Community Debriefs

RCHAIN DEBRIEF 100: THE MARKET SIGNAL

Victor Ojimadu

Update summary

 
The hangout opens as usual with the technical update from Medha Parlikar. They have just released node 0.7 and plan to relaunch the test net to support validator bonding on the network. Reflective Ventures focuses on strengthening the faith of its portfolio companies. Conversations continued regarding the election of board members and eligibility of members. Following the conversation about ballot results, Greg shows the community the perception of the RChain tech advancement in relation to market signals. Most of the hangout, however, revolves around co-op bylaws, management and leadership practices, and how they affect the community as a whole.
 

Timeline

Technical update
Reflective Ventures update
Ballot results for board election
The market signal for RChain
 

Content in brief

 
Announcement

Technical update

  • The re-launching of the test net is underway. The required number of approvals for the Genesis block has been reached. Validating nodes have the block and are processing it.  
  • Test net re-launch will allow new validators to bond onto the network.


Rholang team:

  • The design of peek in RSpace is under review. Implementation should be completed in this sprint.
  • Stack safety of serialization in the interpreter, pull request is expected this week.
  • Generative tests are exposing bugs in the interpreter. Four bugs exposed.


Casper team

  • Contracts are in code review for the removal of unforgeable names.
  • New integration tests authored by community member. Thanks, Will Qiu!
  • Work has started on slashing.


Node team

  • There are continued improvements in threading and chunking.
  • The team has started working on a client interface for dApp developers.

The interface will ultimately support deployment, estimation of costs, the creation of unforgeable names ( for the purposes of data retrieval/ listening on a name) and obtaining data from the chain.

  • Working on catching unhandled exceptions.


Storage team

  • The team removed the syncVar (1 of 6) from replay RSpace, they observed an improvement in performance on the replay side.
  • They are working on creating a separate thread pool for RSpace. This addresses the issues with propose hanging (due to thread locking).
  • The team is combining the in-memory hot store with SyncVar removal to verify performance boost.
  • Performing R&D on RSpace performance.
  • Investigating the performance of the genesis block.


SRE team

  • Supporting the re-launch of test net.
  • Performance testing of the code.
  • RSong is being moved into continuous Integration.
  • Updated Grafana to work.

RChain test net

  • Genesis ceremony started yesterday and concluded today.
    • The ceremony contained a file of RHOC balances based on a specified ETH block height as a proof-of-concept that this will work for issuing REV with the launch of the main net.
    • 15 nodes were able to validate and send approval back to the bootstrap node. Improvement is on the way.
    • Bootstrap node processed and showed the genesis block.
    • At this time none of the 15 nodes have been able to process the genesis block and transition to a validating node on the network.
      • Two nodes crashed with OOM errors.
      • 11 nodes are up and appear to be processing the block.

Ceres games

  • Work in progress to develop this program. Web page to launch by end of this month, and the start of the challenges around December.
  • Kelly speaks more about the Ceres games (incentivized test net):
    • It is aimed at incentivizing people to engage with the platform.
    • To help understand how the network works (the stability, security, and load).

Questions

  • When will Casper be feature-complete?
  • See Greg’s question about the performance of RSpace, in-memory and LMDB.
  • Medha responds to Rich Jensen’s question in the chat about continuous integration testing.

Reflective Ventures update

  • The team is concerned with strengthening their partnership with the portfolio companies.

Ballot results for board election

  • Ian Bloom spoke of the ballot results. Emails were sent out to eligible members to enable them to vote their candidate.
  • See Allan’s question about member eligibility for voting and ID verification.

The market signal for RChain

  • Greg Meredith gives an overview of the node release plan after which he shared a chart showing the relationship of the RChain tech performance to the market signal. He believes the market does not respond to RChain’s technology update given its rare accomplishments in the blockchain space. He holds that the market signal is separated from the actual deliverables of the RChain network and doesn’t take into thought the tech achievement of RChain.
  • He urges the community members for more marketing effort in getting out the news about RChain’s rare achievement in terms of the design (CBC proof of stake), volumes, and performance observed in test net for a true market signal.
  • Greg Meredith further points out that RChain’s failure to deliver on Venus will place the RChain platform on a higher risk with another blockchain 3.0 project like Solidity.
  • Jonathan Kochmer feels differently. For him, the down market signal is due to fears, uncertainty, and doubts about the current state of affairs in the co-op.
  • Medha doesn’t think the market perceives RChain incorrectly, nor does it measure the value of RHOC based on technology. For her, the down market signal is the result of uncertainty arising from the mismanagement of tokens and lack of financial clarity. She believes the quality of the technology doesn’t matter but has to do with the executive management, leadership and the certainty of fulfilling corporate obligations and deliverables.

Q&A/comments