and secure function calling that doesn’t expose any passwords or wallet info.
2. Using Grin in AI-driven marketplaces for trading resources or services.
3. Privacy-preserving payments between AI agents, which fits naturally with Grin’s design.
This is still very much an idea in the exploration phase, but I think it’s worth trying out a few experiments to see what’s possible. It doesn’t need to be a major focus, but I think it’s an area with potential to keep Grin current and relevant as technology continues to evolve.
I’ll share more thoughts and updates as I dig into this, but for now, I’d love to hear what others think. Maybe this opens up some interesting possibilities we haven’t considered yet.
Ongoing Bug Fixes and Maintenance
Like any long-term software project, a significant part of the work on Grin involves ongoing bug fixes, maintenance, and support across our many repositories. This might not be the most exciting part of development, but it’s essential to keeping everything running smoothly. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any outstanding issues and addressing them as they come up.
That’s all from me on development for now. There’s some other stuff around admin and communication that I also want to talk about, but I’m still thinking about those and will have that converstaion elsewhere. In the meantime, this is basically what I’ll be doing on the dev side.
that there is plenty to do for developers who want to join in.
: