October Development Update
Last month we published the RenVM Mainnet Release Plan. For those who haven’t checked it out yet, we highly recommend that you do. It lays out the current plan for RenVM and what to expect in the future.
The first step in this release plan is Chaosnet. Last month, working towards Chaosnet was the primary focus for our dev team. This month has been no different, and we continue to make strides in our progress. In fact, this month we began the deployment of our own Darknodes to Chaosnet, which marks the final stage of testing before Chaosnet is released to the public.
Reminder: Even though Chaosnet supports BTC/ZEC/BCH mainnets interoperating with Ethereum Mainnet, it is not intended for production applications. Chaosnet is a pre-production environment for testing RenVM against live mainnet infrastructure, and for its economic incentives.
So with that said, let’s dive into what we have been working on.
RenVM
- The new z0 codebase — the engine within RenVM that runs secure multi-party computations — has been deployed to our internal Devnet and is undergoing extensive correctness and performance testing. The ahead-of-time computations have improved upon previous performance results and there are still more improvements to come (mostly by adjusting when, and how much, ahead-of-time compute is done).
- Some more optimisations were introduced into z0. Specifically, we merged in our own implementation of secp256k1 that does not require any memory allocations. This keeps the hardware requirements of Darknodes as cheap as possible, and helps improve performance.
- Some liveliness bugs, that appeared after the network had been running for a couple of weeks, were found and fixed. This has also prompted us to make some changes in our local testing environments so that we can catch these bugs more easily.
Darknodes
- We have begun work on Windows support for the Darknode CLI. This will allow Darknode owners to administrate their Darknodes from their Windows machines. This reduces the likelihood of errors (for those who ran a Linux virtual machine on Windows) and makes Darknodes more easily available to more people, a necessity for proper decentralisation.
- We have begun merging in several new features to the Darknode CLI, including upgrading to the latest version of Terraform, and the community contribution for Google Cloud Platform support.
Hyperdrive
- The next version of Hyperdrive was released. It includes more efficient block storage, more hooks into important events that happen through consensus, more documentation, and of course more tests.
Devcon 5
One of the highlights this month was traveling to Osaka, Japan for Devcon 5. Here, our entire dev team met with all sorts of people working on new and exciting projects in the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as other blockchain ecosystems. This was a great opportunity for us to catch up with friends, investors, and some of the new technology that is emerging.
A big focus at Devcon 5 was interoperability. There were a lot of discussions, both planned and free-form, that looked into the challenges and different solutions. It was a good opportunity for the team to be reminded how important the work we are doing with RenVM really is, and how much potential is unlocked for the whole ecosystem when truly decentralised interoperability is realised.
Soon, the problem of interoperability will be far behind us…
— Loong Wang, CTO, Ren
