Stealth Development Summary 2019
Ho Ho Ho! Stealth Wishes You and Your Family All the Best for the Holidays and 2020
2019 was a great year for all of us at Stealth, and we hope it was the same for you. As you have seen from our 2019 development summary blog below, we made a lot of progress in our quest to become the leading privacy-focused coin, and we can’t wait to share more milestones in the coming months.
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Stealth Development Summary 2019
We’ve enjoyed a very productive year, achieving numerous important development milestones. The Stealth team was visible at several major conferences, and our overall community and support continues to grow.
In the grand scheme, 2019 marks the year of Junaeth, Stealth’s unique and groundbreaking consensus protocol. Originally called the “Quantum Proof-of-Stake” protocol, Junaeth features five second blocks, scalability, and support for cryptographic privacy.
Junaeth development has been guided by its whitepaper, which provides a blueprint for its functionality. From there code was created starting first with the primary data structures, then adding operational code. The key data structure of the Junaeth protocol is the StealthNode registry, which contains information for all StealthNodes and their scheduling via a Queue.
In terms of Junaeth development milestones, the year started with the implementation of the block production and registry synchronization loops, the two most critical processing threads in quantum Proof-of-Stake (Junaeth). These threads are different from other consensus systems, and they help make Junaeth vastly more efficient than any of current PoS, dPoS or PoW models.
The block index data structure was then updated to facilitate the new block production loop which ultimately helps to speed up the validation of later blocks. This index also includes the staker ID and block height, both required to uniquely identify an unsigned block.
Registry persistence was also addressed, ensuring that the registry is synchronized when loading block data from disk, and ensuring that the registry state information will survive client restarts or crashes. Registry persistence exists solely as snapshots taken every 720 blocks.
Staker aliases were also added to the protocol. Aliases are unique names for StealthNodes. They live forever and cannot be changed. Staker prices were also finalized, forecasting that an optimal number of stakers would generate an expected ROI of 10–20% earnings in XST based on the original price.
Additional coding milestones for Junaeth were achieved, including;
Timestamp Attack Deterrence: The protocol will heavily punish StealthNodes that cause other StealthNodes to miss blocks by virtue of manipulating their own block timestamps.
Block Validation for Junaeth: Junaeth blocks are quite different from PoW or PoS blocks, requiring new validation code.
Transaction Validation for Junaeth: Junaeth transactions have unique structural and input requirements, which necessitated much new validation logic.
StealthNode Ternary Key Design (Owner, Delegate, Controller): They key benefit of having separate authorities for ownership, block production (“Delegate), and monitoring (“Controller”) is that owners need not be operators, and additionally a smart contract can manage operator payouts.
Junaeth Operations Implementation (Purchase StealthNode, Set Key, Enable/Disable, Claim Rewards): Owners, operators, and monitors, must interact with the blockchain to buy, enable, and disable StealthNodes. These interactions required coding the logic that translates specific transactions into modification of the blockchain.
RPC Commands for Junaeth Operations: Not only must operations be coded, the client must provide standardized commands for specifying these operations.
Registry Replay on Startup: It is critical to restore the state of the registry after shutdowns and blockchain reorganizations.
Once all of these milestones were achieved we moved Junaeth into an internal testnet (A.K.A devnet), which proved to be both instructive, and very successful.
To create the most stable Junaeth network we moved from a standard system clock to a new system that uses asynchronous timing, with new blocks carrying timestamps that advance the queue.
In May of 2019 we were pleased to release the code for Stealth’s Junaeth to GitHub for public review. At the same time we invited members of our community to submit suggestions for a new name for our staking token, with the winning entry of StealthNode announced in June.
In September we moved Junaeth into public testnet, engaging many of our community members to help test and monitor the StealthNotes, and
If you missed it, here is a link to the video where James discusses the origins of the Stealth cryptocurrency, our grand vision, where Junaeth fits into that vision, how Junaeth works, the current performance status of the Junaeth protocol (at that time), some Junaeth functionality, and a brief discussion of the public testnet.
In October we announced the new name for our high-performance consensus protocol; Junaeth. We refer to the release of our protocol as “the dawn of blockchain meritocracy”.
Also in 2019 we were very proud to have James speak at both the Elev8 conference in Los Angeles and at Consensus NY. Both conferences provided the team with many new contacts and strategic partners, as well as gave us the opportunity to catch up on the development projects of many other emerging tokens. Stealth will continue to have a presence at the most advantageous conferences moving forward.
Finally, Stealth R&D LLC successfully registered Stealth as a legal trademark, helping to ensure the integrity of our brand.
This coming year will be full of nice surprises, including the soon-to-be-released new Stealth corporate website. Not only will it rock from a design perspective, it will also include our updated road map, information on pending releases, and very exciting news on some new apps that are in development.
We look forward to growing our community engagement and support, and as we move into the New Year, we’re excited about fulfilling our road map goals, ensuring that Stealth continues to be one of the most respected, long-running privacy coins in the industry.
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The Stealth Team
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