Fantom Technical Update 18

Published in

Fantom Foundation

2 min readMar 23, 2020

By Michael Kong

Fantom has been working hard on the first post-mainnet Opera network upgrade, which will be an upgrade to both go-lachesis and the Special-fee contract (“SFC”). We have been carefully testing many aspects of changes to ensure a smooth and consistent upgrade for this release, and future releases. In doing so, we have built and continue to build a number of different automatic test suites, to ensure that upgrades in the future happen faster with more automation.

We have also continued to make Go-lachesis ABCI-compatible, and have added further upgrades to both the backend, Go-lachesis, and the SFC.

Go-lachesis

Changed “Downtime” to be the measurement for the total amount: of time in milliseconds: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/441
Added code to cmd/lachesis/config.migrations() allowing the node to accept configs from previous releases (v0.5.0-rc.1 and v0.6.0-rc.1): https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/438
Help with SFC upgrading. Prepared detail instructions on how to
connect a local node to stagingnet: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/lachesis_launch/commits/master
Fixed of error after upgraded local node did not connect to mainnet: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/443
Tested different scenarios for the first upgrade release.
Separated app.Store’s database from gossip.Store’s: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/436
Denied direct access to app.Store from gossip. Refactor to do all through app methods: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/439
Moved validation score logic to the ABCI-App side: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/440
Moved staker POI logic to the ABCI-App side: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/444

Fantom-SFC

Updated wiki for SFC: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-sfc/wiki
Created autotests for SFC: https://github.com/devintegral4/autotest_sfc_web3
SFC upgrade and running of test cases in stagingnet, prepared instructions: https://github.com/devintegral4/autotest_sfc_web3/blob/master/README.md

Research and Development

Worked on test scenarios and tried to improve test coverage for the upgrade release candidates. We have reached a stable release candidate of go-lachesis. We are also working on a plan for this release.
Investigated a new language with some extensions to allow us to write more secure smart contracts. The new approach will be compatible with Solidity. Further details will be released in a published paper.
We are also investigating several improvements to Go-lachesis, including optimisations, such as more effective gossiping, event block packing, and transaction pooling.
Researched the best way to mint fUSD from collected rewards.