Xmas Development Update — 23rd Dec, 2018
Well what a year its been! From bull markets, to bear markets; from Casper 0.2.0 as a contract, to Casper as part of Serenity; from Rocket Pool alpha, to actual beta release; from Rocket Pool 1.0, to Rocket Pool 2.0; from working as a solo project venture to working with ConsenSys Ventures… phew!
It’s been an adventurous year no doubt, one that’s seen Rocket Pool grow from alpha release to beta release and in turn growing the team in step. With only a week or so left in the year, we thought it’d be time for an overview of what development work Rocket Pool has made lately since our last announcement article that covered our design for a decentralised staking network with Rocket Pool 2.0.
Not only have we been busy working away on Rocket Pool 2.0, we’ve also been doing a bit of travelling spreading the good word, most notably of which was Devcon4 in Prague, so we’ll spend a short bit giving our insights on that too since it is THE event for Ethereum developers.
Rocket Pool — Wait, what, who?
If you’re not familiar with Rocket Pool, here’s a quick run-down before we get into the details of the development update.
Rocket Pool is a next-generation Ethereum proof of stake (PoS) infrastructure service, designed to be highly decentralised, distributed and compatible with Casper 2.0, the new consensus protocol that Ethereum will transition to in late 2019.
We offer any user, business, corporation, pool, wallet provider, exchange, hedge fund — just about any service — the ability to provide their users with the option to earn interest on their ether holdings for a fixed term without worrying about maintaining an extensive staking infrastructure, just plug and play.
Rocket Pool has a long history in Ethereum and work on it originally began in late 2016 after the Mauve paper was released by Vitalik Buterin. This provided an early functional spec for Ethereum’s new consensus protocol called Casper which would allow users to earn interest on a deposit of Ether. Since then, Rocket Pool has grown and evolved into a next-generation staking network, aiming to allow businesses and their users to earn interest on their ether and to empower users who wish to stake on their own node by providing them with additional income on top of interest awarded by Casper.
Rocket Pool isn’t just a whitepaper, it’s actual code. Be sure to read the Rocket Pool 101 — FAQ for more information.
Devcon4 — Prague
The highlight of the year travel wise, was non other than Devcon4 in beautiful Prague. Devcon is the yearly Ethereum Developers conference where thousands gather, made up of developers, enthusiasts, investors and those just wishing to find an excuse to go to which ever exotic location its hosted at.
This year, the core development team from Rocket Pool made the trip from Australia — a fairly brutal 24hrs+ worth of travel and an ungodly time difference made the first day or two a little taxing, but we persevered non the less. Inspired by the location and lots of coffee, we found our feet in no time.
Ethereum 2.0 Workday
Rocket Pool was lucky enough to attend the invite only Ethereum 2.0 Workday in Prauge the day before Devcon4 started. This was an excellent workshop day run by Danny Ryan a core developer and all round nice bloke. The day was broken up into several breakout groups whos aim were to discuss and work on ways to tackle aspects of Ethereum 2.0 development. The breakout groups that Rocket Pool took a seat in were:
- Client architectures
- State execution
- Network signature aggregation
- UX/DevX/Project Management — how will we transition to Eth2.0
All groups were great and it was great to meet a lot of the other teams involved in the Serenity path for Ethereum.
Generalised Mining and 3rd Party Economy Panel
Rocket Pool was also invited by CoinFund and Cambrial Capital to participate in a panel on Generalised Mining and 3rd Party Economy, this panel was on the first night of Devcon4 and was standing room only, completely packed. It was aimed at discussing a wave of new groups which have taken to market to build mining companies and network-facing services that provision staking and validator nodes. Darren from Rocket Pool participated and did a great job even though it was 4am our time!
You can read more about the event and even watch the video here.
Our Highlights
With so many talks and meetings over the Devcon4 days, we thought we’d give a quick recap of our personal highlights.
Daves
- Ethereum 2.0 Workday — A really great day meeting all teams participating in creating the Ethereum 2.0/Serenity vision. Everyone was a pleasure to talk too.
- Generalised Mining and 3rd Party Economy Panel — This was an absolutely packed event and it was an honour for Rocket Pool to participate in it.
- Vitaliks Keynote — Not much to say really, Vitalik being Vitalik in a funny and really informative way as usual. Great to see the vision for Serenity laid out for the masses.
