Development Update — March 18

Skycoin: BIP32 Panic Fixes and Fibercoin CI

BIP32 panic-to-error conversion — the bip32 package used log.Panic for error conditions, which would crash the entire process on invalid xpub keys or derivation failures. These were converted to proper error returns so callers can handle them gracefully. New verifyXpub and nextAddress CLI commands were added for xpub key validation and unused address derivation.

Fibercoin genesis CI test — an integration test was added that creates a Fibercoin from scratch in CI: generates a genesis wallet, creates a fiber.toml, starts a daemon, creates the genesis block, distributes coins, and verifies the chain state. This catches regressions in the Fibercoin creation workflow automatically.

Makefile improvements — update-dep and sync-upstream-develop targets were added for easier dependency management and upstream synchronization.

Skywire: Transport Layer Reliability

TPD rate limiting — transport registration was being rate-limited by the TPD, causing registrations to fail silently. The fix adds proper retry logic with backoff to the Address Resolver bind and TPD registration endpoints (#2222).

Deferred transport registration — instead of registering transports immediately on creation, registrations are now deferred to the batch re-registration loop that runs every 90 seconds. This reduces load on the TPD and prevents registration storms during visor startup (#2223).

Batch TPD deletions and STCP support — transport deletions are now batched instead of one-at-a-time, STCP (plain TCP without hole-punching) is now supported as a transport type, transport statistics (count by type, unique visors) were added, and STCPR retry logic was improved (#2224).

Skychat fix — the --addr flag parsing for skychat was broken, and proxy start failures weren’t showing the underlying app error. Both fixed (#2225).

These transport layer improvements collectively make the Skywire network more resilient — transports are registered more reliably, the TPD is under less load, and operators can see transport statistics from the CLI.