May Development Update
The release of the latest version of RenVM began rolling out during May and has so far been a smooth process without errors. There is still a small amount of work to do to finalise the release, but we expect everything to be finished within the next week or two. So far, no downtime has been incurred. In the meantime, the team has been very busy with new chain additions.
Blockchain Blitz
This month, the major focus for the development team has been the blockchain blitz. This has been an effort to add support for as many new chains as we can, in the shortest period possible. The main reason for doing so is: (a) of course supporting new chains, but also (b) understanding how effective our recent efforts have been at making new chains easy to add.
Every chain that is added requires: adding support for the chain to the Multichain codebase, deploying the respective nodes to the Multichain cluster, deploying smart contracts to the respective chain, configuring the new asset/chain combinations in the Lightnodes, Darknodes, and Loki, and finally adding support for the new chain into the bridge UI. We do this for our internal development network, the public Testnet, and of course Mainnet.
We have already launched two new chains: Polygon and Fantom. We have another one upcoming and have support for three more ready to go (and are waiting to coordinate with them). Although we anticipated ending the blitz at the end of May — and indeed the bulk of the work is now over — we still have a few more to chains to release in the next week or two. On average, we will have released one chain every week! And although we would have loved to get this done faster, this is still a monumental achievement for cross-chain interoperability.
RenVM | Claimless Fee System
Somehow, the blockchain blitz was not the only thing the development team found time to work on this month. Over the last month, we finished implementing and testing the new “claimless fee system”. This is a much-anticipated feature that allows Darknode operators to earn fees, but not have to spend gas each month to claim those fees.
Although we are very close to releasing this feature, this month we also worked with some Darknode pooling services to find ways to ensure that the “claimless fee system” was one that worked with Darknode pooling. To this end, we have a little bit more work to do until we can roll this feature out. We are still hopeful that the next epoch — set to end in a few hours — will be the last epoch before the new “claimless fee system” goes live.
Secret Compute | sMPC in an enclave
It has been a little while since our MPC technology was discussed. But, we have slowly been making improvements to its implementation, named Rogue. These improvements aim to make Rogue more readable, more performant, and more stable (includes a number of minor bug fixes). This month, we began integrating these improvements into the Darknode. Next month, we expect to begin testing these improvements in our internal development network.
We have also started running our development network Darknodes inside AWS Nitro (the AWS version of secure hardware). While we have successfully run Darknodes in local SGX environments, this is the first time that our development network has — in the cloud — run on secure hardware. Next, we will prepare deployment scripts to make running Darknodes in AWS Nitro easy to do, so that our upcoming Greycore operators can take advantage of its security.
Soon the latest RenVM release will be fully rolled out, the blockchain blitz will be over, and claimless fees will be implemented. At this point, we will turn to onboarding Greycore members to the Testnet environment running inside secure hardware, running all of the latest and greatest features of RenVM.
This will be an exciting moment for the protocol, and a step towards greater decentralisation, so make sure to stay tuned.
Until next time,
Loong
About Ren
Ren is an open protocol that enables the movement of value between blockchains.
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