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Rafiki Updates - June 2024

Slowly but surely, conference season and vacation season is creeping up on us, meaning that we are moving slower than we had been hoping to. But it's not like we've dropped everything and gone to the beach. We still put out Alpha 12 and 13, so let me introduce you to the most important additions and changes.

Breaking Changes

A first major change we made was to move the grant interaction endpoints to a new server on a different port. To clarify, we refer to the grant interaction endpoints as the endpoints that the identity provider consumes to inform the auth server about the user's decision. Previously, these endpoints were on the same port as the GNAP endpoints. Now, in the spirit of introducing more security measures, the account servicing entities do not have to expose the grant interaction endpoints anymore but can keep them private to their internal network.

Additionally, we removed some of the environment variable defaults on the auth server because we were seeing a bunch of nodes coming online that only used default values which can be very harmful (and costly) when done in production.

Additional Properties on the Wallet Address

Previously, the only property that could be passed when creating a wallet address via the Admin APIs was a public name. The Open Payments spec, however, allows for any additional properties. We have updated the Admin API mutation to also allow for additional properties to be added to the wallet address.

WARNING: Be careful what you add there since that endpoint is not auth protected but available to the public!

DevEx Enhancements

Since we want to invite our community to also contribute to Rafiki, we spent some time improving our developer experience. Previously, whenever code changes were made in Rafiki, one had to re-build the code to try it out. We have now introduced hot server reloading within the localenv docker containers whenever code changes are detected. That way, new features or bug fixes can be tried out and debugged on the fly.

Making the MASE a better place

We have always neglected the Mock Account Servicing Entity, a.k.a. MASE, because we were just using it for early demos and sometimes for debugging. However, we did realize that people were looking at the code for integration inspiration so we decided to give the MASE a face lift. Thanks to one of our newest team members Arpi, it now looks and feels more like an actual bank or wallet interface and also adds some features like adding and editing accounts from the frontend.

Account Overview

User Account

What's upcoming

We are still working on the refactor of the backend Admin APIs that will change error handling. Furthermore, we are also in the process of removing harmful environment variable defaults on the backend. Once these two breaking changes are merged, we should be finally ready for a Beta release. We are closer than ever but we also want to be diligent in the process so we have been making sure to fix a bunch of little bugs on the way.

Additionally, we have started working on collecting some additional telemetry metrics that will give us even more insight into the network. Stay tuned!

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Chris Lawrence

Love this!