We are delighted to see all Grin fans here! The team usually doesn’t like to share a lot about the plans, but sometimes they go public. The astonishing announcement is finally out! Grin is making network-wide upgrades through four scheduled hard forks in the first two years after launch, as it was previously mentioned and the next upgrade is scheduled to the mid-January, 2020. Apart from updating their binaries in order to transact after the upgrade, users are not required to do anything. Stored grins will not be affected.
Furthermore, Yeastplume reported that the previous few weeks had been fairly intense in a lines-of-code-added type way, and the next few are likely to be full-on ‘getting ready for a release.’ Previous to that though, the batch of lifecycle functions was done, tests written and merged. The lifecycle API functions and all the work needed to support that is now officially done. A lot of testing and work was arranged to fix inconsistencies with the wallet API secrets, the source of a few unnecessary bugs and potential (mild) security hazards. The Online Transacting via TOR Hidden Services is now opened. There are 99 open issues in /grin, and 31 open issues in /grin-wallet; Merged PRs — 9 in /grin, 2 in /grin-wallet, with 5 unique contributors.
By the way, you may know that the main decisions are made through online meetings of the team. The dev meeting agreed on a release date for v2.1.0, discussed the audit report progress, and reviewed RFCs. The last governance meeting discussed grincon1, and the bootstrapping of community & moderation sub-teams. Grin remains popular in the whole cryptocommunity — it was frequently discussed and compared to other MW projects. Learn more and get acquainted! Some recent news include: the video of Hashmap’s Grin talk at the Web3 summit; Kargakis that confirmed to speak about Grin at Hackers Congress in Prague; Innosilicon that issued an update regarding Grin miners; Gary announced a shift of focus towards a new grin fork that aims to be a blockchain for non-collateralised stable coins. As part of that, Gary also resigned from the Grin core team, but will still be contributing towards the project. Grin has a robust community, and Grin enthusiasts are ready to support anything that takes place. The number of subscribers in social networks is increasing — if you are not a Grin fan still, you’d better join them. Follow Paradigm and beat others to the draw!
Development
- Merged PRs: 7 in /grin | 0 in /grin-wallet | 5 unique contributors
- Last dev meeting agreed on a release date for v2.1.0, discussed the audit report progress, and reviewed RFCs.
- There are 99 open issues in /grin, and 36 open issues in /grin-wallet.
- The next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tuesday Sep 17 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Dev on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.
RFCs
Draft
- Relative kernels [node-dev]
- Asynch Transacting via Relays [wallet-dev]
- Multiple named wallets [wallet-dev]
Open
- Online Transacting via TOR Hidden Services [wallet-dev]
Final Comment Period
- Variable size kernels [node-dev]
Accepted
-
Closed
-
Ecosystem
- Update Friday, Sept 6th 2019
The previous few weeks had been fairly intense in a lines-of-code-added type way and the next few are likely to be full-on ‘getting ready for a release’. Previous to that though, the aforementioned batch of lifecycle functions was done, tests were written and merged, so he very much urge anyone who uses the wallet API to get the latest from master and start using the V3 API. It’s not quite final (he’ll be adding a couple more functions to deal with passwords and BIP passphrases before calling that API complete for now,) but what’s there now is pretty much what the 2.1.0 release will look like.
- Update Friday, Sept 13th, 2019
All very straightforward this week, mostly getting through whatever issues remain for the upcoming 2.1.0 release.
- Firstly, the lifecycle API functions and all the work needed to support that is now officially done! Very happy to have these in place as it should now be relatively easy for anyone to come along and create a Grin wallet, and not have to worry about writing special code to create and instantiate wallets, etc. This is the major feature of 2.1.0, so again all Grin wallet developers everywhere are encouraged to start playing with it now (the older v2 API isn’t going away in this release, but the lifecycle functions aren’t available in it).
- Next](https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin-wallet/pull/216 2) (as opposed to outputs), which should be a more robust approach overall to confirming transactions as well as fix a nasty issue where a transaction won’t confirm on the receiver end if there are no change outputs (doh).
