Dufour Public Release
After several months, we’re launching the latest HOPR release: Dufour. From Saturday, September 9, 2 PM CEST, existing node runners will be able to run an upgraded release that leverages both the infrastructure of SafeStaking and supports the traffic from applications running on top of HOPR, such as RPCh.
It is not only the most powerful release to date but also one that can support an ecosystem of commercial services. Dufour paired with SafeStaking marks the achievement of HOPR’s long-term goal — a decentralized and incentivized privacy mixnet that can truly bring data privacy to web3.
Stability & Scale
Dufour is a release built to scale and, as such, comes with massively improved stability and performance. Many little optimizations, bug fixes and design decisions contribute to Dufour’s stability, but one of the most prominent is the migration to rust-libp2p.
The migration of libp2p to rust-libp2p comes after the migration of many other components of the HOPR codebase to Rust, including crypto primitives, databases, and key features such as the heartbeat and pinging mechanisms. This effort has spanned months, but the results reflected in performance will be more than worth it.
SafeStaking
As announced earlier this week, HOPR has created SafeStaking — a more secure way for any web3 project to allow users to stake on their nodes. The SafeSaking setup will enable funds to be stored in a highly secure HOPR Safe, developed using tooling from Safe (previously Gnosis Safe), while your node that needs access to these funds can still interact with the funds depending on the access level you give your node.
You can customize how much of your funds your node has unfiltered access to, for what actions your node can access the Safe, and for what actions it needs approval from the Safe’s other owner account(s). This approach allows node runners to stake directly on the HOPR network while being secure that a compromised node will not expose all their funds.
This is an innovation web3 has needed for a while, as giving multiple smart contracts unfiltered access to your funds as they interact with each other creates a level of complexity that is very exploitable, as seen throughout the last several years.
These risks are so large, they even hold back Vitalik from staking most of his ETH because “multisigs for staking are still fairly difficult to set up”. SafeStaking by HOPR mitigates these risks without introducing unwieldy levels of manual oversight or centralized custody.
Node Admin
Node runners from our previous releases will be familiar with our old HOPR Admin UI, which has served us for a long time as we continued focusing all our resources on developing the protocol. But now, with the release of Dufour, we’re happy to announce a complete revamp of the Admin interface, allowing node runners to control their node through an easy-to-use intuitive graphical interface.
Staking Hub
With the introduction of SafeStaking, node runners will need to create a HOPR Safe before creating a HOPR node. This is an extra process compared to before, but you can go through this whole onboarding flow easily through our new Staking Hub. You can follow the walkthrough below if you need help with any of this.
Once you’ve completed onboarding, you can manage your funds and track your node’s performance through the staking dashboard.
Waitlist
For the initial release of Dufour, we’ll have a waitlist active. This is to control the rate at which the network scales as we take all of these new features live, but compared to previous releases, we’ll scale the network quite fast. As soon as Staking Season 8 ends at 2 PM CEST 09/09/2023, we’ll add most node runners from Monte Rosa en masse.
If you join the new waitlist with a previous Network Registry NFT, you can expect to join the network within hours or days. After that, we’ll slow down to onboarding 30 nodes a week for the initial couple of weeks.
For more information on the waitlist, you can read our FAQ.
Port forwarding
In Dufour, nodes on the network can only communicate or interact with each other if they have port forwarding set up.
Most nodes run behind Network Address Translation (NAT), where the public IP address of your router is what receives traffic, and then it is sent to the internal IP address of your laptop, node or any other device connected to the router.
The problem with NAT nodes is although they can send outgoing traffic fine, they often have problems receiving traffic. This is why the HOPR network relied on Public Relay Nodes (PRNs) to facilitate connections between nodes. For the Dufour release, we want node runners to run “public” nodes, which can directly communicate with each other,
By mapping ports from your router directly to your node, you can make it so your node is essentially “public” and doesn’t need a PRN. You can read more about this in our docs here.
We’re excited that you’ll soon be able to get your hands on the new release and see the enormous improvements. If you find yourself on the waitlist, please be patient: We’ll onboard you as soon as possible.
Dr Sebastian Bürgel,
HOPR Founder
Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G
Forum: https://forum.hoprnet.org
Staking: https://stake.hoprnet.org
Bounties: https://bounties.hoprnet.org
Playground: https://playground.hoprnet.org
