Q4 2022 Roadmap

Q3 2022 Recap — Q4 2022 Roadmap — AMA 📢

The Aeternity Foundation (ACF) supports the æternity protocol and ecosystem.

The ACF is giving funding grants for applications on the promotion of the success and growth of the æternity blockchain ecosystem as well as the ae blockchain maintenance. Weekly detailed reports on the progress of the developers can be found in the Active Grant Applications under the forum’s ACF Grant Category.

Our goal remains the same: to make the aenode faster, better and lighter and the ae ecosystem more attractive for the users. The hyperchain network using the aenodes has been designed to attract the Aeternity enterprise customers and their users. On top of the faster æternity network and hyperchain network the decentralized applications (dapps) can be run with higher performance and in a private context. Therefore, the whole æternity ecosystem will perform with higher availability, scalability, security, and performance.

Q3 2022 Recap

Short review of the tasks from the Q3 2022 Roadmap.

HyperChains Alpha test network is running with a new user-friendly interface. The UI was revisited from the ground up. The underlying smart contract were refactored as well. The new UI provides many new features/options. Now it is possible to spawn an customized hyperchain (HC) with a set of configurable variables (like thresholds). Since the goal is to empower everyone to configure and spin its own network, this is a great step forward. With regard to usability and adoption a new tool was developed for the setup of a new hyperchain. This HC tool guides the users through the process. With regard to the parent chain integration a lot of work was done as well: the election was extracted into a separate contract so the same DPoS contract can be used with different election contracts. Currently the test HC has a simple PoS election contract and a HC one. The HC consensus was extended to consume parent chain blocks and use their hashes as a source of entropy for the election of the child chain’s leaders. Parent chain blocks are a function of consensus amongst a few parent chain nodes and those blocks are neatly cached in the node for faster syncing. Since the hyperchains github branch was merged to the main aeternity branch there will be in the future only one release for the main net and the HC. It is just a configuration of how to use the release.

RocksDB refactoring

The refactoring of the RocksDB was completed. Now nodes will have better consistency of results. As a side effect — the syncing is speeded up a few times. Unfortunately, a potential memory leak was discovered after the last release process. The primary suspects were some C++ components. These components were replaced with new C codes. However, this was not the cause of the problem. The investigations on the leak issue are ongoing. Please note that it is not a trivial task to expose and reproduce this issue for any node (for example some testnet nodes run for a month now without a substantial increase in memory).

Rosetta API

The Rosetta API has two sections: read state and produce transactions. The first part is finished and the related test running on mainnet was successful. The second section of the API (produce transactions) will be developed in Q4 2022.

State Channel Demos

With the Aeternity Universe 2 closing in, two separate teams prepared different showcases for State Channels:

• SC Marketplace
  The leading developer Ulf Wiger produced a demo of a State Channel market where anyone can list an item and sell it for AE coins on the market. All parties first open their state channels with the marketplace and then they can exchange coins and goods instantly and have a chat.
• SC Game
  This showcase was a game with a server.

Both of those SC showcases exposed some points of necessary improvements in the state channel implementation. Some of these improvements were done in Q3 2022.

Q4 2022 Roadmap

Ongoing tasks

All tools (AeCanary , GUI Launcher, HC UI, etc.) and State Channels will be continuously improved and supported with bugfixes and small features. Rosetta API is in the second stage of implementation and hopefully be finished soon.

HyperChains

The goal is to have the initial full HC implementation and to publish the HC whitepaper in Q4 2022. Work on optimization with regard to commitments on the parent chain will follow in 2023.

The following tasks are planned to be completed:

• implement for a parent chain connector the post and the consume commitments
• compute difficulty of different forks
• add more features in the contract
• improve the UI
• improve setting up new HCs
• report about the HC progress in the forum

All subsequent tasks are documented, see hcproject 3. All regular reports on the hyperchains progress can be found in the ae forum, see HyperChains 0.2 1 and HyperChains Alpha 1.

CERES Hard Fork

A work on issues/features need to be done in order to prepare for the next hard fork/protocol upgrade. Some issues/features tasks are the following:

• Fix delegated signatures for non-existing accounts
• Make it possible to call contracts by name (top level in ContractCallTx a name can be given and contract_pubkey will be resolved in the transaction)
• Add raw pointers to AENS
• If there is consensus update the AENS auction parameters
• investigation on dynamical fork protection (security R&D)

GC Old States

The next step is to support starting synch to the live state of a given height and then continue from there. This could dramatically shorten the time it takes to bring up a usable node.

The updates on the aeroadmap and the aerelease schedule will follow dynamically in this topic. The previous roadmap can be found on the AETERNITY ROADMAP Q3 2022 .

You are welcome to contact us under the Email: hello@aeternity-foundation.org 📥

Release 6.6.1

Release Date: October 2022
Type: Maintenance / HC

Release 6.6.2

Release Date: December 2022
Type: Maintenance / HC

🔔 Ask Me Anything with the Core team

The Foundation welcomes open, honest communication and real-time connection with open-source technology contributors — thus, on October 14th (Friday), the æternity blockchain core development team hosted the Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in order to present the Roadmap for this quartal, but also answer all potential questions & discuss ideas.

Stay in tune with all updates: @aeternityCF & Forum

The æternity Foundation is a non-profit organization established in the Principality of Liechtenstein. The Foundation brings together all the necessary resources and infrastructure to ensure a stable æternity environment and thriving ecosystem around open-source blockchain technology.