July 26, 2019
The Telos Core Developers (TCD) are a group of developers, many of whom are affiliated with Telos block producers. This group works with Telos block producers and the Telos community to maintain, improve and extend the Telos blockchain network.
Worker Proposals
TCD WP #2
The Telos Core Developers Worker Proposal #2 for 535,000 TLOS was approved by Telos voters and paid out to the seven companies that had delivered work comprised by it. Due to the large amount of work done in this period, two of these payments were partial payments that will submit for final payment in TCD WP #3.
Projects delivered under TCD WP #2 include:
· Upstream code merges (GoodBlock)
· Arbitration contract eosio.arb (GoodBlock — second/final of two payments)
· Arbitration management portal (EOSphere Devs — second/final of two payments, CSX Communities)
· Chainspector site development (The Teloscope — first of two payments)
· Sqrl wallet ongoing development (Telos Miami)
· Performing snapshots (Telos Madrid, CalEOS, GoodBlock)
TCD WP #3
The current TCD worker proposal has been submitted for user voting. It requests 303,500 TLOS for work already performed and delivered over the past two months since TCD WP #2 was submitted. The recipients of funds are CalEOS, The Teloscope, and EOSphere Devs. The full worker proposal can be read on Telos IPFS: https://web.ipfs.telosfoundation.io/QmTVWy3dywQb5Xa3pCPHAPW9cxztrrAwkLkSRnVbDRbEec
Ongoing Projects
The TCD is working on a number of initiatives:
Testnet table corruption post-mortem
In the process of testing the implementation of REX and some other system upgrade functions on the testnet several weeks ago, a system contract table that tracks block producers was corrupted. Significant efforts were put in place by several block producers to correct and restart the Telos testnet. CalEOS effectively led these efforts with notable assistance by Infinitybloc and EOS USA, among others. Ultimately, the testnet was restored to normal function.
The TCD is still examining the reasons for this corrupted producers table. CalEOS continues to lead this effort and is working with GoodBlock to discover the root cause or eliminate potential causes in order to ensure that there is no risk to the Telos mainnet in performing updates to either REX or EOSIO v 1.8.
Implementing REX and the TED Plan
The Telos community is currently in the last days of voting for the Telos Economic Development Plan which is expected to vastly improve Telos economics, in part through providing a high staking reward to TLOS-holders who are engaged with the chain through voting and staking.
The TCD has been working on a plan to implement the changes that would be approved by a successful TED Plan ballot. There are two parts to this implementation: enabling REX and enabling the regular transfer of specific amounts of tokens from the exchange token reserve fund account to the five recipient accounts designated in the TED Plan. These efforts are moving forward with all due caution until the root cause of the testnet table corruption is confirmed.
The REX implementation was spearheaded by Telos Miami several weeks ago and is expected to be complete, pending confirmation of the testnet error. The funds transfer plan was proposed by GoodBlock and discussed with block producers and other TCD members. Notable contributions were added by CalEOS, which is also writing the implementation contract, which is now being tested on testnet. GoodBlock is testing the code and more TCD members are expected to audit the code before mainnet deployment.
Upgrading network to EOSIO v 1.8
Block One has released a stable build of EOSIO version 1.8.x which is a major upgrade to the EOSIO software, offering many beneficial features. The TCD intends to upgrade Telos to v 1.8 as soon as possible following the implementation of the TED Plan features. However, this still depends on first ensuring that the Telos mainnet is not at risk of table corruption first. The upgrade to v 1.8 is a forking upgrade which will create the risk of significant forks if not coordinated carefully by the Telos block producers with the help of the TCD.
Telos IPFS development
Telos has made important advancements in the Telos IPFS system necessary to many dapps. This presents a competitive advantage for Telos over all other EOSIO blockchains. GoodBlock has led the creation of Telos IPFS. This work has continued for several months. Currently, the system is active and functioning well. It supports the WPS, Ratify/Amend, and arbitration governance functions. The system is also capable of use by dapps, which will be billed by the various service providers.
Iris advanced history node development
EOS uses a private, closed-source service called dfuse to provide fast, high speed search of transaction information. Dfuse is not currently deployed on Telos. CalEOS is creating an open source version that will deploy on Telos. This should be beneficial to Dapps that need this dfuse-type service layer. Iris is essentially a websocket client that can subscribe to live data streams from the Telos blockchain. Several elements of Iris have been developed and development continues. Read more at the code repository: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@caleos/iris-client
Skunkworks project #1
GoodBlock has been leading efforts on a “secret” skunkworks project for several months. We believe that this is a novel invention in blockchain that adds real value and pro-mass adoption features to Telos. We are keeping this under wraps for now because this could be easily adopted by other chains as well (we expect it will be) and we would like to see it fully deployed on Telos first. The time when we hope to be able to reveal the project is growing closer. We think this will be a real crowd-pleaser that’ll get a lot of Likes from the community.
BP schedule optimizer
Telos Global is leading the efforts on an optimizer for the block producer scheduler. Currently, when a BP schedule is created, the rotation order is determined by the alphabetical order of the BP names. This offers a lot of room for improvement. The goal is to first create a version of the scheduler that is optimized for geolocation. This could be done either by assigning locations with numbers that roughly follow the lower-latency routes, or simply by using longitude so that the BP schedule moves smoothly around the globe. The goal is to optimize the schedule so that there are fewer times of high latency. When there is a very distant hop between BPs, there can be a lag which causes the incoming BP to miss its first block, through no real fault of its own. Optimizing by location is not perfect, but closer areas do tend to have less latency between them. Therefore, the overall amount of blocks lost to high latency situations is expected to go down. A future version can be improved with an oracle querying BP nodes for actual lag times, but that will require more development. Meanwhile, the geographic optimizer is a simple and powerful improvement.
Sqrl Mobile Project Planning
Project planning is underway by Telos Miami for Sqrl Mobile (iOS first, followed by Android) that will be a 100% Telos-focused and open source mobile wallet. Support for common wallet functions (sign up, send, receive) as well as all governance functions (BP voting, WPS, Ratify, TF voting and Arbitration) and support for EOSIO dapp signing.
About the author: Douglas Horn is the Telos architect and whitepaper author, and the founder of GoodBlock, a block producer and app developer for the Telos Blockchain Network.
More about GoodBlock can be found at: www.goodblock.io
Join us on Twitter @GoodBlockio
Vote for GoodBlock on the Telos Blockchain Network @goodblocktls
