Welcome to the next edition in a series of regular updates on our development progress. We want you, our community and token holders, to be kept updated with our development news. We’ll use these updates to share our progress, our plans and our challenges with you.
As we are gearing up towards our testnet release in the middle of this calendar year, all our development teams are operating with “full throttle”, while all other business work streams continue to grow our client and partnership base, or help with operational activities across all our entities.
Achievements in the last week:
· Key architectural improvements to run our lightweight nodes via SQLite and full-scale nodes via PostgreSQL
· Completed transaction signing and submission workflow finished, which includes — generating private keys and CHX addresses, transaction signing and verification, submission, validation and storage
· Ramped up our open source check-ins via github
Technology spotlight
Introducing our development approach
As with any modern project and engineering approach, we run agile project management principles paired with TDD (test driven development) in order to improve engineering efficiency and to ensure our code is delivered developer-tested with a high degree of certainty before it hits our QA and Test teams. This isn’t anything unusual in the software engineering world, but in addition we are using the KISS coding principles (Keep It Simple, Stupid) to ensure multiple people can understand and contribute on the same code base. This is particularly important as we on-board and recruit many new developers over the coming months, and they need to get into the source code quickly and maintain the “readability” of all modules and functions and classes. Simple coding and clean code will always help you in the long run (as with in line commenting) — and we’re a sucker for these things as we all are more engineering traditionalists … but we do have our cowboy moments too!
Explaining our “Epics”
Within agile principles (and with the creation of “user stories”), Epics are larger bodies of work that can be broken down into smaller increments. We are focusing on the following 4 major epics within our core development, and these are itself broken further down to make the roadmap and delivery sizes more “manageable”:
· One-Node blockchain — test blockchain system that runs on one single node without communicating with other nodes
· Leader-Based blockchain — a node network having a simple (leader-based) consensus mechanism
· Blockchain Alpha — a fully functional blockchain with all features implemented
· Blockchain Beta — blockchain network tuned and hardened, ready for shipment
Milestones
Each Epic is further split into the following milestones:
Epic — One-Node blockchain
o Submission — delivers node APIs and crypto wallet
o Validation & Processing Engine — delivers a node transaction processing and validation engine
o Verification — the possibility for a node to create and validate all downloaded transactions from the beginning of the time (genesis block) and getting an up-to-date state view
Epic — Leader-Based Blockchain
o Propagation — the networking protocol and transaction and state exchange between the nodes
o Synchronization — State sync of a one single node with the rest of the network and the consensus mechanism
Epic — Blockchain Alpha
o Completion — Full feature set and validation for all transaction types implemented
o Assimilation — Possibility to onboard an existing shareholder register (from any other legacy source)
Epic — Blockchain Beta
o Acceleration — Consensus protocol and transaction processing tuning (iterative cycle)
o Hardening — Making the blockchain network robust and bug free and secure
All of these Epics and Milestones are under heavy development (some of them shared publicly, some of them hidden due to protection of our IP) and we’re swiftly moving into the later stages of our roadmap cycle. We are progressing to plan and we’re enjoying the creation of a whole new paradigm shift for capital-raising and digitally managing shares and stock.
In the next development update, we will introduce our app development workstream…
Missed issue #1? Check it out here…
Chainium has rebranded to Own. For more information about our brand change please read this medium post.
