SpankChain Development Update 004— November 25, 2017
Good day happy Spankers! Now that the auction has successfully completed the SpankChain team wanted to take a moment to update our community on milestones, token details, and next steps!
Key milestones Achieved:
- Successfully built and launched a custom, blind, same price, State Channel Auction
- Successful Spork testing method developed & implemented
- Off Chain Processing method developed and implemented
- Successful distribution to Metamask wallets of token holders
Validating Our Finite Stake Machine
We needed to process off-chain bids in order to successfully conclude our auction and transfer the ETH staked (deposited) during the auction. Anticipating this event, we abided by best practices implementing unit tests and held many simulated auctions to provide a level of confidence that the contract code would function as expected. But how do you ensure you know all scenarios? The realm of possibilities, while finite, can be quite large. So we decided to spork the main net.
Similar to a fork and a spoon, a spork is a divergence of a chain that allows developers to know what would happen to a set of transactions if they were to be processed. Inspired by this article, we thought that this technique could not only be applied to past events but could also help “predict” future events. Using this technique turned out to be invaluable. Inevitably there were some edge cases that we did not anticipate that were exposed from our spork.
Hustl and Hodl
After successfully concluding the auction and fixing edge cases, community members discovered that we had made a unit conversion mistake. No funds were lost and were were able to deploy a fix. We were “moving fast” and focused on making sure that our hybrid system worked correctly that we overlooked a simple unit conversion bug. This retrospective of the infamous NASA unit conversion mistake sends chills down our spine, turning any condescending thoughts to sympathy and understanding.
But there was an underlying issue in the culture of NASA’s space exploration at the time, Cook said.
“‘Better, faster, cheaper’ was the mantra at the time,” Cook said. “Certainly that project was trying to do a whole lot for a limited amount of money.”
Luckily for us, no funds were lost, nonetheless — no excuses, lesson learned! We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused. Since we are dealing with a blockchain we can’t “move fast and break things” so we are setting processes in place that allow us to continue to “hustl and hodl”. We believe this requires investing in development tools without sacrificing product delivery expectations. This is truly exciting because there is full confidence in the team that we will be able to meet these goals. Most importantly, this would not have been possible without those who believed in us. From the entire SpankChain team, thank you!
