Community

RChain Debrief 99: Items of Business

Victor Ojimadu

Update summary

Greg M opens the hangout, then Medha takes over with the technical update. Following the technical update, Greg M gives an overview of the ballot proposals for the forthcoming member meeting on 24th October. The hangout is significantly focused on the co-op’s current state regarding funds for future developments and launch of the mainnet. Greg answers pressing questions from members about available funding and he talks about the measures to fill the financial gap. Issues were raised about ensuring an effective means of communication to coordinate for special meetings. See some details and timestamps of questions of interest below.
 

Announcements

 

Timeline

Technical update
Ballot and Items of Business
Dealing with the financial gap to support future development
 
 

Contents in brief

Technical update

  • Release-blocking bugs fixed. Node testing to verify fixes is in progress.
  • Once bugs are verified, we will re-launch test net on October 22nd. Relaunch described in RNode user guide.

Rholang team

  • Example package manager in Rholang provided to the community. Created for demo purposes by Mike.
  • We have examples of how to use the registry in Github, under rholang/examples. Thanks to @mrmoneychanger.
  • Solution found for using ” @(*contractName, “method”) ” The team will register all the contracts at public keys.  Examples of this pattern will be provided for dApp developers.
  • Porting of contracts is underway. Expect these will be done in the next week.
  • Rholang API to supply deploy information to payment code in the review.  

Casper team

  • Fixed issues around adding blocks to the local DAG. There was some inefficiency in the code base that was creating the problem.
  • Moved to the inMemory block store for the time being.  The new on-disk block store comes next sprint. Look for increased memory utilization in the node.
  • Non-deterministic bugs have gone into hiding for the moment. A lot of work has been done on the platform, so we will push forward with updating testnet.  
  • Suppressed the protocol handshake messages in the server console.
  • Validation of the genesis block takes too long.  This will be investigated by the RSpace team in a future sprint.
  • Block Store is in implementation. Pull request for latest messages store expected tomorrow.

Node team

  • Fixes made in stream API included in the release.
  • Working on compression implementation.
  • Working on supporting dynamic IP addresses in the node.
  • Writing up a proposal around serialization and de-serialization.
  • Suspect that we may not be efficient in our use of protos.

Storage team

  • Benchmarking scodec serializer against cryo serializer. Working with Artur, who is working on something similar for the interpreter.
  • Cryo is only slightly faster than protobufs. Less than 10%
    Almost no performance gain from the batch Trie Update/Merge strategy.  

SRE team

  • Working on enhancing integration tests to support testing for clique safety.
  • Work in progress to improve the integration test suite.
  • Help is needed from people who know Scala or Python to author unit and integration tests as well as Rholang tests and examples.
  • Work in progress to improve debugging by implementing a process to obtain server logs from nodes.
  • Support for the testing and release of RNode v0.7.
  • Ceres games.

Ballot and Items of Business

  • There are five candidates vying for the board of directors. Four candidates will be elected to four director seats.
    • Three of the seats will be for a three (3) year term, with one seat being for a one (1) year term, replacing Aleksandr Bulkin for his remaining term.
    • The three candidates with the most votes will be elected to a full three-year term. The next candidate with the fourth-most votes will be elected to a one-year term. The rest of the candidates will not be elected as directors.
  • There are 7 ballot measures for consideration:
    • Ballot Measure 1: Financial Transparency
    • Ballot Measure 2: Operations Roadmap
    • Ballot Measure 3: Conflict of Interest Policy
    • Ballot Measure 4: Member Participation in Governance
    • Ballot Measure 5: RChain Monetary Policy
    • Ballot Measure 6: RChain Improvement Process
    • Ballot Measure 7: Proposed Bylaws Amendment
  • See full details of ballot measure proposals for the members meeting.

Questions

 

Dealing with the financial gap to support future development

  • The main items on the list for future development: the last code commit, the hardening, launching of the validator network, and the feature sets associated with the Venus launch.
  • Currently, there is sufficient funding through to the last code commit but a shortfall in funding for the launch of the validator network and feature sets for Venus launch. 
  • There is a process ongoing for raising gap funding. The board is engaged with capital partners who will provide bridging funding while the co-op works on closing a deal estimated at an eight-figure sum. Furthermore, the board is currently taking austerity measures and has contingency plans to the closing of these deals.
  • The deal involves the resale of assets that were developed with the RSong dApp. According to Greg, this will send a market signal that RChain dApps or parts of dApps are already reselling at the eight-figure level. The success of the deal will mean the availability of sufficient funds to continue the co-op’s mission and that the co-op is delivering on its promise. It will also help solve the marketing and development outreach problems.

Questions/replies/comments