Development Update — 21st August

Published in

Tangram

3 min readAug 21, 2019

It’s almost been a month since our last update. The team has been hard at work preparing the release of test-net1, which is hoped to be released by the end of Q3 as planned.

We are aiming to release test-net1 at the end of this month, 31st August 2019 —(not Tue 2020), and currently we’re on track to hit that milestone 🤞.

Development update and summary

Currently the team is working in 3 streams (in priority), these include:

Consensus (Blockmania) with SWIM (Gossip protocol — membership)
Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
Implementation of unlinkability (Final piece of the Tangram).

Over the past couple of weeks, we have been finalising and validating implementation of the test vectors for test-net1. With this underway, more of the core functionalities and features will be detailed in depth on release day:

States
Messages
MessagePool
Membership
SWIM protocol

Up until this point there have been many bugs squashed, and successful porting the code of Blockmania from Go to C#.

A user guide for test-net1 will be prepared, and will be released and updated following the test-net release. Detailed instructions will be provided, including how to build, install and get started with using and participating in test-net1, along with some extra tips and tricks.

Other areas where we can use the community’s help and support involve ‘breaking things’ and beginning to focus on different threat models. We will aim to provide more details and a threat model cheat-sheet at a later date.

PoS Updates:

Lottery and Stake POCOs;
Initial LotteryService;
Ticket commitments.

Breaking down Tangram’s consensus mechanism: Part 1

Distributed consensus algorithm — A walkthrough on BFT & pBFT and more…

medium.com

v0.7 Release — Distributed Networking

Introduction

medium.com

Identified bugs and status (Cypher — CLI Wallet)

A complete list of bugs can be found here. Thinking of contributing to the code? Connect with any of the Core and/or Community managers OR simply create an issue/pull request!

I ran into a bug, how can I help?

We’re looking to improve on the first test-net for future ones. If you identify any bugs or security issues, you are more than welcome to report these by opening a ticket here: Github. You can also discuss this further in any one of our channels. We do appreciate if you’re able to share your .log file along with steps to recreate the issue — these can be emailed to dev@getsneak.org

You can find your .log file in the following location:

Navigate to your root directory;
Open Cypher> bin > Release > netcoreapp2.2 > publish > cypher-2019<date>.log;
Email: dev@getsneak.org

Are you a new user?

A beginners guide (click here) was proposed by the community and has been recently released. This guide helps to provide new users a more of a ‘frictionless’ experience when downloading, installing and running Cypher. For more experienced new users, abbreviated installation instructions can be found here.