Community Debriefs

RChain Update 108: Immersion license agreement extended

Blog admin

Update Summary

 

Last week Greg Meredith offered brain candy on channel-based security and self-sovereign identity. The co-op is hiring five more developers to speed up main net delivery. The board submitted conflict of interest disclosures; Greg Meredith responded to Pyrofex’s criticism about the Casper consensus protocol.

This week, platform stability remains the top priority for the dev team. After Kelly Foster’s technical update, Zak Cole from Whiteblock gave a demo on building a three-node network and adding a block. Greg Meredith announces the extension of the Immersion Networks license agreement by 6six months and the establishment of communication policy to minimize injurious action to investors. The hangout closes with an overview of Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN climate plenary and how RChain’s core mission is to provide solutions to such planetary challenges.

Announcement

Timeline


Content in brief

Technical update: platform stability and bug fixing

General

Test net status

  • A public test net is not yet available
  • Platform stability is the co-op’s top priority

Mercury requirements and acceptance criteria

  • The development team has worked during this sprint to support the creation of test cases and acceptance criteria for stories that are ready
  • User story requirements, testing scenarios, and status will be reported in features.md. This is a work in progress. When complete, stakeholders will have a web-based dashboard showing the requirements and the status of the acceptance criteria

Work with Whiteblock

  • In progress. Received documentation and collaborating with the Whiteblock team.

Holiday schedule

  • Dev team members planning time off during the holiday season. With few exceptions, this team has not had a vacation since Nov, 2017. We’re still operating on that model to support Mercury delivery
  • Current sprint ends Dec. 24. Next sprint will start Jan. 2. Those who plan to work between sprints have a clear backlog
  • No community RNode testing Dec. 25 or Jan. 1. We’ll resume on Jan. 8

Rholang team

  • Block store work should be complete by end of the week. Recent work is to assure integration tests pass with the implementation of the new store
  • In support of stability work, work in progress to improve the output messaging of Rholang unit tests to be more explicit about causes of failures
  • In addition to supporting stability work, working on other bugs and continuing work on the block store

Casper team

  • Fully focused on stability work
  • Work in progress to remove deploys from finalized blocks to help node not run out of memory
  • Investigation of the issue of node hanging on propose

Node team

  • Pull request merging today to implement a new metrics API, CORE-1489
  • Add Kamon InfluxDB reporter
  • Add command-line flags and configuration options for Prometheus and InfluxDB reporters
  • Change Metrics-API to take an implicit MetricsSource parameter with a module name
  • Use node-id as metrics hierarchy root name
  • Review existing metrics if they make sense and are required
  • Add new metrics if required
  • Use Kamon System Metrics instead of our own JVM metrics
  • Use histograms instead of gauges
  • Implement a timer in Metric

Storage team

  • Priority is stability work

SRE team

  • Priority is stability work: improvements to test infrastructure and work to make use of the new metrics API to improve monitoring and reporting

Developer website

  • Site migration is complete and Derek and Kayvan are available to support updates. Updates in progress related to the release of RNode v0.8.1 and to the REV issuance page today

Comment/Q/A

  • Completion of the acceptance criteria with respect to the minimum viable product requirement is expected by the end of next sprint

Whiteblock gives a demo: building a 3 node network and adding block

  • Whiteblock is providing a testing environment for RChain.
  • Zak Cole demoed a very simple example of building a three-node network and adding a block
  • More elaborate test plans in progress to take advantage of Whiteblock’s computing power to ease the starting up and tearing down networks
  • See Whiteblock documentations(WIP)

Progress report: Immersion license agreement extended

  • The Immersion Newtorks license agreement has been extended by six months in favor of the co-op
  • The board will  have a meeting tomorrow to discuss the open seats
  • The board is on track to the reduction of burn rate

Comment/Q/A

  • About the co-ops management fee due to the Reflective venture partners.
    • It is stated explicitly from the contract that the management fee comes from the fund and RChain has no requirement to pay out to Reflective Ventures

Co-ops communication policy: communications on Discord

  • There is now a co-op policy to regulate communication on discord
  • Greg Meredith talks about conditions for disciplinary action. Trolling (or any kind of action that constitute potential injury to investors) will result in a “cooling off” period
  • The co-op’s communication channels are aimed at fostering support and cooperation
  • Greg Meredith believes there is a lot of opportunity for all projects on RChain and they require cooperation to succeed
  • Inasmuch as the co-op is engaged in potentially lucrative deals, the co-op is determined to pursue pilot projects as a strategy in the blockchain enterprise. Market conditions state that while portfolio companies are beneficial, established companies command a different value

Security in a blockchain setting: Economic security

  • The co-op had a successful engagement with one of the largest telecommunication network in the world regarding blockchain-based security protocols
  • The co-op also had a conversation regarding blockchain security systems and the viability of economically isolating the DAO contract
  • The telecom providers are quite enthusiastic about the conversation with RChain on blockchain security. Greg Meredith believes the coop is going to enjoy partnerships with enterprises in the near future

An overview of GretaThunberg’s speech at the UN climate plenary

Any alpha codebase cannot be deployed against mission critical systems. So, I will not recommend RChain to be used for real supply chain management problems in its first 3years. In order to transform the consumption and supply chain management behavior we have to begin to attack how people coordinate

  • Using RSong as a practical instance, Greg explains how RChain as a tool for coordination and self-organization
  • Greg mentions two possible approaches to achieving social coordination:
    • By dividing the market into risk sectors
    • Using the correct-by-construction methodology
  • Coordination technologies at such a scale can only be built from the ground up

RChain Asia update: RChain Korean week success

  • Jonathan Kochmer announces the success of Korean RChain week. Thanks to Joshy, Isaac, Jocelyn, and HJ