Community Debriefs

RChain Debrief 105: Co-op executes contract with Whiteblock

Victor Ojimadu


 

Update summary

 
This week, Kelly Foster opens the hangout with an update from the development team. Through December their priority is ensuring that currently-implemented features of Mercury work and there is adequate test coverage for all aspects of the project. Ed Eykholt then demonstrates features of the Rever wallet dApp he has been working on. He discusses the technology, challenges, and goals of his wallet. Greg Meredith is excited to announce that the co-op has executed a four-month contract with Whiteblock for test net infrastructure, mentioning some of the benefits this partnership will yield to the community, including significant cost reductions and time hardening test net. Tutors are confirmed for the RChain Korea training, including Joshy Orndorff, Jake Gilberg, and Dan Connolly. The marketing team is focused on podcasts and news about portfolio companies until they’re ready to start promoting test net.
 

Announcements

 

Timeline

 

Contents in Brief

Technical update: RNode v0.8 scheduled for December
General

  • The dev team started a two-week sprint on Nov. 26 with a plan to release RNode v0.8 the week of December 10. Will be updating the release plan this week
    • Continuing conversations are occurring to align on Mercury’s minimum viable product requirements
    • Defining user stories for the desired outcomes of the platform
    • Converting these stories to tests designed to assure platform functionality delivers the desired outcome
  • The team developed a dashboard that shows each user story, describes the test, and shows the status of the test
  • The team anticipates changes to the published timeline for Mercury based on team changes last month; they’ll work on Mercury requirements this month. Priorities through December include assuring that currently-implemented features work andadequate test coverage for all aspects of the project are in place. Next priority will be feature implementation based on Mercury’s minimum viable product documentation. Estimate of feature completion is in March 2019

Rholang team

  • Work to ensure stack safety continues. Pull requests merged this week to make AST equals stack safe and make AST hashCode stack-safe. Bugs found in the effect stack used in the matcher leading to wrong costs and in the StreamT transformer used in the stack. Bug investigation and resolution is the high priority this week
  • They are refactoring business logic to use a generic F and limit use of Task to boundary classes pull request is blocked by two failing integration tests. The priority this week is work on the tests, the pull request, and to complete the refactoring effort
  • Work in progress to update tests related to the new DAG API

Casper team

  • Working on improving the test suite of Casper features
  • Working on bugs found in community tests related to nodes catching the state of the network

Node team

  • Investigation and resolution of bugs is a priority this week. Working with Casper and SRE teams to support
  • Work in progress to improve metrics provided by RNode. Working on a proof of concept of a StatsD implementation

Storage team

  • The team is making changes to the implementation of ProtoUtil. Conflicts to better support debugging in Casper by allowing identification of individual channels in produces and consumes in the replay log. Currently, this information is all hashed together. The plan is to store a sequence of hashes per channel rather than a hash of all channels

SRE team

  • Working on migration to new infrastructure. Work to be complete by end of month
  • Investigating test failures, test improvements and implementing fixes in CI
  • Building out comprehensive tests for Mercury deliverables

RChain test net

  • Planning to relaunch a test net on new infrastructure during this sprint

ED Eykholt’s demo: Rever wallet dApp

Technological review

  • Scala.js- to catch more errors at compile time
  • React.js- for reactive asynchronous user interface
  • Bootstrap- for responsive HTML layout
  • DIODE- for models, subscription and internal eventing
  • Ethereumjs- library for crypto
  • gRPC Comms
  • Web HTTP 1.1 communication
        • to envoy proxy
        • To RNode external gPRC
      • Case Classes and Stub (client) object generated from RChain model proto.file

Challenges

    • Dealing with gRPC and Protobuf
    • Many asynchronous round-trips to RNode
    • Missing complete usage examples for:
      • The existing contract for basic wallet, purse and wallet checks
      • Generation of predictable forgeable names in dApps
        • Generation of registry name in dApps
      • Contracts require the use of public key against the Ethereum-Style address
    • Crypto libraries: cannot use only existing Ethereum libraries. It also needs a Blake2b256 hash, ed25519
  • Goals and next steps
    • Connect the Rever wallet to test net
    • Collaborate with the coop team on the requirement for command-line wallet dApp under consideration
    • Be an active tester of command line dApp
    • Rever wallet to be an alpha by the new year
    • Begin regular user feedback session
    • Funding and staff line
    • Release coincident with Mercury

Comment/Q&A
Why scala.js?
Whiteblock’s proposal update: the co-op executes a four month contract

  • The co-op has executed a contract with Whiteblock for a four-month 36 node test net infrastructure (test net in a box)
  • Greg Meredith believes this will
    • Reduce the timeframe for reproducing bugs
    • Accelerate the hardening phase by shortening the node stabilization time to probably half
    • Save potentially a million dollars in the hardening phase of the network
    • After the stabilization and hardening process, it can be migrated into a shard in the box solution which can be monetized and will ease deployment for validators
    • The cost is about 1/3 of what the co-op was paying to its DNA partners.

Kenny’s weekly progress report

Draft charter for revitalized governance committee is ready for comments
Asian community update: tutors confirmed for Korea training sessions

  • Joshy Orndorff, Jake Gilbert, and Dan Connolly are confirmed to handle the one-week training sessions in Korea about Rholang, RChain, Casper, and computational calculi

Marketing update: podcasts with portfolio companies

  • Derek Beres recently featured Dr. Muhammad Ali Chaudhary of Inkrypt on RCast, who talked about resisting censorship
  • Upcoming episodes include Access, a financial services network facilitating local economic development through on-demand mobile banking and crowdsourced problem-solving, as well as EVERY, a retail platform that allows shoppers to monetize their data in direct transactions with brands. Future RCasts will feature Rubica and Augmate