Also been thinking a little bit about a helper library (discussed in the wallet dev channel) that includes both the node and wallet libraries, spins up both and exposes the APIs directly into Node.js as an NPM package. Not sure if this is getting a little deep into ‘community’ territory and whether it’s something we want to maintain long term, but on the plus side, it would be good to have at least a sample starter project that anyone versed in js/css can just pick up and run with. With a large chunk of work out of the way, the next issues to pay attention to, in no particular order:
- The one true method of transaction exchange, much discussion has been going on around this, which I’d like to catch up on and weigh in on very soon.
- Implementing a proper interactive CLI mode to the default wallet (in addition to the existing ‘one invocation per operation’) method it currently uses. (All of the work for the lifecycle functions needed to happen before this)
- Chain scanning as part of normal operation (trying to eliminate the need for grin-wallet check)
- Multiple wallets per installation
- The node helper library, as described above
- Long-outstanding bugs/issues within the current list (some of them may not be issues, but need investigating)
And 2.1.0 release work, 3.0.0 release planning etc all as a matter of course on top of this.
- RFC (Variable Size Kernels) is here. The tracking issue is here. Support for kernel serialization/deserialization with protocol version 2 (“variable size kernels”).
Protocol version 1 preserves backward compatibility -
- always serialize/deserialize bytes for fee and lock_height
- always verify these are 0 if unused
Protocol version 2 introduces flexibility -
- only serialize/deserialize fee if applicable for kernel variant
- only serialize/deserialize lock_height if applicable for kernel variant
When writing for the purposes of hashing we use protocol version 1 to maintain backward compatibility. We can only change the serialization strategy for kernel in a HF and not for existing kernels.
These changes only apply to the p2p layer currently — nodes will negotiate protocol version during Hand/Shake and only use v2 if both peers support this.
The local db will continue to use v1 for full backward compatibility. This will be tackled in a separate PR with support for local db migration etc.
The txhashset MMR files will continue to use v1 for full backward compatibility (both on disk and for txhashet.zip archive file during fast sync). See #3011 for separate tracking issue for this.
- According to #64: Android wallet. Covering Sep 09 — Sep 15 2019
Dev
- There are 99 open issues in /grin, and 31 open issues in /grin-wallet.
- Merged PRs: 9 in /grin | 2 in /grin-wallet | 5 unique contributors
- The next bi-weekly developer meeting is scheduled for Tuesday Sep 17 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Dev on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.
Governance
- The last governance meeting discussed grincon1, and the bootstrapping of community & moderation sub-teams.
- Request for funding proposal to hire a full time cryptographer, to be discussed in the next governance meeting.
- The next bi-weekly governance meeting is scheduled for Tue Sep 24 @ 15:00 UTC in grin/Lobby on Gitter. You can add topics to the agenda.
RFCs
Draft
- Relative kernels [node-dev]
- Asynch Transacting via Relays [wallet-dev]
- Multiple named wallets [wallet-dev]
Open
- Online Transacting via TOR Hidden Services [wallet-dev]
Final Comment Period
-
Accepted
- Variable size kernels [node-dev]
Social encounters
- Video of @hashmap’s Grin talk at the Web3 summit is up.
- @kargakis confirmed to speak about Grin at Hackers Congress in Prague.
- Innosilicon issued an update regarding Grin miners.
- #64: Android wallet. Covering Sep 09 — Sep 15 2019
- Ironbelly has launched on Android, still in beta, but on mainnet.
- @garyyu announced a shift of focus towards a new grin fork that aims to be a blockchain for non-collateralised stable coins. As part of that, Gary also resigned from the Grin core team, but will still be contributing towards the project.
Upcoming events
- Oct 4–6 2019, Prague, CZ: @kargakis at #HCPP19
Partnerships and team members
With regards to partnerships, they have no partnerships at the moment, and no foreseeable plans to establish any.
- ANNOUNCEMENT: Announcing the Grin Community subteam — help organize Grincon1!: @lehnberg wrote: As part of our governance process and following discussion in last week’s meeting, we are launching the community subteam…
Rumors
About Grin
Social media metrics
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Grin Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Grin coingecko.com.
