LT Testnet — First Results and Release of Wallet Version 0.16.2

Since the launch of the LT Testnet and its accompanying testing activities, we are quite busy to observe and work on the individual elements that make up our blockchain. We have received very valuable feedback from you, mostly regarding the wallets and their operation.

We now want to share with you our first update regarding the progress we have made.

Through the transaction competition, bounty participants have stressed the network as much as they can — generating well over 10 million transactions within a single week. Some blocks reached as many as 6,000 transactions, still far from reaching the limits of the LT blockchain.

And the best of it: the network performed very stable, despite the fact that many of the community nodes got to their hardware limits (mostly Raspberry PIs and other low-end devices) which implies that we have already simulated the worst case scenario for the blockchain and have successfully mastered it.

Key Facts:

• The LT testnet is being maintained by more than 250 public testnet nodes
• We have throttled down our own staking weight to below 25% of the total, which means that the vast majority of the network is maintained by community nodes as we speak
• An average transaction has a data size of around 180 Bytes. At the current block size of 2 MB, this puts the maximum capacity of the LT network at 11,000+ transactions per block or almost 350 TPS.
• 10,000,000+ transactions were generated within 1 week, mostly by nodes participating in the transaction competition
• Individual blocks reached as many as 6,000 transactions regularly (Example)
• This is despite our community not having any specific expertise on blockchain, using regular household computers (including many low-end devices such as Raspberry Pis), having regular household internet connections and conducting them in uncontrolled environments across the globe.
• Furthermore, we have intentionally refused to provide any instructions on how to optimize their devices or connections — in order to generate as much chaos as possible (increasing the likelihood of breaking things).
• As a result, participants have used wildly different strategies to generate as many transactions as possible.
• Many of the block producing nodes were in distant geolocations with flawed connections, increasing the odds for forks, stale blocks and overall collisions.
• We have reached periods of 200 TPS despite those worst case conditions (explicitly targeted by us) outlines above, which is an important characteristic of our testing methodology. → Mastering the worst case.

Thus, we are now quite confident that our network performs well on its key metrics. In the coming weeks and months, we will dig deeper into the data, perform more advanced tests and try to break the network as hard as we can. If we fail to break it, we will consider ourselves successful.

While the decentralized network performed healthily, some bounty participants reported their wallet application freezing or having difficulties in connecting to the network. Most of the cases were related to insufficient hardware equipment, which was not able to withstand the extreme load of transactions. (If your device is running out of hard-disk space, you can prune your wallet)

For other cases, we have developed the following solutions during the past two weeks:

1. We have upgraded the seeder to provide 3 alternative DNS, which will immediately provide 4 starting nodes instead of 1. This should improve the connectivity of nodes significantly.
2. We have upgraded our STUN server in order to have a direct observation what the nodes are doing and how this affects their connectivity with the blockchain.
3. We have fixed the telemetry connectivity issue (some nodes could not connect to our telemetry server due to firewall settings).
4. STUN is now an optional feature and can be activated/deactivated on the client interface (Settings → Options → Network → Enable STUN). This way, we want to ensure that the ISP throttling problem does not get triggered by STUN during high network loads (which we believe was the root of some connectivity problems). → Activating STUN can improve your connectivity and staking performance. Should you experience connectivity issues after activating it, please contact us.

Update your wallet now to version 0.16.2 in order to take advantage of the improvements described above (takes only 2 minutes). The update is recommended to everyone.

Do you want to join our Testnet Bounty? It is not too late!

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