The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1266: “A Fedimint signet appears out of the wild.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
Earlier this week, Eric Sirion announced the official launch of the first public signet (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 building out the protocol are making material progress and a mainnet being ready for the public seems to be in sight.
I had the pleasure of taking the signet version for a spin.
Even though this is only running on signet and the functionalities are rather limited — you can join a mint, receive signet ecash tokens that represent sats and send those ecash tokens — it was a pretty magical user experience. The ease and speed with which it took to join the mint and receive sats from Sirion’s faucet using the Fluttermint mobile app was pretty surprising. If this experience can be replicated on mainnet, it isn’t hard to see how these federated mints can become popular in a relatively short amount of time.
This was especially apparent on the receiving side of things. I created a QR invoice on my phone then had my laptop camera scan the QR code from the faucet page and the tokens arrived in my wallet almost instantaneously. Again, it is yet to be seen if this experience will be the same when the protocol is ready for wider adoption via mainnet, but this is a very promising start for the protocol.
We’ll keep you freaks posted on how the development of Fedimint progresses.
Onward!