0Chain Weekly Debrief — July 13, 2022
Happy Wednesday! As the month continues on, the dev team has made numerous blockchain updates to address smart contract performance as well as node stability. Meanwhile, the storage and UI teams are working hand in hand to ensure that our applications run efficiently and accurately for the release of our products and demos. Meanwhile, we continue to onboard new team members in our business development and marketing teams. These new members bring multiple years of experience and have helped us develop a detailed marketing go-live strategy, plans to expand our network, and build brand recognition. We look forward to introducing some of the new team members to the community!
Development Team Updates
The blockchain team closed 7 PRs and 8 issues on the 0Chain repo, mostly involving optimization of smart contracts to enhance performance. Some of the key fixes include removing redundant data fetching for updating blobbers, enhancement of the challenge process for when a blobber is not storing any data, implementing changes to the formula for blobber rewards, and removing redundant access to MPT which slows the node’s performance. These optimizations help boost a node’s performance by reducing unnecessary strain on resources, which helps keep the network running at a rapid pace.
Meanwhile, the team has spent ample time to address an issue that would cause the chain to become stuck. After several rounds of debugging and re-testing, the team was able to identify and locate the bug and implement fixes. Sharders were experiencing a variety of issues that would all result in the chain getting stuck. These intertwined issues resulted in difficulty with synchronizing blocks, leading to difficulty with the chain progressing as needed. These ongoing, redundant processes would cause the overuse of a node’s RAM, resulting in the sharder to slow and eventually stall. The team implemented a few changes to fix these issues, including the pruning of data. While this PR is still under testing, early results have looked reassuring. You can view the branch, which contains the updates and testing, and will then be merged into this PR.
The team continues its work on other fixes which are undergoing testing and pending review prior to merging. In correspondence to recent updates to health checks for miners and sharders, the team implemented a kill and shutdown option. This will ensure that the necessary processes are completed prior to the shutting down of a node. The team is also in the process of optimizing write pools. This introduces a single embedded write pool to each allocation instead of the old, complex versioning. You will see these PRs be closed in the coming weeks. For those of you who have attempted to use our beta networks, you may have encountered a “not enough blobbers registered” error. This has now been fixed by our DevOps team which will improve our systems testing process as well.
The blobber and gosdk team have had a quieter week in terms of PRs closed. They have implemented a fix for logging errors as well as are in process of a massive PR that includes several issues detected by our mobile team. The Blobber and gosdk teams are on-hand assisting other teams as they experience any issues so that we can implement fixes quickly and precisely so that our apps are ready to go. As the app teams continue to round out final screens, buttons and graphs, the blobber team provides updated APIs to ensure synchronous data streams across all platforms.
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.
