ODHack 9.0: Better wallet, easy testnet coins for developers

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Developers on the BSV blockchain need easier ways to develop and test their apps in a safe environment—that is, they shouldn’t have to spend their own money to try them out live on the mainnet. The BSV Association’s (BSVA) team at OnlyDust’s ODHack 9.0 hackathon event have been working on two projects that should make access to developing new use cases on BSV much easier for everyone: a BSV testnet coin faucet, and a mainnet browser wallet.

ODHack 9.0 ran from October 24 to November 3, 2024. The BSVA joined the event as a sponsor for the first time, adding some much-needed BSV action to OnlyDust’s long list of Starknet- and Stellar-based projects.

CoinGeek spoke to Mohammad Jaber, one of the Project Leads on the BSV Association‘s team at ODHack 9.0, to hear more about the team’s projects and their experience participating in the hackathon. Jaber said the BSVA is always looking for innovative ways to attract new developers from outside the BSV ecosystem. OnlyDust’s hackathon event was a great chance to showcase BSV’s capabilities.

“OnlyDust have developed a renowned Web3 development community, so collaborating with OnlyDust provided a pathway to bring awareness and usage to the BSV Blockchain’s open source libraries and tools in the hands of people that have not been exposed to it before.”

OnlyDust’s platform “makes interaction between contributors seamless throughout the development lifecycle, and the event itself so far has been very well-organised. I believe this will be the start, and there will be further participation in future OD hackathons in the near future,” he added.

To decide which projects would best suit the purpose, the BSVA team initially sketched out project descriptions and relevant repositories and made a detailed list of features and issues that required solving. Then, they opened an invitation to developer candidates to join in.

“There was a lot of interest,” Jaber said. “We were able to assign the issues based on what looked like the best fit based on the applicants’ skillsets.”

The BSV Faucet (for Testnet)

The BSV Faucet is actually designed to distribute BSV Testnet coins, assisting developers in testing their applications. Jaber said this has been one of the ecosystem’s pain points, as “testnet coins can be a bit harder to come by compared to mainnet coins (believe it or not), which can make it tricky for developers to get them without the right connections.”

“This gap in the ecosystem made it tough for most (especially new) developers to carry out important development and testing of their use cases and ideas without acquiring real BSV tokens on the mainnet to conduct their testing which is generally not good practice. The faucet, once completed, can become a dependable method for developers to obtain testnet coins.”

By the end of ODHack 9.0, the team wanted its BSV testnet faucet to have the following features:

• Setting up a base wallet that communicates with a regtest node that is actively mining testnet blocks guarantees a steady supply of testnet tokens;
• Ensuring the faucet remains operational at all times, with an automatic approach to replace its treasury whenever reserves run low with BSV tokens;
• Providing users with a dashboard that allows them to request BSV tokens from the faucet and a summary of their transactions, amongst other usage statistics.

The SPV Wallet Browser

The team’s second project, the SPV Wallet Browser, is also aimed at developers. It’s a fork of the open-source Yours Wallet project. It’s designed to be a white-labeled version that “hopefully will bring fresh ideas from other Web3 developers who have experience in similar browser extension wallet development.”

Yours Wallet, which exists as an extension for desktop and mobile browsers, has proven quite popular with BSV users, mainly thanks to its feature set aimed at 1Sat Ordinals, and BSV20/BSV21 tokens. It’s frequently used as login credentials for accounts on third-party exchanges, games, and other online apps.

“Dan Wagner and David Case have been kind enough to helped us in this hackathon by providing a list of existing issues and potential new feature enhancements,” Jaber said.

The SPV Wallet Browser will include these features, some aimed at developers and others aimed at end-users:

• Obtaining Testnet coins directly from a faucet in the wallet;
• Sweeping funds from a WIF private key;
• Sending cash to numerous addresses with different outputs;
• Enhancing the user experience via features such as notifications, richer transaction history, and more intuitive UI functions.

The BSV Association is reaching out at all levels to grow the BSV’s ecosystem, from hackathons for new and upcoming developers to joining established open standards organizations like World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Linux Foundation. Since two of the biggest hurdles BSV faces in the blockchain industry are awareness and education, all these examples provide perfect opportunities to spread the word in a more professional (and rational) environment than social or mainstream media.

Watch: Developers can propel the BSV blockchain forward