Reimplement Pirate Chain plugin over react-native-pirate-wallet

[j0ntz]

CHANGELOG

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Dependencies

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Description

Asana: https://app.asana.com/0/1215088146871429/1214721783909451

The piratechain team released a new SDK family for their orchard upgrade (Pirate-Unified-Light-Wallet), including react-native-pirate-wallet, which replaces the react-native-piratechain wrapper Edge wrote. The new SDK is not a drop-in replacement, so this PR reimplements the piratechain plugin on top of it.

Architecture changes driven by the new SDK:

• Wallet registry instead of per-seed synchronizers. The native core persists wallets in its own encrypted registry. The io bridge restores each Edge wallet into the registry under the existing walletId alias name (idempotent lookup-by-name, serialized to avoid duplicate restores) and all wallet-scoped calls use the resulting registry wallet id.
• Polling synchronizer. The SDK's JS synchronizer polls sync_status/get_balance/list_transactions natively, so the io bridge forwards its snapshots as the existing update/statusChanged/error yaob events. Block progress maps from localHeight/targetHeight.
• Transaction history. list_transactions replaces block-range queries (the blockRange windowing in otherData is gone). Amounts are signed and fee-inclusive for sends, which matches Edge's nativeAmount semantics directly. Recipient addresses are not exposed by the SDK, so sends are detected by sign.
• Sends. The registry wallet holds the spending keys, so broadcastTx sends outputs (plus the explicit default fee) through the SDK instead of passing the mnemonic per spend.
• Addresses / keys. Receive addresses come from current_receive_address (still sapling zs1… — orchard is not active on mainnet). derivePublicKey exports the sapling viewing key after registering the wallet. New-wallet birthday heights are probed via a throwaway create_wallet, whose null-birthday path resolves the live chain tip with a checkpoint fallback.
• Endpoints. The lightwalletd endpoint and checkpoints are baked into the native core, so rpcNode in networkInfo is no longer consumed (kept for info-server payload compatibility).

The plugin compiles against local typings (rnPirateWallet.d.ts) because react-native-pirate-wallet is not published to npm; it only exists as a 473 MB zip asset on the PirateNetwork GitHub release (prebuilt xcframework + jniLibs). GUI integration is blocked on a packaging decision — npm/yarn cannot install zips, so the package needs to be hosted as a tgz (e.g. the zano-utils-js EdgeApp-release pattern) or published before edge-react-gui can swap react-native-piratechain for it. Mnemonic/seed derivation is BIP-39-compatible with the old SDK (same sapling addresses), so existing wallets restore in place; first launch re-restores into the registry from the stored mnemonic + birthday and rescans from the wallet's birthday height.

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Note

High Risk
Large rewrite of sync, balance, transaction mapping, and spend paths for a privacy coin; incorrect handling could affect funds display or broadcasts until GUI ships the new native dependency.

Overview
Reimplements the Pirate Chain (ARRR) plugin on react-native-pirate-wallet, replacing react-native-piratechain (peer dependency and lockfile updated; local rnPirateWallet.d.ts added because the SDK is not on npm).

piratechainIo is rewritten around the unified SDK: lazy SDK init, fixed app passphrase + Direct tunnel (not Tor), serialized wallet registry restore keyed by the Edge wallet id alias, and a polling synchronizer that maps snapshots to existing yaob update / statusChanged / error events. Sends use raw build_tx → sign_tx → broadcast_tx invoke because the JS send helper mishandles field casing.

PiratechainEngine drops block-range paging and otherData.blockRange; history comes from full getTransactions() lists with processedTxHeights deduping. Balances use spendable / total; txs map PirateTransaction fields (signed amounts, per-tx fees). broadcastTx no longer passes the mnemonic—outputs + fee only. Critical synchronizer errors no longer restart the engine. PiratechainTools uses piratechainIo for validation, birthday height, and registry registration when deriving the sapling viewing key.

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[j0ntz]

Simulator-tested update (force-pushed as part of the single commit):

• App passphrase unlock: the SDK's SQLCipher store rejects every wallet call with Security error: App is locked until set_app_passphrase/unlock_app runs. The io bridge now unlocks (or provisions) the passphrase store before any wallet operation. Verified on the iOS sim: registry restore, viewing-key derivation, and zs1… receive address all work.
• Direct tunnel: the SDK transports through Tor by default, which never bootstraps inside Edge — sync sat at stage: Headers, target_height: 0 forever. The bridge now issues set_tunnel {mode: Direct} after unlock, matching every other Edge plugin's connectivity. Verified the sync config flips to transport: Direct against http://64.23.167.130:9067 (server healthy; tip 3,990,043 via grpcurl).

Upstream blocker found while testing: block sync still cannot progress through this binding. pirate-ffi-native builds a throwaway current-thread tokio runtime per invoke, and sync_control::start_sync spawns the sync engine onto it — the task is destroyed when the call returns. The Flutter app works only because flutter_rust_bridge keeps a persistent runtime; the RN/iOS/Android SDK bindings all share this defect, and the bounded start_background_sync API is not exposed through the JSON dispatcher. Needs a Pirate-team fix (persistent global runtime in pirate-ffi-native, or expose start_background_sync via invoke). Until then balances/sends can't be exercised end-to-end.

[j0ntz]

End-to-end sync + send verified on the iOS simulator (with a locally rebuilt pirate core carrying the one-line persistent-runtime fix):

• Funded wallet (254.547 ARRR) restored from its Edge mnemonic + birthday and fully scanned ~940k blocks to chain tip; SDK balance matched Edge's cached pre-upgrade balance to the arrrtoshi.
• Sent 3.261 ARRR wallet-to-wallet in the same account: txid b44367658e7c92cd916eccbdee3dc8f6861a48985683037040a8ead2035c9881, broadcast accepted by http://64.23.167.130:9067.

Two more findings, both addressed in the latest force-push:

1. Wrapper send bug (upstream): sdk.send()/signTransaction() camelize the build_tx result and feed it back into sign_tx, which rejects it (Invalid request JSON: missing field 'total_amount'). The bridge now drives build_tx → sign_tx → broadcast_tx over the raw invoke channel so the pending/signed payloads round-trip untouched.
2. Runtime defect confirmed + fix validated: rebuilding libpirate_ffi_native with a persistent global tokio runtime in WalletService::execute_blocking (instead of a per-call current-thread runtime) makes foreground sync work through the json-invoke bindings. That's the patch to upstream to the Pirate team — without it the stock release binaries cannot sync outside their Flutter app.

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