Taraxa Weekly Tech Update: 2019 Week 39

This week’s major highlight was the launch of Albidum; the initial version release of our testnet. It was the culmination of a lot of late nights and a lot of hard work. Much more work remains to be done, and lots of improvements will be coming to Albidum and future launches. But it marks a major milestone for what will be increasingly a journey undertaken together with a growing Taraxa community.

Taraxacum albidum is a species of dandelion that grows in eastern Eurasia. A member of the Asteraceae, it is a perennial herbaceous plant native to the southern part of Japan.

Taraxa Explorer

• Added server side logging
• Added full block and transaction parameter api for saving data flow
• Fixed chart api bugs due to version changing
• Added node package to manage running local node and synchronize data with node
• Identified some RPC method bugs and began fixing
• Added search result highlighting
• Updated block page to show more detailed info, including all transactions
• Optimizations for a more stylish display of the DAG graph
• Added graph legend
• Adjusted node labels to only show last two when block level grows large
• Pruned early period blocks from graph as it grows

DAG Layer

• Worked to optimize ordering of nonce when broadcasting transactions and proposing blocks, and to catch nonce gaps
• Refactored transaction insertion APIs to remove redundant RLP copy operations for performance improvement
• Created transaction RLP cache map for memory optimization
• Debugged test failures for some outstanding flakey integration tests
• Fixed a bug dealing with DAG block height calculations
• Continued to work on proper transaction nonce gap handling

PBFT Consensus and Execution Schedule Layer

• Removed PBFT unverified block queue from PBFT chain class
• Added unverified blocks table and parents blocks hash map
• Pruned unverified blocks by parent hash for performance optimization
• Modified unverified PBFT blocks pushing behavior
• Added mutex locking for unverified blocks table
• Changed economics model for sortition thresholding and player selection
• Solved other outstanding PBFT issues for player syncing and bootstrapping identified in Albidum testing.

“Albidum” Testnet Release

• Deployed public documentation for joining the testnet
• Published “one-click” easy install scripts and other node running scripts for joining Albidum in the taraxa-ops github repo
• Launched Albidum testnet with a small set of initial nodes!

Stay tuned.

• website: taraxa.io
• blog: medium.com/taraxa-project
• discord: discord.gg/WaXnwUb
• reddit: www.reddit.com/r/Taraxa_Project/
• telegram: t.me/taraxa_project
• twitter: twitter.com/taraxa_project