RChain update (Debrief 88), 1st August, 2018

Update summary

Medha again opens the hangout with an update from the development team. There has been great progress in the Tuesday node testing sessions, with about 18 peers connected and fixing of the non-deterministic bugs. Validators and those curious about becoming a validator are encouraged to be part of the sessions. The Reflective team records success at their Deal Day, with RumbleMonkey emerging as the winner of the 50,000 RHOC award. The event recorded about 140 attendees. Pithia is moving on with validator onboarding and has its first link with a large angel network. They are also wrapping up due diligence with some of the portfolio companies. There was a lot of interest in validation, and there will be two validator focus groups. There is a call out for serious marketing efforts on RCon3; persons with a lot of connections who might like to attend or with a good marketing idea to should kelly@pyrofex.net. For more detailed updates, please read on.

Timeline

Technical update

Reflective update

Validator update

Other update

Announcements

Content in brief:

Technical update

Working with Jeremy on metrics and performance testing.

Great progress with node testing. Had 18 peers connected and we were able to validate the fix for non-determinism bug & lock synchronization encountered last week.

Rholang team

Stable marriage algorithm for pattern matching is in review.

Reminder syntax for maps and set is in flight.

RSpace doesn’t roll back with CLI and REPL when there is an error. Fix is needed from RSpace team.

The PR for cost accounting is improved. Working on aggregating the cost for single deploy with multiple Rholang programs inside it.

Discovered a bug in concurrence during node testing and already got the PR cut, fixed, and reviewed.

Discovered spurious equivocation and the fix is also in review. Starting work on the challenge protocol for genesis block signing. There will be a threshold of number of signatures in order to approve genesis block.

Registry work in progress; making resources work on unforgeable names by registering them and implementing confirmed methods that eliminates URN request from untrusted code.

More work on sharding. Discovered a need for a lockout / tagout mechanism to ensure it doesn’t hang if a validator unbonds while a transaction is pending.

Added sender information to blocks and updated the GHOST rule to run off the last finalized block.

Due to the backlog in consensus testing and performance work, several members of the Rholang team will help work on consensus.

Cost accounting coming along very nicely.

Storage team

Tomáš Virtus joined the team as an SRE to work closely with Pavel and Sebastian on Kademlia refactor.

We need to implement an endpoint request that a load balancer and monitoring system could use to check for liveness of a bootstrap node.

Block storage work is complete. Need to integrate block storage into Casper.

Node configuration file feature has been merged. The user guide has to be updated with the config changes.

Implemented RSpace support for client “listening on a channel.”

Working on metrics visualisation and building the metrics dashboard in Grafana.

Roscala team

Working on integrating the actor work with the parallelism work.

The Roscala team will be disbanding in order to support the Rholang and Node teams for the Mercury release.

Website

RHOC holders should bookmark https://developer.rchain.coop/token-swap. This is the official and only place to get information on the token swap.

Those interested in being validators, please register your interest on our website.

Prospective validators are encouraged to participate in the Tuesday node testing sessions.

RCon3

Preliminary program for the conference is out.

Round 2 scholarship application open until August 6th.

Demo of how to buy RCon3 ticket with ETHER.

To register for RCon3, click HERE

Discussion/Comment/ Q&A

Greg M: “Do we have a more solid date for when we’ll be able to measure comm events?”

Medha: “The metric to measure comm events is implemented. The Grafana dashboard to view the measurement of metrics of comm events is implemented. I need to be able to point it to a set of nodes and display those comm events across multiple nodes. I’ve got two developers working on that this week, so I hope to be able to demo something next week.”

Rudy: “How are signups going for the conference, and how close to selling out it is?”

Kelly Foster: “As of yesterday, we had 75 registrants, which is quite low for what we would like to see. We’re targeting an audience size of close to 500. We compared that to April’s Rcon2 registration at the same point in time prior to Rcon2. We’re actually right on track. We have late engagers. If you are interested in coming to RCon3, please register. We would love to see your numbers. It really does help us with planning and to assure that we can make a stellar conference for everyone who wants to be there… Also if you have a network of people that you think might be interested in coming to this conference (particularly if they’re based near the Berlin area) and you are able to get in touch with them, we would love them to come to this event. Contact me at kelly@pyrofex.net, or you can DM me through Discord. I’m happy to get you set up with a discount code that you can share with your network to help promote this event. Similarly, if you have a marketing idea, don’t hesitate to shout it out, again to kelly@pyrofex.net. We will be working aggressively to get the audience numbers that we would like for this event.”

