Development Update — 21st Sept, 2017
Hello Rocket Poolers! With the presale for the RPL token starting almost two weeks ago, it’s been a busy few weeks with organising participants, deploying the token contract + presale sale agent and fielding numerous video calls and emails. Happy to say though that with the presale running successfully, there’s also been time to get some solid work on Rocket Pools contracts and smart node service scripts done.
RPL Presale
With Rocket Pools RPL token presale beginning on the 9th of September and allocations for the presale beginning two weeks before that, it was quickly allocated in it’s entirety after just 3 days and all on word of mouth from people excited about the project. Many thanks to all those who participated and shown support for the project.
As it currently stands, about 40% of Rocket Pools RPL tokens remain to be minted. As the presale was a white listed sale to long time Rocket Pool supporters and larger entities, the following public crowd sales will be open to everyone and will use a proportional distribution model to guarantee everyone who participates some tokens, regardless of the size of the contribution or the time it was given. Currently the first of these public crowd sales will begin in late October with more concrete dates to be given in the near future. All updates and dates will be announced in the Rocket Pool Slack before anywhere else.
Development
While the presale has been running, work has been full steam ahead on Rocket Pool. Original development started on Rocket Pool in late 2016 and with Solidity being a new language, it is undergoing constant updates, so part of the work put in over the last few weeks has been updating Rocket Pool in full to run with and utilise the strengths of the latest Solidity 0.4.15.
Contract Updates
- Added new addressBook method to simplify contract address lookups. This means that in the future, Rocket Pool can add new contracts to join onto existing contracts easily.
- Testrpc the popular local blockchain software recently added some changes which caused a few of the existing unit tests to fail. These methods have now been updated.
- Solidity 0.4.15 fixed an existing minor bug which had an effect on how Rocket Pools Minipool contracts read data from their delegate contract. This required adding new inline assembly code (low level) to allow the Minipool contracts to function as they did previously. Certainly more work than your average fix, but turned out great.
- Many other minor additions and optimisations.
Smart Nodes
Rocket Pool isn’t only made of contracts, a big part of what makes Rocket Pool unique is its smart nodes. Smart nodes in the Rocket Pool network can listen to the main contract and receive commands, plus check in with the main contract on a regular basis to report on their server load which helps with load balancing users who stake with Rocket Pool. Future smart nodes will also be able to talk to other smart nodes directly and also attempt to automatically remote reboot other nodes that have become unresponsive. All these functions will be possible regardless of which cloud provider the node is hosted on.
In order to be smarter than your average node, Rocket Pools smart nodes have background services that run along side the node software which communicates with the Ethereum blockchain. These services help the node listen for instructions from Rocket Pools smart contracts and also allow the smart node to talk back to the contracts and report on various things such as it’s current server load.
These scripts have been in prototype form until now. The first full versions of these service scripts are now underway and already making great progress.
Talking Rocket Pool and Dapps
For those of you in Australia and more specifically the Brisbane region, I’ll be giving a talk to the Ethereum Brisbane meetup group on the 4th October. Will be giving a high level overview of the differences betwen PoW/PoS as well as a rundown on what Rocket Pool is, how it works and some general info on decentralised apps. If you are in the region, please drop by for a chat.
Rocket Pool Contact
If you’re new to Rocket Pool or have any questions, we invite you to please checkout our website and contact us there or join our slack chat group to get all news and updates before they are posted anywhere else.
