The below is a direct extract from Marty’s Bent Number 1266: “A Fedimint seal appears out of the wild.” Subscribe to the newsletter here.
Earlier this week Eric Sirion announced the official launch of the first public bookmark (a testnet) for Fedimint, the open source protocol that allows people to easily create their own Chaumian Mints on top of the LNP/BP stack. This is a very exciting thing to see because it means that those who are developing the protocol are making material progress and that a public-ready mainnet seems to be in sight.
I had the pleasure of trying the signet ring version.
Even though it only works on the seal and the functionality is rather limited – you can join a mint, receive bookmark ecash tokens which represent sats, and send those ecash tokens – it was quite a magical user experience. How easy and quick it was to join the mint and receive tap sats from Sirion using the Fluttermint mobile app was quite surprising. If this experience can be replicated on the mainnet, it’s not hard to see how these federated currencies can become popular in a relatively short time.
This was particularly evident on the receiving side of things. I created a QR invoice on my phone, then my laptop’s camera scanned the QR code from the tap page, and the tokens arrived in my wallet almost instantly. Again, it remains to be seen if this experience will be the same when the protocol is ready for wider adoption via the mainnet, but this is a very promising start for the protocol.
We will keep you updated on the progress of Fedimint’s development.
Ahead!