A public test net is not yet available and there is a plan to launch one the week of March 25. Please see RChain public testnet information to learn about the rollout plan for launching the public testnet as well as a FAQ
At this time there are no known blockers to the delivery of Testnet-1.
Ran a testnet over the weekend and are investigating options for reducing time required to add blocks. This work includes adding metric spans to Casper to support analysis. Investigating possibility of improving how we record history as a way to reduce time required to add a block. This would be a significant change in terms of development and is critical to achieving Mercury performance goals. Work in progress to analyze this plan and determine next steps.
Improved performance by limiting the check depth of deploy history duplication,
Demonstrated successful attempts at validator bonding in 20190314 RNode community testing. We have observed some bugs related to bonding after the fact. Investigation in progress for
Cost accounting
Ran into an issue in the investigation of why running out of phlo doesn't stop the evaluation of other execution branches, RChain-3077. The current implementation does not provide synchronization, which means that concurrent branches of execution would not always see the latest amount of available phlogistons and continue executing also if the account was in the meantime depleted. Testing if replacing Ref with MVar will be the resolution.
Node
Very pleased with RNode stability in this weekend's testing.
Removed round trip from the transport layer and rely on heartbeat to improve node performance.