0Chain Weekly Debrief — June 8, 2022
Happy Wednesday! Hope everyone is doing well and is having a great week. The dev team continues to chip away at the remaining issues. While the blockchain and blobber teams are addressing pertinent issues, our UI teams are finalizing application and website workflows and interactive content.
While we remain committed to limiting too many details being shared prior to launching of our rebranded website, new applications, and marketing materials, the non-dev team continues to ramp up their work. By rounding out our internal marketing, biz dev and operational teams, we are implementing numerous strategies to help make our launch as successful as possible.
We want to thank everyone who participated in our wallet referral program. We are thrilled with the initial response! If you haven’t already, make sure to sign up for our storage application, which will intertwine an intuitive UI to simplify user interaction with 0Chain’s underlying blockchain storage network. Keep your eyes tuned for a few more landing pages coming soon regarding some of our upcoming products.
Development Team Updates
Continuing off last week’s progress, the blockchain team closed 14 PRs and 11 issues in the 0Chain repo. As noted last week, the run sharder node in full nodes PR has now been completed and merged. This PR helps address some issues that could occur during block fetching, thus making the integrity of the network more robust while ensuring accuracy of block history. A modification was made through the blobber challenges PR to address an issue that could occur if the blobber had numerous expired allocations, which would impact its probability of being selected for challenges by miners. By addressing this issue, we not only ensure fairness of rewards amongst nodes as well as improve efficiency of the challenge process. This challenge modification, along with others, reflect overall changes to tokenomics that will be further discussed alongside release of interactive content, articles, and token economics paper.
A bug was fixed for API endpoints, which would cause an error during an API call to search the event db for blocks via hash lookup. This has now been resolved. A few new APIs were added, including those which pull total data stored, capacity, geolocation, and read/write prices. It is important to have updated and accurate API streams to properly convey information to front end systems, such as our explorer. The new explorer page will provide key information, statistics regarding blobbers which will play a role in node selection by businesses and developers. Support was added for updating validator settings smart contract, which previously only supported blobber updates.
Finally, we saw the refactoring of our user read pool structure. This issue was mentioned several weeks ago, so let’s review the issue and why it’s important. 0Chain’s architecture allows for owners to access their stored files with ease; however, it also enables a visitor to access the file via public or encrypted sharing. Our protocol allows for the owner of the pool to require the visitor to pay the read cost. By doing so, our old implementation created an owner read pool and would create as many as needed visitor read pools. This update addresses the unnecessary creation of infinite pools, thus reducing unneeded transactions and enhancing network performance.
We have also identified and discussed the slow MPT pruning issues and have begun implementation on a fix. We anticipate seeing significant progress during this week’s code sprint. The underlying issue arises during the nodes scanning themselves and the data being stored. The processes to scan and remove unneeded data from the node would benefit from improved logic to reduce speed and prevent overuse of node resources during this process.
Alongside the blockchain team’s successful week, the blobber team saw the completion of 6 PRs and 8 issues on the blobber repo. In parallel to the above mentioned refactoring of the user read pool structure, modifications were required on the blobber side and have now been implemented. The team also fixed a panic issue that would occur on auto migration, which could cause unexpected issues as well as further complicate dev ops work in the future. The team also removed redundant processes that occurred during json encode/decode and this PR helps run challenge commit transactions in parallel, both of which improves our storage network performance. Finally, the team addressed a bug that would occur during a bl-info or bl-update command, which is an issue that arises during the synching process of blobber settings.
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.