Development update June 2019
Onwards and upwards
Our developers, Artem and Ashot have been hard at work since the last development update.
Version 0.13.4.0 was released a week later than we had hoped but was worth the wait. Everyone who has updated is experiencing improved stability, lower resource consumption and fast syncing. The network node count has recovered from its dip and there are currently around 1000 masternodes and 1500 systemnodes online. The systemnode count is still much lower than it traditionally has been because the depressed price makes them unprofitable (in fiat terms) on many hosting platforms at present. However, canny community members know the systemnode ROI is higher than the masternode ROI, take a long term view and keep running those nodes.
Trezor
The final pre-reqs for Trezor integration have been completed:
- Bitcore-Crown and the associated Crownsight explorer
- the pull-requests to Trezor-firmware for the prefix change and explorer links
We now have to wait for Trezor to push a new firmware release. These happen roughly every 3 months and the last was in March so we’re hoping it will happen this month.
NFT framework
Artem is still concentrating on development of the non-fungible token (NFT) framework. He has completed coding of most of the APIs (get, getbytxid, totalsupply, balanceof, ownerof) and has a couple more still in progress. He’ll be working on the documentation soon and we’re hopeful for a testnet release on 20 June 2019.
Codebase refresh
Ashot evaluated the best Bitcoin codebase to migrate to and has settled on v0.17. This is going to be a complex and time-consuming process. He basically has to take all the changes over the last four years which made Crown Crown, and re-apply them to a clean Bitcoin base. A very rough guestimate for how long this might take is 3–6 months.
Astute readers might wonder why we chose Bitcoin v0.17 rather than v0.18 since the amount of effort is about the same. The reason is account support. Accounts are the flaky wallet code for partitioning wallet funds into separate chunks. Some centralised exchanges are known to rely on this functionality. In Bitcoin v0.17 the functionality is deprecated but still present. In Bitcoin v0.18 it is removed completely. Switching to the v0.18 codebase without prior agreement from exchanges could cause us problems.
The new codebase will bring security, speed and stability enhancements. It will also make it easier to keep up to date with critical Bitcoin changes and ease maintenance into the future.
