Community Update 93

General

• Release

  • Node version 0.9.15 is the current release RNode-0.9.15 release plan

  • Testnet is currenty running rnode version 0.9.15

  • The 0.9.15 includes the new type safe API (instead of Either), some fixes for Long Proposal Times Issue, Offchain-data API (events API) improvements and other incremental progress in features discussed below.

• Sprint 39 in progress

  • Main focus on (a) Cost accounting  (b) Long proposal times - Fairness Constraint and other imrpovements (c) RSpace improvements in off-chain data API (d) multisig features (e) ongoing work in Casper tests independent of network layer (f) Ongoing work in Planning and implementation for Network safety, reliability and hardening

  • Cost accounting

    • Scope of work documented at https://gist.github.com/ArturGajowy/73e481767548b084a8e5d7c19bb1f70c

    • Some refactorings needed for Cost Accounting are completed

    • Implementation in progress for these preliminary tasks needed for implementing the main portions of cost accounting:

      • Generalize NormalizerEnv

      • Validate user deploy cost in replay

      • Bulletproof unforgeable-name namespace uniqueness by prohibiting terms wider than Short.MAX_VALUE splits/terms

      • Remove DeployData.payment log

      • Signed[A: Serialize] with a signing smart-constructor

    • In Review - Casper refactorings needed for Cost Accounting mainly to improve type inference - https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2761

    • Other tasks from the above link being ticketed and assigned - These tickets are more detail level arrived at based on analysis of prior tickets in cost accounting

  • Reduce long proposal times: 

    • Initial implementation of a (simple round robin) fairness constraint as an additional mechanism to address long proposal times. Will observe impact and possibly design additional variations later. A generic solution is available.

    • Exploring additional improvements to existing synchrony constraints.

    • Investigating improvements to other bottlenecks e.g. in slow finalization https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3872 , ignore invalid blocks in toposort https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2757 etc.

    • We continue to explore various test parameters and more complex contracts, to both test the stability of this issue and make it manifest sooner if it exists.

  • Rspace

    • In Progress - In RSpace, an API is implemented for DAG discovery and block discovery, to enable an alternative to ListenForData@Name (Off-chain observability of deploy results). Relevant tickets are https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3760 https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3661 and  https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3762 and https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3812 

    • Investigating failing integration tests in off-chain-data https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2476

    • Lot of knowledge transfer sessions and hand-offs to new developers in RSpace. Potential Future improvements identified RNode feature gaps 

    • A simplistic Block Explorer is implemented https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2725  Documentation on how to use it at Data reporting

  • In Review - Implementation of mult-sig vault features is ongoing as detailed in https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3392 https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3196 https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3223 and https://rchain.atlassian.net/browse/RCHAIN-3773.  Next step is to write tests for this.

  • Refactoring, Optimizations and bug fixes - ongoing 

Mercury requirements and acceptance criteria

• Details on the acceptance criteria: Mercury acceptance criteria

• Please see the documentation at https://github.com/rchain/rchain/blob/dev/docs/features.md. 

• Testnet status

  • Please see RChain public testnet information to learn more about public testnet as well as a FAQ.

• Community testing

  • Sept 19 at 14:00 UTC. Please see RChain community RNode testing for more information.

Blockers to testnet-3

• TBD

Risks to code completion for Mercury

• Evaluating backlog vs current velocity 

Developer website

• https://developer.rchain.coop