CryptoNote is an open source project that gives developers a good starting point for building their own cryptocurrency.
It’s used in a lot of the biggest cryptocurrency projects today like Monero and AEON.
You may be familiar with the way cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are not fully anonymous, but what us in the biz call pseudo-anonymous. That means that if you have someone’s public address (the long string of characters you need to actually send them money) you can look up the history of every transaction that person has ever done with that address and the addresses that they’ve sent and received bitcoin to and from since it’s all recorded on an immutable blockchain.
Using a lot of pretty advanced math and cryptography, CryptoNote allows for fully anonymous transactions, meaning even if you have someone’s public address, you can’t see all of their previous transactions — even though it’s all still stored on an immutable blockchain.
It’s pretty crazy stuff, but it works and can be verified mathematically.
Anyway, web3 dev Brian noticed that some of their C++ code specific to the Mac OS platform was a little outdated and wasn’t compiling correctly on the latest version of Mac OS. He found two changes that seemed to do the trick and requested his updated code be merged in. Before long, the CryptoNote team approved his changes and merged them into their codebase.
You can see the merge here.
Before too long, those changes should be picked up by many of the popular privacy-based cryptocurrencies out there.
P.S. The last time Brian got some code approved for a major blockchain open source project was with the popular Ethereum framework Truffle, where he fixed a small grammar error in their documentation. With that tiny little contribution he walked around the office for months calling himself a “Truffle contributor”, so we’ll see how much this more substantial open source contribution goes to his head :/