Update summary

The success of RCon3 was a huge call out for dApp developers and node performance testers to prove the robustness of the RChain platform. The release of RSong and Cryptofex are good measures of a milestone achievement. The need for more dApps and performance testing remains paramount for robustness of the platform. The technical team is focused on the details for the release of RNode 0.7, 0.8 and 0.9. The Reflective Ventures team is excited about the closing of its deals with Tesloop and Fanfactor. Greg M officially announces the minimum price for the validator sale to be $0.55. Read on for more detail.

Timeline

Technical updates: Progress on name registry, validators bonding, and message queueing

Reflective Ventures update: eSports and Tesla travel partners

Pithia’s update: 23 companies in the pipeline

Validator update: Minimum validator sale price is $0.55

Marketing update: Priorities are user onboarding and elearning

Announcements

Community members with requests to upload videos to the RChain YouTube channel should go through the marketing team.

RSong acquistion and proxy details have been published in the Github repository.

Contents in brief

Technical updates

Focused on getting detailed release plan for RNode 0.7, 0.8 and 0.9. Medha is working with Mike and Kyle on sharding .

Limiting scope creep is paramount. The team is concerned about locking down what we will deliver for Mercury.

Medha is writing a detailed specification of the Mercury release .

Rholang team

Team to re-assess the block storage architecture.

Name registry is merged. Working on removing the ability to send or listen on forgeable names.

Good progress in making the interpreter stack secure.

Enhanced the algorithm to find the most common ancestors in the DAG to address the invalidbondcache error.

Clique safety oracle will be updated to use it in the memory representation of the DAG. It might speed up to show blocks and other portions of the system.

Validators bonding to finish by the end of this sprint.

Some churn in cost accounting, discovered an issue while implementing matching for the tuplespace. The team is discussing it.

Storage team

Fine-grained locking (disjoint channels) work is progressing, PR will be merged today. Need to test to see if the work pays off. We will know by the end of this week.

Node shutdown issue is fixed.

Work continues on separating Kademlia from the RChain protocol.

Working on message queuing (chunking and unlimited block size), bugs around messages being received. PR is coming this week.

Threading improvement continues.

SRE is moving our Cl solution to a self-hosted Drone solution.

Comments /Q&A: More Rholang and dApp testers needed

Lawrence: Are you getting the testers and test case you need from the community?

Medha: The engagement for node testing is good. I would like to see a lot more on Rholang contract. More engagement would be better.

Greg M: The best testing is for our portfolio companies to be writing dApps against the platform. We’ve open sourced the code for the RSong node demo. It represents a template for others to build their applications on. We would encourage our portfolio companies to grab these, copy and tweak it to suit their application needs. If people would provide us with similar kind of application frameworks, that will be some of the best test harnesses.

Medha: I’ve shared the GitHub repository location for the proxy and the song acquisition for RSong.

Reflective Ventures update

The team closed deals with two companies: Tesloop and Fanfactor .

Pithia update

About 23 companies coming through the pipeline this week.

Tesloop is a southern California based company. They work in the electric and semi-autonomous vehicle space. They are connecting data from those vehicles all the way to ride sharing. They’re already blockchain-tested.

Fanfactor is an e-sports and fan engagement multimedia platform. They crowdfund interactions between sports fans and their teams and use blockchain for gamification and low-friction global payments.

A lot of companies are too early or not ready to move over to RChain yet, so the team will be reaching them in a couple of months.

Two companies with female founders, one doing crypto analytics and taxes on the blockchain.



Validator update

The minimum price for the validator sale is set at $0.55.

Discounts will be given if spot price goes above $0.55.

Greg M mentions some of the progress made by the community: The tech: Cryptofex and RSong dApp demo with a great market potential The community: about 2000 viable community members with most being technologically savvy. The portfolio companies: about 25 companies are already signed up to build dApps on the RChain platform.

Greg Heuss hopes to have about 30-35 companies using the RChain protocol by the end of the year.

The bounty system is on the reboot. Interested persons should comment on GitHub issue #783 .

Marketing update

The new RChain website is launched. More updates will be made over the next couple of months.

The new member onboarding process is top priority.

Will be doing a proof of concept demo in Tampa Bay meetup: a Raspberry Pi coin faucet for loyalty tokens .

Joshy Orndorff will be syncing with Ned Robinson to set a curriculum for developer education around dApp development.

Meetup programs and community building efforts are in progress.

The team will be working to expand and empower the European and Asian communities.

Notes from comments/Q/A