August Development Update
Without a doubt, the biggest achievement of the last month has been the successful release of RenVM Testnet. It has now been running smoothly for two weeks, and we have been able to gather the first bits of feedback from other projects and the general community.
We encourage everyone to get started with RenVM Testnet, read our docs, work through our tutorials, and check out our examples. Even if you’re not a developer, you can try out RenVM Testnet by using our DEX demo.
One of the core purposes of RenVM Testnet is to find bugs and get suggestions about what to change/improve before RenVM Mainnet is released. In the last two weeks, we have received a lot of feedback and are working to improve RenVM Testnet accordingly.
- Support for Bitcoin SegWit addresses is being added. This will allow for wider support of the different wallets used by the Bitcoin community.
- Support for Lightning Network is being explored. The goal is to decrease the latency introduced by waiting for Bitcoin confirmations.
- Support for Google Cloud Platform has been added to the Darknode CLI thanks to contributions by our community. Soon, users will be able to run Darknodes using Google Cloud Platform. This marks a step towards greater decentralisation.
- Memory leaks in the transaction pool were found, and have been fixed. This improves the overall stability of RenVM.
- Data in persistent storage is periodically garbage collected. This reduces the storage requirements of RenVM.
You can have your say by chatting with us on Telegram, opening suggestions on our GitHub, or filling out our demo feedback form.
As usual, the team has also been hard at work improving RenVM in other ways. Our goals currently are to improve stability, performance, blockchain support, and prepare our codebase for auditing.
RenVM
- The next version of Hyperdrive is ready, undergoing testing, and undergoing integration into RenVM. These upgrades should make Hyperdrive faster and more resilient to unexpected crashes. However, the core focus of these upgrades is to make Hyperdrive easier to understand and therefore easier to review and audit. This is fundamental to ensuring the correctness of our implementation.
- The next version of RZL sMPC is under development and will introduce pre-computations that significantly increase the peak performance of RenVM from 10 TPS to over 100 TPS (these numbers are based on our initial conservative estimates). Like the next version of Hyperdrive, these improvements also make RZL easier to understand, review and audit.
- Support for Bitcoin Cash is under development. Bitcoin Cash was chosen as the next token to be supported because it is easy to support (as are most Bitcoin forks), and it is very liquid.
Darknodes & Command Center
We have released our new Command Center:
https://dcctestnet.republicprotocol.com
The Command Center is a place where everyone can go to see what is happening on RenVM, and to manage their Darknodes. Once per fortnight, we will be deploying the latest features to the new Command Center. Since the last update we have:
- Added a new Overview tab that displays high-level information about the network. This includes a map of Darknodes all around the world, the number of Darknode registered, the total amount of fees that have been earned, and more.
- Added a new Hyperdrive tab that shows the latest blocks and transactions that have been executed. It also links to the external transactions on the respective underlying blockchains (i.e. Ethereum, Bitcoin, and/or ZCash).
Please keep in mind this is the first release of our new Command Center, so while it is basic at the moment, many more features will be added over the comings weeks!
The last month has been one of our busiest, but it has also been one of the most motivating. There is so much in store for the next few months; RenVM is improving rapidly, and we are more confident than ever about the road to RenVM Mainnet.
— Loong Wang, CTO, Ren
