Natrium v2.2 Released on iOS and Android

15 May, 2020 • 2 min read

It's time for another Natrium update. We just pushed Natrium v2.2 to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store, here's what's new:

Faster Cryptography with C

When we built Natrium in Flutter we also published a plugin, Nanodart, which handles all of the cryptography required for a Nano wallet. That is things such as Blake2b hashing, key derivation, and generation, as well as elliptic-curve signatures.

Nanodart itself works well enough, but there were significant issues related to performance specifically on 32-bit ARM devices as well as some other devices. This affects the user experience in a detrimental way for many users.

Dart 2.5 added a technical preview for dart:ffi (Foreign Function Interface). What this means essentially is that you can call functions from another programming language from Dart.

We utilized this new feature to increase performance in Natrium by using C implementations for Blake2b and ed25519. We published these changes in a new plugin called flutter_nano_ffi. This plugin replaced Nanodart in Natrium v2.2.

Rewritten Networking Layer

Sometimes the reliability of creating transactions or loading account history would be an issue, particularly on unstable network connections. We've completely rewritten how transactions are broadcast to the Natrium servers and expect that users will generally experience more reliability as well as error reporting.

The paper wallet loader was also rewritten, which fixes some issues that users reported with that feature.

Ready for Nano V21

This update makes Natrium ready to support the new PoW requirements in Nano V21 (Athena). You can read more about the upcoming Nano features in their blog post.

What Else is New in Natrium 2.2?

In addition to the changes mentioned above, Natrium 2.2 also introduces the following:

Flutter 1.17 — We've updated our build to Flutter 1.17, see the release announcement.
QR Scanner Improvements — Reliability has been improved on some Android devices, improved auto-focus, and fixed the QR scan shortcut from not working in some cases.
General Fixes & Improvements — Dependencies have been updated, some screens have been re-worked.
GitHub Actions — Behind the scenes we've migrated our CI/CD workflow from Gitlab to GitHub Actions.

More details about what's been changed can be seen on the Natrium GitHub.

Support Natrium Development

Natrium is open source and released under the MIT license — it is completely free. If you would like to support the development of Natrium, you can donate using the link below: