Regen Network Dev Update #8
Two weeks ago, the Community Development Call led by CTO Aaron Craelius updated our community on Regen Network’s exciting progress across multiple areas. A few topics included CosmWasm, our planned mainnet launch, and new developments in verification projects. Below, we go into a full call recap, announcing the new plans and findings to see what Regen Network has been up to on the development side. View slides from Aaron’s presentation here.
First, the team had offered a bonus round parameter change government proposal to make jailing parameters more lenient for Regen-test-1001, but was halted due to a past proposal that required 50% of 100 blocks to be signed. According to Ethan Frey, our Lead Developer, this means that if you missed 50 blocks in a row, you would be off, which is considerably harsh. This gave participants limited time and did not trigger a restart. Despite the halt, the team is working on tallying testnet points to all who have participated and preparing for the next testnet launch. The upcoming testnet will be based on the latest Cosmos SDK where our upgraded module will be integrated.
In addition, Regen Network has received two grants from the Interchain Foundation to merge into the Cosmos SDK. Last Wednesday, Regen Network and Cosmos SDK discussed key management and the upgrade community groups for the merge. You can even check out the tracking on the latest work from the key management community group here.
Ethan also updated us on CosmWasm, a new library that he built with the web assembly integration team. CosmWasm will allow for high-level extraction to execute smart contracts. By adding these web assembly smart contracts into the Cosmos SDK, users will be able to write smart contracts in languages such as rust. During the call, Ethan gave a quick tutorial of how to test out the starter template on CosmWasm and demonstrated the full functionality of the module to load contracts.
Next, Aaron spoke about the updated planned date for mainnet launch to Q1 of 2020. Regen Network is also brushing out remaining blockers to ensure a smooth chain upgrade for a persistent ledger of ecological claims. This allows users to see the history of when claims or credits are issued here. With Token Sales, Regen Network still has a sale in progress that will be wrapping up in Q1 of 2020. Aaron also reminded listeners that Round 1 of token sales will be ending on November 15.
Regen Network Science Lead Dr. Gisel Booman further informed us on verification work with soil organic carbon (SOC) in Australia and of sheep grazing in Northern California. By sampling soil carbons on an Australian farm with remote sensing, Dr. Booman discussed how there seem to be very high correlations between SOC samples and some bands of Sentinel 2 from the raw data, resulting with accurate regressions. This assists the farm by verifying where there is carbon sequestration in the soil, what areas are losing carbon, and determine variations in carbon over the years. Dr. Booman also mentioned that there are plans to expand these methods in the Patagonia region of Argentina and other areas in Australia.
With grazing verification on organic vineyard farms in Northern California, Dr. Booman has been supporting the increase of SOC. Currently, she is receiving very quantifiable data and is attempting to verify with remote sensing that sheep were actually grazing on the vineyard farms. She saw the NDVI drop as sheep grazed in these farms from current results. Next winter, her team plans on expanding sampling and correlating over more fields to eventually build a model for the area.
To close out the call, Aaron discussed the advancements with the ecosystem service credit support for Regen Ledger. The product team is currently requesting more user requirements and pilot partners for this specification. This is to help attain the goal of building the most flexible ecosystem service credit that exists to hope that it will be used for various credit types, including carbon credits. Also, the design team is working on mockups for the credit registry.
If you want to keep up with the community development team’s progress, tune in on Wednesday, November 13, or listen in on the next validator session planning call November 6!
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