Launching Bug-Free with New Buffer Utilities and Cryptography Libraries

You probably want EarthBucks to launch right away if you’re reading this. I’m going as fast as I can, but I’ve decided not to cut any corners. I want the launch product to be solid, meaning free from bugs. It won’t have all the features I envision at launch, but it should at least work without crashing or losing your EBX.

I’m currently building the payments feature. You will be able to send EBX to someone’s address, and I’ve decided that it’s important for you to be able to send an end-to-end encrypted message attached with the payment. The reason for this is that payments are rarely unsolicited; they’re usually related to an invoice. However, that extra invoice information has nothing to do with the blockchain. I shouldn’t be able to see it, nor should anyone else who is simply looking at the blockchain. Therefore, it should be off-chain and encrypted.

To make this possible, I’ve created a new set of buffer utilities and cryptography libraries called WebBuf. Included in WebBuf are tools for converting buffers to/from hex and base64, hashing buffers, signing buffers and verifying signatures, and encrypting and decrypting buffers. EarthBucks is already using this tool for all of its cryptography.

WebBuf is optimized with Rust code built to WASM. The underlying cryptography libraries are either popular Rust libraries or written by me from scratch when existing libraries don’t provide the interface I need (such as ECDSA, surprisingly). WebBuf is dramatically faster than pure JavaScript code, thanks to the Rust/WASM optimization.

If you’re not a developer, this might not impact you directly, except to know that my intention is to make sure that when EarthBucks launches, it simply works as expected, error-free. That’s where all my effort is going right now.

The final steps to launch are to finish the payments feature (now that all the cryptography code is complete and functional) and to add the KYC feature via InternetKYC.