Community Debriefs

RChain Debrief 102: Officers, items of business updates, and transactions discussion

Victor Ojimadu


 

Update summary

 
Greg began by giving an overview of the changes in the dev team. Kelly followed by giving the dev team update. Kenny gave his weekly update report, which covered the results of the first board meeting since the annual meeting and updates on the items of business. This was followed by a Q&A. Greg introduced Zak Cole, CTO of Whiteblock, to discuss internal and QA testing services they provide, as well as their recent EOS report. A long discussion of the different notions of a transaction followed.
 

Timeline

Technical update
Updates on board meeting
Greg Meredith introduces Zak Cole CTO of Whiteblock
Weekly debriefs include global activities, but emphasize activities within the RChain US Cooperative.  Updates are also available from the RChain China and RChain Europe communities. This blog also has posts in Chinese and Korean.
 

Contents in Brief

 
Technical update
Announcements

General

  • Extension of the current sprint to accommodate time used for contract negotiations last week
  • Planning for the next sprint to the new release to adjust for work stoppage and changes to the team

Rholang team:

  • Working to complete the work to harden against deeply nested programs
  • Some refactoring work completed this week (see pull request)
  • Added examples of interpolating Rholang code with Pars (see pull request)

Casper team

  • Work in progress to mitigate risks related to lazy validators
  • Primary focus is on work to fix issues on test net; this put other planned work on hold

Node team

  • Investigation and resolution of bugs is a priority this week
  • Work continues to support blocks of all sizes
  • Team supporting work to fix issues on test net; this put other planned work on hold

Storage team

  • Work in progress to persist in Memory DAG representation on disk so that a node can recover the state on startup
  • Team supporting work to fix issues on test net; this put both syncvar and thread pool work on hold

SRE team

  • Team supporting work to fix issues on test net; this put other planned work on hold
  • Investing test failures and implementing fixes in CI

Definition of minimum viable Mercury features are being finalized
RChain test net

  • Investigating blocking issues to test net stability
  • The team is realigning what kind of value node-testing Tuesdays brings to not only the development team and the platform, but also the community and portfolio companies. We will be continuing the cadence of the Tuesday meet-ups, though the focus will be changing week to week. Check in the Discord #node-testing channel on Mondays to find out what’s happening each week. Suggestions for future sessions are always welcome.

Comments/Q&A
Weekly progress report updates
There are working drafts of the operations roadmap, conflict of interest policy, and member participation in governance policies.
Monetary policy

  • All wallets have been funded; next is defining the specifications for the mint contract

RChain Improvement Process The working group has had one meeting. There was a review of the current best practices in the markets, looking at the Ethereum and Bitcoin improvement processes. Considering dividing participants up according to a RACI model. The document on how the group will be structured will be due in the next week.
Officers

  • Evan Jensen declined to continue serving as secretary. Barry Cynamon will serve as interim secretary until a new one is appointed
  • Kate Gonsalves was not re-appointed as Treasurer
  • After main net is launched and Mercury backlog completed, Greg Meredith will step down as the president and transition to another relationship with the co-op in support of the development of Venus. Kenny Rowe will fill in the position of the president while the board initiates the process of phasing out the office of the president in favor of a council of vice presidents of engineering, marketing, token economics, finance, and governance
  • Kenny was appointed Vice President of Governance

Annual meeting

  • The board approved all of the resolutions from the annual meeting

Comments/Q&A

Greg Meredith introduces Zak Cole, CTO of Whiteblock

  • Whiteblock is a blockchain testing platform that helps development teams validate performance and deploy distributed ledger technologies faster. Their recent work is on EOS platform and Zak Cole gives an overview of the result
  • Zak Cole speaks of their work and test result on EOS.

Comments/Q&A

  • Kevin Valentine verifies if his thoughts about EOS transaction spoofed is aligned with Zak’s EOS hypothesis
  • Zak Cole’s definition of transaction: According to him, a transaction is a transfer of data (either asset or token data) from one entity to another. It’s an action that’s processed in a cryptographic manner, including into a block and made available to the recipient

Engaging Whiteblock development QA and internal code testing

  • Greg Meredith makes a two-fold proposal to engage Whiteblock: for internal testing and development QA
  • Greg Meredith would like to see independent individuals or groups that would want to fund the work to have Whiteblock prepare a report for RChain
    • Zak Cole recommended opening a bounty on the Bounty network to support open source contribution
    • Greg Meredith considers paying bonded RHOC as a proposal for reward to the bounty effort in response to Jim Whitescarver’s question

Discussion of different notions of transactions by Greg, Zak, and community members