0Chain Weekly Debrief — April 20, 2022
Welcome back to another week! We hope you are doing well and had a great Easter, for those who celebrate. A smaller update this week as dev work continues to progress with merging a few key PRs for smart contract updates. A few blobber updates were implemented to address increasing storage capacity and db automigration. Thanks to everyone who joined in on the community Twitter Spaces on Saturday. Keep an eye open for more of these community chats coming soon!
Development Team Updates
The blockchain team has closed an additional 12 PRs and 4 issues on the 0Chain repo. During this time, we opened 7 new PRs and highlighted 6 issues to be addressed. One of the main PRs that was merged was the partition refactoring PR. As mentioned in previous week’s update, this update aimed to make our partition package easy to use, extend and decrease the risk of intention misuse. Following our recent systems testing, we identified a few issues with a few cases generating challenges After a few rounds of debugging, the team was able to locate the source of error and implement a fix. This resulted in the successful passing of subsequent systems testing,
During the same time the team was debugging the systems tests error for the above mentioned partition refactoring PR, we were fortunate to identify another issue which resulted in the number of open challenges on a sharder to continue to rise infinitely. When the number of open challenges rises, there becomes a backlog which can cause unnecessary processes and waste sharder resources. The team has already suggested possible solutions for this and have created an issue to track the progress.
A PR was merged which improved the performance of the update allocation request. Previously, this process loaded all the blobbers from the MPT each time a request arrived. The team implemented a change which provides the blobber list in the request parameters, which saves a lot of time by eliminating the loading and decoding process that would be required previously.
A notable smart contract update was through this PR which allows the smart contract owner to update staking pool settings. As the ecosystem grows and adapts over time, the pricing (in terms of $ZCN) may need to change for read/write pools. API end-points and documentation were updated for the zcnsc via this PR. They also added a change log to record notable changes to help when doing future releases.
The blobber team closed 4 PRs and 5 issues over the past week. One of the main PR that was closed was the db automigration PR. This PR essentially improves the way that blobber databases are continuously updated. A blobber’s database is full of tables which contain pertinent allocation information, such as which fragments of data are being held. By changing the manner in which the blobber gets its table schemes, it removes the need for any sql files. With this reworking of code, the team was able to ensure that blobbers do not need separate network testing for changes made in the database column. The blobber team also spent ample time working on resolving the infinite storage service, which will help blobbers to extend disk space automatically when the remaining storage capacity is not enough. This is done in anticipation of network growth and adoption, which will make it easier for blobbers to upgrade as demands increase. By simplifying this process, we are working to promote a system in which our blobbers are highly available to avoid downtime for users, enterprises or developers.
Developer Resources
- Interested in learning more about building on 0Chain or becoming a service provider? Check out our GitHub for access to repositories. Community ambassador Sculptex has created numerous tutorials to help get you started.
- Try our BetaNet here! Users can create wallets and allocations, store files, send transactions, and share files.
- Need help navigating creating wallets, allocations, or joining as a blobber? Check out our documentation page.
- 0Chain’s API endpoints use simple and intuitive HTTP requests to interact with the blockchain in order to send/retrieve information to and from miners, sharders or blobbers in the active network.
About 0Chain
0Chain is a high-performance decentralized storage network designed to eliminate business threats such as censorship, privacy liability and data breaches. 0Chain helps entities achieve GDPR compliance, localization and tokenization, and monetizes private data sharing.
