Dispatch Developer Update 4–4/4/18
DAPoS, Wallets, QA, and Smart-Contract Roadmap
Testnet Alpha Success
We’re over the moon 🌔 to have successfully launched our Testnet Alpha! The preceding weeks were full of proving out our new DAPoS (Delegated Asynchronous Proof-of-Stake) consensus algorithm, and the testnet holding consensus is the best validation we could possibly have. You can hop on our public Discord channel and ask us to send some test tokens to your very own wallet!
The coming weeks will be work stress-testing and optimizing the consensus, including:
- Parallel Validation of transactions
- Storing & Caching transactions
- Tx/s testing
UI Wallet Development
We’re now working on UI updates and mobile versions of the interface. I’m sure you’ve already seen our beautiful wallet demo (which included a lot more than just a wallet), but in case you missed it: http://wallet.dispatchlabs.io
What went into the wallet for the release of the network wasn’t just a wallet example, but also an example of a network scanner. We’re splitting the app into two pieces: (1) a wallet so easy your grandma could use (2) an actual network scanner to lookup things like wallets, transactions, and delegate statuses.
Smart-Contracts, here we come!
Now that we’ve got consensus in the currency, we’re turning our attention to building out the DVM (Dispatch Virtual Machine) to process smart-contracts in the next iteration of our testnet.
Our DVM is backwards compatible with the EVM and Solidity smart-contracts, but we’re actually working on something much MORE exciting. Using the LLVM Compiler framework, we’re looking into creating a smart-contract platform that works with almost any language. That means you could have smart-contracts running on Dispatch that were written in ActionScript, Ada, C#, Common Lisp, Crystal, CUDA, D, Delphi, Fortran, Halide, Haskell, Java bytecode, Julia, Kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, OpenGL Shading Language, Pony Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Solidity, Swift, and Xojo.
That being said a Turing complete virtual machine is no small task, even for us, so expect continued updates as we push forward with DVM development.
Bringing Enterprise Level QA to the Distributed World
On top of all our awesome product developments, we wanted to be sure to cross our T’s and dot our I’s. Our new resident QA experts, brothers Denis and Dmitri Molchanenko, are working on just on Dispatch QA infrastructure, but on much needed generic QA standards and frameworks that can be applied to any DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) project.
Having a quality QA infrastructure in place, along with a solid Continuous Integration process, will reduce our time spent chasing bugs and ensure the security of the Dispatch network through the release of the Mainnet.
tl;dr
- Testnet Alpha is alive and well
- DAPoS Consensus: optimization, storage & caching
- Working on mobile wallets UI
- Building a GUI Dispatch network scanner
- Starting building the DVM and smart-contract support
- LLVM for smart-contracts in almost ANY LANGUAGE 😱
If you’re excited about our updates give us a 👏 or a share. Have an opinion or feedback? We want to hear it. Join the conversation on Discord