Witnet January 2024 Roundup

Published in

The Witnet Oracle Blog

3 min readFeb 2, 2024

Hey GM everyone!

Here is a breakdown of the Witnet January community call. The call took place at 5pm CET on January 31, 2024. The development community has been heads down building and working hard on making progress on the Witnet 2.0 Roadmap.

New WIPS

There are several new WIPs (Witnet Improvement Proposals) in the works. One WIP is adding several new RADON operators and the other is expanding the rules to improve the handling of RADON errors.

Some of the new proposed RADON operators are:

RadonArray.pick(indexes) -> RadonArray
RadonMap.alter(keys, innerScript) -> RadonMap
RadonMap.pick(keys) -> RadonMap
RadonMap.stringify() -> RadonString

These new operators would expand the capabilities of how smart contract developers can query. Giving them a finer control of custom data sources, which are often not uniform. This is still a work in progress as defining the specification requires updates to the node software and also the witnet solidity contracts used to construct requests.

The second WIP about extended error handling addresses some unique edge cases while also better categorizing the errors. It has a draft and discussion on GitHub.

Wallet Updates

During January, both Sheikah and myWitWallet have seen updates and improvements.

Sheikah had all of the dependencies updated, including updating to the newest version of Vue3. This has been a long time coming and needed to more effectively make updates in the future when we look to witnet 2.0.

There was a new release of myWitWallet, version 1.0.2. In this update, the wallet was upgraded to the most recent version of Flutter, which required fixing some style issues for certain devices. The permissions on Android devices for saving signed messages as JSON files was fixed. The bug relating to incorrect wallet types was also resolved in this version.

Witnet 2.0 Progress

Due to the network issue that took place in December, we had a critical update and hardfork, which resulted in all node operators needing to upgrade there version of witnet-rust to 1.7.0 and 1.7.1. While the network is back in a healthy state, some exchanges are slow to update their nodes and have paused withdrawals until they can update their systems.

With 1.7.1 and the network back in a healthy state, attention has been given to the Witnet 2.0 roadmap in regards to Staking. The workflow for staking is complete. The “Stakes” structure, that tracks the total stake in the network, also now allows for multiple withdrawers to stake to a single validator. A protocol version controller was introduced and implemented which allows nodes to switch between protocol versions on the fly. This is needed to support legacy transactions after staking goes live. The ability to bootstrap a network on 1.x or 2.x has been implemented. This bootstrapping mechanism is important for the next steps of running a testnet.

Advocate Program

Season 4 of the Witnet Advocate program had a slow start, partly due to the network incident in December, but it is picking up steam as more and more people submit work and share with the community. The participants so far have been evenly split between brand new advocates, and those returning from season three.

The program is meant to be flexible, and to give new participants a chance to earn some $WIT, the list of tasks will stay the same and only have new tasks added, none will be removed. If an advocate wished to submit the same task twice, they can, but the newer one needs to be better quality to get approved.

Thanks for reading!

The month of January has been really busy! Mostly with the development community heads down focused on shipping Witnet 2.0 as soon as possible. We also have seen an increased interest in the Advocate Program as more people become aware of it.

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