Latest Sprint News: Giant.Determination
Let’s see what the Giant team has accomplished in the last two-week sprint (21 January — 3 February 2019). We’ve been quite busy and there is a lot to tell. Before reading this material, you can check out the backlog for this sprint and get the idea of our work!
Technologies Development
The process of Giant Contracts structure creation was extremely active: Alexei Bokarev was thorough on transaction receipt details code basis. Here’s an example of his activities in this field:
receipt:
{
"transactionHash": "0x9fc76417374aa880d4449a1f7f31ec597f00b1f6f3dd2d66f4c9c6c445836d8b",
"transactionIndex": 0,
"blockHash": "0xef95f2f1ed3ca60b048b4bf67cde2195961e0bba6f70bcbea9a2c4e133e34b46",
"blockNumber": 3,
"contractAddress": "0xa94f5374fce5edbc8e2a8697c15331677e6ebf0b",
"cumulativeGicUsed": 314159,
«gicUsed": 30234,
"logs": [],
"status": "0x1"
}Additionally, Alexei researched the execution commands for smart contracts and the corresponding operations. Several new methods (GiantNode) class have been added:
- initContract
- mountModule
- getContractMeta
- getAllContracts
The ultimate goal is to increase the mobility of Giant smart contracts environment which is especially important considering how the system is going to serve the dApp creators for years to come.
Meanwhile, Dmitry Filinberg was overseeing this work and ensuring the compliance of all new additions with the Giant Contracts design plans we made in 2018. Another concern of Dmitry were the infamous Fake Stake attacks — and quite soon, he found out that the vulnerabilities described in the recent blog post of Decentralized Systems Lab are not relevant for the Giant blockchain. The main reason is that the research of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was focused on Proof-of-Stake 3.0, while Giant Coin (GIC) works under Proof-of-Stake 2.0. It has become clear to us that such attacks cannot influence the algorithm of network consensus and lead to double-spending.
As for Giant.Exchange (GEX), we can all thank Ablai Tursumbekov and Denis Seliverstov for the improved interface. You can see the result of their combined efforts on Giant.Exchange Beta.
This has happened in conjunction with the new design implementation which happened thanks to Pavel Bulatov who found a good specialist in this field and Denis who helped to adapt it. The following illustration was first shown to our masternode owners.
Ablai has started to work on crucial back-end matters — Graphql and Node.js on Giant.Exchange. We can thus say that both Giant.Exchange (GEX) back-end and front-end is under active development and we have passed the stage of initial planning long ago. The determination of all of our developers is high, as everybody has a clear vision of the final product and what to do to bring it closer.
Social Media
This sprint is marked by a valuable addition to our Discord — a special bot is now tracking the commits on GitHub and posts them into the new #github channel. This is extremely useful for those who are interested in the recent Giant dev team actions.
We are seeing a lot of interest towards the Giant block reward distribution vote and corresponding proposals continue to develop. The Giant team members are determined to complete the vote. Our top priority remains to be a reliable and secure blockchain with unique features in store.
This section would be incomplete without the mentioning of the digitally-verified masternode-owner role on Discord. More and more people are engaged in this process, and the level of initial misunderstanding and the natural distrust towards the new idea has dramatically decreased. More on this matter can be read in Masternode Owner Verification Process — our special article. As a reminder, Giant masternodes will serve as a crucial component of Giant.Exchange too, as Brokers and Oracles (data source providers) will have to use their masternode to create a binary option smart contract and/or the Oracle contract which broadcasts the data (e.g. price motion stats) from a certain third-party platform. Each new binary option and Oracle proposal is put under the GEX governance vote.
Marketing
Giant Coin has been added to Delta App — this user-friendly product allows to track your cryptocurrency investments. This addition is part of a larger strategy to increase our presence on the market even before the first Giant blockchain dApp is released. Another good event in this field reported by Mikhail Maximov is the initial establishment of business ties with Blockfolio. Positive talks with this company CEO Edward Moncada indicate that quite soon, Giant may be added to Blockfolio Signal. This service will allow us to reach out to a wider audience interested in new cryptocurrency projects.
We’ve been working on the Giant promotion strategy for quite a while this sprint, and soon you may see the first results of this process too. Aside from marketing and the development of the new version of Giant blockchain which supports smart contracts, we have also been researching the experience of other Proof-of-Stake projects, their governance model, ways to present their vision and client relations. The Giant team realizes its responsibility to deliver a good and secure product and can always be found on Discord in case you have any software or website mistake to report.
