Ardor just got a new technical Roadmap: Lightweight Contracts, Transaction Vouchers and Subnets for Childchains are coming.
Yesterday in a Korea Meetup, Lior Laffe (lead dev of Ardor) announced a new roadmap. In this week's Nxter newsletter is more of a description, plus links to the meetup and other news. There is also a video of his talk in Seoul.
Some features were already known to come for sure (Smart Transactions), but got a date. Others are more surprising. I'll just write my (non-programmer) understandings of them here. I only have the main-net release dates here (removed earlier testnet dates) - the full list is in the links above...
...so here we go:
Ardor/Ignis Technical Roadmap
Q2 2018
• Asset, Currency, Goods specific bundlers
Bundling is a specific term - it means attaching a Child-Chain block (Ignis for example) to the Parent Chain (Ardor).
Anyone can do the bundling ... which usually means you can collect fees for it. But you can also do it for free. Allowing for 0 fee transactions!
The feature mentioned here means you can limit this to Assets and Goods for example. So let's say: You sell a book on the Ignis chain's market place. Then you can set up a bundler just for your book, to make sure no buyer has to pay fees.
• Translation of wallet to 14 languages
• Java 9 support
These are self-explanatory.
Q3 2018
Additional child chains launched on mainnet
So Ardor (for who doesn't know) is itself a main chain that can't do all that much. The action is really in the child-chains that can be spawned. It's comparable to terms like side-chains or shards. The advantage is that the parent-chain (Ardor) stays small compared to other cryptos. Each child-chain can have unique features - we have this for example with AEUR, which is a pegged chain to the Euro - linked to a credit card.
At the moment there are three child-chains. They wrote it in plural, so seems more than one more are coming! :)
• Lightweight Contracts Runner Add-on - mainnet
Lightweight contracts were explained by the Ardor dev earlier - the idea is to have smart contracts like on Ethereum, but that not every node has to validate them separately. Again, this keeps the blockchain small, so everyone can keep running nodes. (Though to be honest, I don't grasp the concept fully yet).
• Transaction Vouchers - mainnet
You can send transaction requests/invoices to other accounts, they can then decide to pay with one click so to speak. It's comparable to REQ I suppose - and especially Exchanges could make their lives much easier.
• Child Chain Control
It likely means Child Chains can demand that every transaction gets a permission (similar to Asset Control on NXT). It would be a different way of working, and probably is for future specific child chains.
• Token balance migration
With this one can migrate from asset one one cahin to child chain.
Q4 2018
• Pruning and Snapshots - mainnet
Pruning means that old data can be deleted out of the block chain. Snapshot means that whole time-frames can be deleted, and the blockchain starts from a specific state, instead of the genesis block.
Again this is about blockchain size - two/three years ago, the NXT devs decided that would be their focus. And it comes with good timing.
• Wallet and usability enhancements
The wallet collected a lot of features over the last 5 years (beginning with NXT), and really needs a clean up.
One specific part that will be updated is the exchange window. You can trade between child currencies (e.g. sell your Ignis for the Euro pegged chain) in the client. That is hopefully going to look much more like the exchange interfaces everyone is used to.
Q1 2019
• Blockchain pruning of the Ardor parent chain
Removing old data as above... this time for the parent chain.
Q2 2019
• Child chain specific subnets - mainnet
So the first time I hear this... but this seems to be child-chains of child-chains. Meaning it's even less taxing for the main-chain - and could be removed or such without breaking the other chains.
Research projects
• Allow user issued child chains
Currently child-chains can only be made with approval by the dev company behind Ardor. In the long term - so after all is proven to work fine without bloating Ardor's blockchain, this process can be open to everyone (likely with high fees though).
• Zero knowledge transactions
Meaning: Privacy. Ardor aims a lot at business use, so they'll need something in that regard.
• Integration with data storage services
Actually, I dunno what this is. Maybe someone else can chime in.
**NXT Technical Roadmap ...
NXT will get the features that work for Ardor ported. So Transaction Vouchers and Lightweight Contracts will come too. As NXT works quite differently, it won't get everything... but then again, it can get other features like a "Permission layer for NXT clones", making the cloning of NXT easier for businesses to run their own private blockchain and such.
Uh, this got longer than I thought - but I hope it helps to clarify the features. Obviously I'm convinced... just would wish Ardor would get more attention, since the team delivered on so many promises already - they're ahead on the tech with a *gasp* working product, but lack on marketing still.
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