Public Testnet Weekly Update

Week of December 9, 2019

Hi All —

Hope everyone’s enjoying a nice and not too snowy December so far! Before the quiet of the holidays inevitably hits we have one more big ask — we want to do one coordinated upgrade on the public testnet and we need your help to make it happen!

Some more info below on what that means:

Coordinated upgrade next week — December 17:

Timing: You can begin your upgrade from 19:00 UTC Tuesday, December 17 (2019–12–17T19:00:00Z) to 18:59 UTC Wednesday, December 18 (2019–12–18T18:59:59Z).

How will this work?

• We will have updated documentation for handling the upgrade ready by EOD Friday. This will include the planned height that we will handle the upgrade and also the process for handling the upgrade. Essentially the process involves the following:
• Dumping current state into a new genesis file
• Patching the dumped genesis state for some new parameters
• Wiping state
• Upgrading the node
• Restarting the node

We know there’s no incentive (yet), why should you do this?

• For the health of the network! This is a dry run before we go into the staking competition
• There will be an incentive in the future and we want to be sure you’re ready! In the Quest Competition we’ll run a few coordinated upgrades and reward any node who successfully participates. Think of this testnet upgrade as your best practice run so you’ll be guaranteed to earn tokens in January.

Other notes

• As part of the upgrade next week we will be increasing the expected timeout for a given round. So block creation should no longer be as quick as we are currently seeing. This should hopefully alleviate issues with syncing.

Other updates / reminders

• Sign up for The Quest today!
• Reminder that the competition will start in early January but to get ready the best thing you can do is join the public testnet now
• The competition will kick off with a genesis block of all initial competitors. To be in this block you need to:
• Set up a node on the public testnet
• Sign up for the competition and sign the waiver in this form when you do so

Oasis Labs DevAccelerator Program

• Oasis Labs also just recently announced a DevAcclerator Program to provide additional support for small teams who are building privacy-first user applications on the Oasis Network.
• For those interested you can apply here.
• Also wanted to highlight a new release of the “Developer Spotlight” series Oasis Labs does, this time highlighting a team out of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York using data privacy in the healthcare space.

Dawn Song and Oasis Labs in the NY Times

• Wanted to share a recent article in the NYT about what Oasis Labs is working on — and the long term vision for data privacy and data ownership. It’s a cool article — check it out!