Taraxa Community Update: December 2019

Published in

Taraxa Project

5 min readJan 1, 2020

Happy holidays, fellow Taraxa Supporters! And thanks for sticking with us!

As 2019 winds down, we’re thrilled to share the latest updates of the year and outline our future aspirations. The month of December was mostly focused on developing Taraxa Testnet, growing our team, and spreading the product concept across our communities both in the US and China.

➕ Community

Taraxa and Conflux go to Tsinghua University

Our CEO and Founder Steven went to Beijing and was invited by Tsinghua University, along with Conflux, to share our R&D insights in the field of throughput of public chains with the local and international students at the school. Together with Dr. Yang of @ConfluxChain, we enjoyed amazing interest and feedback!

Taraxa + Celer + Conflux + X-order in Shanghai

We also co-hosted an event in Shanghai with Celer Network and Conflux on blockchain scalability and applications.

Panel at Stanford Club Alumni Meetup

While in China, Steven took part in the alumni gathering of Stanford Club of Shanghai where he had the privilege of serving as the VP of the club in past years. He took part in a panel about blockchain’s technical basics, commercial applications, and legal status.

➕ Insights of the Month

For all the curious minds out there, we released a new blog post to address the question we get at almost every meetup. We broke down how misconceptions about DAG spread false assumptions in the IoT space and outlined Taraxa’s way of leveraging block DAG topology to ensure the immutability and provenance of IoT-generated data.

Over the rest of the month, we’ve been hard at work on our Testnet, but before getting down to the tech, a quick reminder that you can start engaging in our open source development. We already have people contributing, and if you’d like to become one too, go check out our Discord. Okay, now on to the nitty-gritty of the platform development.

➕ Tech Stack Progress

We keep adding improvements to ‘Aphrogenes’ release of Taraxa’s Testnet, having successfully accomplished two sprints of the monthly Testnet upgrade. Along with fixing periodical performance issues in our initial Testnet releases, we’ve been working on replacing proof-of-concept bits of code with robust implementations. We continue to focus on ensuring the network’s overall stability, security, and smart contract system integration.

Here is the breakdown of the core directions of our work.

DAG, block proposal scheme, lambda, VDF, PFBT

A lot of effort has been focused on the efficient block proposal scheme to prevent malicious actors from influencing the network’s output:

On the execution layer, we removed ‘Invalid’ from transaction status, duplicate transactions in PBFT schedule block, and RPC send_pbft_schedule_block

PBFT block, PFBT chain, consensus algorithm

To make sure the consensus algorithm runs smoothly:

PFBT syncing, blockchain network, nodes, RocksDB

To bootstrap the network and sync the nodes:

network synchronization, Aleth, Ethereum, Ethereum block, API, Taraxa EVM, EthService

We made some major progress in facilitating network synchronization and future integrations:

Taraxa code, JSON RPC, get_node_status, database integration, build system

To make it easier for developers to work with Taraxa’s code:

We are now shooting for the roll-out of the next major Testnet release that will feature a block explorer to visualize DAG, block confirmation, unique properties of Taraxa, Metamask wallet integration, and improved documentation of RPC APIs.