- Karl’s Plasma Talk — There were a LOT of talks on plasma over several days. Karls stood out as he gave a very good high level overview of all different approaches from Plasma Cash to Plasma MVP and more.
- Raul Jordans Talk — Raul from Prysmatic Labs gave a fantastic talk on Serenity implementer updates and also gave a shout out on the main stage to Rocket Pool. If you want to see this talk, check it out here (Raul starts about 10 mins in).
- Community — Just great to just meet so many in the community who are building Ethereums future and also talking to so many people who’ve heard of Rocket Pool, read our articles or even community members who participate in our beta. Was an absolute pleasure.
Jake
- Karl’s Plasma Talk— Very interesting and high-level; easily understandable unlike some of the other talks. also fantastic presentational style as always from Karl.
- Metamask — The metamask team’s update about all of their UX and devX work, and the new mobile features.
- Solidity 0.5.0 —The solidity 0.5.0 update presentation; super relevant for us and really interesting to hear about using Yul to actually write code in.
- General — Just seeing all of the focus on UX and Plasma since usability and scaling are the big barriers to adoption right now; awesome to see people taking those problems seriously.
- Obviously second joining the bokky brigade too!
Darren
- Raul Jordans Talk — Obviously Raul’s Serenity talk where he mentions Rocket Pool.
- Georgios’s (Loom) plasma cash presentation — for the right use cases it works and is ready to go.
- When Jon Choi couldnt make his presentation and the girl spoke about how bounties and annonimity helps to prevent discrimination.
- Becoming part of the bokky stick wearing brigade.
Development Updates
Onto the main development updates. With our recent release of the Rocket Pool 2.0 whitepaper, primary work on Rocket Pool has focused around building the smart contracts from the ground up to allow it to integrate with the new upcoming Ethereum Serenity milestone.
With the much improved Rocket Pool 2.0 design, all smart contracts are being developed from the ground up with a focus on being gas efficient and implementing good design patterns, such as the new Pub/Sub design pattern Jake wrote about recently.
While the smart contracts are getting a major overhaul, we’re also beginning early work on a GUI for a smart node installer which can turn any regular PC into a fully compatible smart node in the Rocket Pool 2.0 network. No need to run any command line installer (unless you want too, smart nodes on cloud providers will have this option), just start the installer, deposit some of your own ether for staking and monitor your smart node as it receives users from Rocket Pool + much more.
Details Please
For those into the more intricate details of the smart contract and node developments, here’s what’s been primarily worked on in the last 2 months.
Nodes
- Implemented dynamic RPL ratio based on network utilisation.
User Deposits
- Implemented user deposit queue
- Added deposit queue withdrawal functionality
- Added max deposit queue size & dynamic max deposit value
Minipools
- Implemented minipool timeout
- Implemented minipool user & node operator withdrawals (for timed out & withdrawn minipools)
- Implemented active minipool set to decrease time to staking
Validation / Eth 2.0
- Integrated Validator Registration contract as per eth 2.0 spec
- Implemented JS beacon node simulator into testing framework
General
- Implemented PubSub
- Updating available minipool & node indexes via PubSub (on minipool status change)
- Updating total network ether capacity & assigned ether via PubSub (on minipool creation/removal, deposit/withdrawal)
Misc
- Added code test coverage tools
- Increased code test coverage to ~95%
- Updated all contracts to be solc 0.5.0 compatible
Don’t forget, our smart contracts are open source, so you can always dive in and see the updates for yourselves at anytime.
Xmas Wishes
As the year winds down, the Rocket Pool team would like to wish everyone a very safe and happy Xmas. With crypto being such a new and fast paced industry, it’s easy to get lost down the rabbit hole, either watching the price religiously or just working like crazy to stay on top of new developments. So before next year kicks off, be sure to wind down 2018 by spending some quality time with your friends, family and loved ones. I know I’ll be doing that and also enjoying a few homebrews in the process!
So have a safe and merry 2018 and we’ll see you all again in the new year!
Questions or just say hello!
If you have questions or want to know a bit more about us, why not swing by for a chat and say G’day! You can view our website or have a chat with us in our chat room that anyone can join. If chat rooms aren’t your thing, we’re also on Twitter!
