nChain’s John Murphy on making Nakasendo easier to use

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Bitcoin SV is quickly rising to become a favorite for developers globally. With this comes the need to avail as many tool for development as possible. Nakasendo is one of these tools, and during the CoinGeek Seoul conference, nChain’s John Murphy explained recent developments that make it more user friendly. Murphy spoke to CoinGeek’s Stephanie Tower, explaining some of these features and what developers should look forward to in the near future.

Nakasendo is a software development kit (SDK) that’s meant to make it easier for developers to build on Bitcoin. It consists of low- and high-level APIs, allowing developers to build applications regardless of their experience.

nChain has been working on Nakasendo in an effort to make it even easier to use, Murphy revealed.

We’ve spent the last 6-8 months, pretty much redesigning the library from the ground up. We’ve tried to make it more user-friendly for the community. We’ve taken some feedback from the community, which is they wanted Python, they wanted JavaScript, so we gave them those language bindings.

Murphy, a senior software engineer at nChain, delved into threshold signatures. In a nutshell, this is taking a piece of data and chopping it into multiple parts, he explained. This allows for security as the pieces by themselves are useless and only gain value once they are recombined.

The applications for threshold signatures are immense, he continued. At an organization level, they can be used to ensure accountability, where every board member, for instance, holds a piece of the private key. The piece by itself is useless and the members have to come together with their pieces to make important decisions and actions.

Nakasendo is all about making the Bitcoin blockchain secure. This is quite an ambitious goal, Murphy admitted, as there are several facets that they have to work on before they can achieve this goal. The developers at nChain are however working extremely hard to make this a reality.

The nChain team will introduce more features to Nakasendo in due time, but Murphy remained tightlipped on what these features are:

“There’s a few bits in there that we are not telling people about just yet. There’s a lot of functionalities across multiple languages.”