12 Apr Symbol blockchain news update – 12/04/24

Good morning XYM City! Hope that you are all well! It’s an early start for me today and I thought I would try to get a quick post out this morning before getting back to some more taxing writing 😅

AggregateData Metadata Standard

A big thank you to faunsu for messaging to tell me about kicnft’s Symbol Improvement Proposal (SIP). These are community proposals for new features that could be integrated into Symbol to provide additional functionality. They are looking for community feedback so please check out the proposal. In brief, the idea is that a metadata standard could be implemented to tell users how to decode data stored on chain. There are many disparate formats for storing data at present, think NFT-Drive, COMSA, Metal etc. This gets quite confusing for those who are building new applications to access and view data.

I am not sure exactly how the method would be implemented but I assume that it is just a proposal for a standard vocabulary. The data structure would be saved as mosaic or account metadata but perhaps it is a proposal for a new metadata transaction type which enforces the vocabulary – maybe this could be clarified in the document. Given the standard data descriptor developers would be able to work out how to treat the data and properly decode it. If you have any feedback on this then please have your say!

New SDK Releases

Time to update your Python and JavaScript SDK installations!

Release notes are below.

Added
added now() to the facade for getting the current timestamp, improving on a previously verbose interface.
python 3.11 removes named zero flags from the Flag class - manually add 'none' => 0 mapping in the add_flags_parser.

Changed
removed duplicate code from the generator and significantly reduced the size of generated models.

Fixed
replaced the deprecated ByteString typing in Python 3.9 with bytes | bytearray | memoryview

Added
added now() to the facade for getting the current timestamp, improving on a previously verbose interface.
added an alternative javascript implementation for WASM since certain runtimes (namely React Native) do not support WASM.
added a static getter that can be used instead of a constructor in typescript, as a workaround for a known typescript limitation.
use exports in package.json as recommended in newer NodeJS versions.

Changed
previously, the sdk did not support named imports; to improve discoverability, a single entry point has been split into default, nem, and symbol.
symbol-crypto-wasm-node package is no longer enforced, and has now been made an optional dependency.

Fixed
removed duplicate code from the generator and significantly reduced the size of generated models.
previously, the sdk could not be run in a browser were global is not defined - now, globalThis is used instead of global for WebAssembly for browser compatibility.
added better support for mm-snap by requiring default export to be last.
fixed an issue in Cipher.js failing in ReactNative environments because of Buffer polyfill limitations by wrapping all Uint8Arrays in Buffer.
updated inline rust code to use dalek 4.
pruned a customized tweetNaCl implementation.

fixed a known issue with javascript minification dropping ‘constructor.name’ which prevented the discovery of a specific class - as a temporary workaround, added the class name to a nc module to find transactions by class name.

Mobile Nodes

Hopefully, all of my readers have updated their nodes already but if you are one of the many running a mobile node you will be glad to hear that the latest release of Symbol Mobile Node is now released. Details are below:

CoinPocket

The CoinPocket wallet is now live on Android and iOS – I think that they are currently in testing phase but I am excited to try it out!

Secure Sharing of Medical Records

Tweets in English always stand out for me so thanks Radio for the heads up, I think I would have otherwise missed it. Shizuilab has just published an article (in English) about the permissioned transfer of personal medical data e.g. CT and MRI scans as NFTs on Symbol. I haven’t looked into the technical setup yet but it is an interesting concept for moving personal data e.g. between clinicians with the consent of the patient. I didn’t see any details on how the data is stored but presumably, the encrypted in some way so that only the recipient can view it perhaps through message encryption.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading, it was a short one this week but I will be back again soon with another update!

NineLives

I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!