Portal API disabled?

The Portal API is probably the most well-documented API (Portal’s API documentation) but it seems to be disabled. The responses to all of the Portal JSON RPC calls I tried come back with “Method is disabled on this version”.

Portal sounds like one of the coolest features and I was very disappointed to find out it’s not really there. I was also surprised that I couldn’t find any conversation discussing this on here.

A few questions:

  • Why was it disabled?
  • When was it disabled? The linked documentation suggests it must have worked at some point
  • Did no one use it? If anyone used it while it was available, I imagine they would have been upset when it got disabled.
  • Are you planning to enable it again?
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Hi @coride1315,

There are problems that we were facing in the operation phase of the old Portal protocol. You can see a sum up in here.
As mentioned in this roadmap post. We are building a new approach for Portal protocol with tons of improvement. That’s why we are temporarily pausing all RPCs of the old version of Portal and focus on building the new Portal version.

FYI: Here is the link to a draft version of the new Portal implementation specs. We love to receive feedback from our community.

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Thanks for the quick reply @cuong I’ve scanned through the links you’ve shared and they make sense. I will definitely check them out in greater depth. A couple of follow-up questions around the process of disabling the API:

  • How did you manage to disable the Portal API while keeping all network participants happy? For example, how did you recover existing custodians’ funds?
  • Presumably, you must have also made some artificial changes to the blockchain state, so that custodians are no longer treated as such. How did you do that?
  • Was it the case that no one external was using the API and you could coordinate all of that within the team?
  • Or have just the Portal RPCs been disabled while everything underneath (including the blockchain state) remained the same?

Thanks for your interest in our Portal.
After we deployed Portal on mainnet, Inocognito team hadn’t released Portal feature on the Incognito app, so no user also as no external one call Portal API until we disabled them.
Therefore, there is no data of Portal in the blockchain of Incognito.
As @cuong mentioned, we have been building the Portal v4 - Decentralized Bridge for BTC, and haven’t planned to enable Portal v3.

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