Greg M: “To your point Kelly, I was on the Berlin co-op call this morning, and they’re already rolling out engagements on the ground at various meetups to make sure that there’s RChain presence in meetups, especially in Berlin. I will be talking with you and Medha later about a new Rcon3 promo that ties into the killer app.”

Medha: “I would like to ask if we can collaborate with folks on the membership management side. If we can get information about Rcon3 sent out in an email to the the co-op membership base, that would be hugely helpful. I’m not sure how many of the members actually listen to the live stream regularly.”

Greg M: “We’re going to have some pretty first-class music at RCon3. In particular, Adrian Belew PowerTrio and Echo Test are going to be playing at Rcon3 for the entertainment on the evening of the 5th. So, in addition to launching some pretty groundbreaking technology across the board and making some very significant organizational announcements, we’ll have work from some of the best researchers on the planet being presented. So help us spread the word. This is it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Reflective update

The team had positive feedback from the blockchain week in Asia. They got in touch with investors and validators who were inquisitive about RChain.

About a 140 people were at the Reflective Ventures Deal Day held on the 27th of July.

RumbleMonkey emerged as the winner of the 50,000 RHOC award out of 6 companies.

The Deal Day was attended by representatives of four university blockchain groups: Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Washington University.

The team is leading efforts on the validator programs.

Pithia update

The team will be having its first link up with one large angel network.

About 5 validator onboardings in progress.

They are wrapping up due diligence with different companies; probably, they will be bringing two university groups online.

Q&A/Comment

Jacob B: “Lawrence, how many deals have Pithia signed?”

Lawrence: “There are three deals that Pithia signed… lifeID, Trusted Key, and DigitalTown.

Validator update

There is an overwhelming response from the validator focus group. There has been so much engagement that the group was split into two. About 77 persons have applied for validation on the web page.

The validator agreement document is under revision and hopefully, the validator sale goes live by mid-August.

Working with the RCon3 demo group to get an executive summary of the validator prospectus. It will be translated first into Mandarin Chinese.

The price for the validator RHOCs will be available when the packet is sent out next week.

Other updates

Michael Ovadia will be engaging to help the co-op community flourish.

Greg M detailed a bit more about the on-chain audio company which will be giving a demo at RCon3.

Greg talked about the need for a high transaction volume for the success of the RChain network. The approaches to facilitate it are: the throughput, transaction fees, a rich and vibrant ecosystem (having veritable companies running on the platform) and unique applications that are popular.

Q&A/Comment

Allan: “When will we be able to talk specifically about the killer app?”

Greg M: “Hopefully by the middle of next week.”

Jacob B: “Is the killer dApp a household name?”

Greg M: “We get no name recognition out of that. However, the first time you experience it, you will know exactly what I am talking about.”

Rudy: “We are trying to find a blockchain conference in Texas. It turns out there’s a big one happening in October where you can take an espresso machine. We’re going to see if we can have RChain

be part of that. It will be one of the first exposures and progress we’re making on that. Our idea is to go after companies that have end-users that we can actually get in with and then make their networks work back to the main office. So, that’s how we’re working both sides — the main offices and the distributors.”

Greg M: “Awesome…I had a lovely conversation with Nobuko Yoshida… We will be joining her in partnership at RChain research. She is one of the luminaries in computer science. Her work on the combinators for the Pi calculus, type systems for the Pi calculus, session types — all of that is just phenomenal. She teaches not only at Imperial College but also at a number of Southeast Asian universities that are of similar profile. She has many many students who are in the process calculus space, which is exciting to us because we want to attract those kinds of people to come work on RChain and to help tell the RChain story. In fact, one of the things Nobuko spoke about was the possibility of together, crafting in a video that would appeal to her students. So, I’m very happy about that. We had some other exciting research talks that will be at RCon3.”

Announcements