0Chain Weekly Debrief — June 1, 2022
Hope everyone is doing well this week! As we spring into June, the dev team provides various updates which address some key issues while continuing to round out API streams. This week is a techy heavy update, so let’s take a further look.
As we roll into June, 0Chain CEO Saswata Basu is happy with recent code merges and testing, bringing us closer to our mainnet launch. While content with progress, he states “While I’d love mainnet to come out today, we want to get it right. I think everyone understands the utility and market of a fast decentralized storage — it can be universally used by all apps as a way forward from centralized cloud. We need to make sure the platform is well tested and scalable. A major aspect of our timeline includes pre-mainnet event with the Active Set, for which our platform needs to pass all internal simulated tests prior to the event. We are close and expect this to be within a month. The mainnet timeline will then be primarily dictated by marketing events such as hackathon of the pre-mainnet, and testing of other products on it.”
Development Team Updates
The blockchain team continues to make consistent progress forward by closing out 9 PRs and 11 issues this past week while closing in on 2 additional PRs (that could be merged by the time you’re reading this). A few of the main issues that were closed include the fixing of the rounding error when performing currency calculations. This fix not only prevents unintended token burning, but by addressing the issue, the team was able to implement mechanisms that improve overall network performance by decreasing work performed by sharders. A few weeks ago, the team encountered an issue during the challenge verification process. This issue was addressed by this PR which ensures that the challenge signatures are verified by network validators.
The blockchain team also was able to implement a fix for an issue causing miners to crash, which was discovered by our rigorous testing methods over the past month. The issue would arise due to the maximum time allotted for a miner to complete a challenge, which is stored in a miner’s RAM. Since one challenge is generated per black, there are a series of challenges being issued in a quick, repetitive manner. If the miner were to begin to fill up with open challenges, it would cause the miner to run out of memory and crash. As the team continues to make modifications to existing and add new smart contracts, they have also enabled CORS on REST API endpoints. This ensures that our APIs can be used by other applications without being rejected by a browser due to cross origin policy, which is a security feature.
As noted in the intro, the team continues its work on the full node sharders PR. An inconsistency issue was encountered in the event database which was caused by missing blocks. This update ensures that sharders will sync all finalized blocks to be saved locally. This PR has been worked on and tested for numerous rounds. Following code review and approval, it will be merged into staging. The removed blobbers pool PR has undergone some recent fixes. Updates are currently being made to address small issues encountered during systems testing and will be merged upon final tweaks and successful testing.
During this time, the blobber team has closed 3 PRs and 2 issues in the blobber repo. The two main issues addressed on the blobber repo include the fixing of a panic issue caused during logging and the fixing of an issue caused by a blobber or validator failing to complete a challenge. During this time, our API team has continued to round out testing numerous API endpoints. This includes those that are not covered under our CLI testing as well as testing old bugs via a review to ensure that old bugs are still valid.
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.
