Update Summary

In the previous hangout, Greg announced that Mark Pui and Steve Ross-Talbot were appointed as temporary board members. Ed Eykholt discussed the command line wallet requirement and specifications. The Asian community reviewed progress on tutorials and their RChain-Rholang blockchain course.



This week, dev focus is on stability; features work is also picking up. RNode v0.8.2 was released on Jan. 7. The dev team and Whiteblock are working together on Whiteblock’s private test net.

Greg reviews the progress on the kinds of applications that the co-op needs in order to fulfill its functions, such as identity and members voting. Kayvan and Jim Whitescarver give demos of Rholang voting contracts. Greg and Jonathan emphasize the generalizability of the RSong back end and how it can be used to quickly create MVPs for data sharing and supply chain applications.

The Governance Committee had its first meeting and five voting members were chosen.



Announcements

Timeline

Contents in Brief

Technical update: Test net, stability, and features work

Sprint and next release Two-week sprint started Jan. 7 Part of the dev team will start working on features while the rest work on stability RNode v0.8.2 was released on Jan. 7. Improved platform stability and expanded test coverage for Casper Whiteblock team expects to start running tests in its testing environment this week



Rholang team Work is in progress to implement a new block store that can handle a large number of blocks



Casper team Discussing Validator Incentives and Casper and implementation of cost accounting to support Mercury requirement work Implementation of RhoSpec complete for improved messaging from failures Bug investigation that looked like an issue with validator bonding, and now appears to related either to the code or the algorithm



Node Team Stream API on client queue with retries is done. Last PR in review PR in review to stop receiving stream blobs if they don’t fit in memory Updates to DAG grapher to group blocks by validator. This tool has been very helpful in debugging because it enables the team to see what the DAG looks like Profiling of RNode in progress to see how it’s performing and where there might be bottlenecks



SRE team Priority is stability work and testing v2 of RChain Doctor log aggregator used in this week’s community node testing Improving delivery of data from the Rundeck testnet Supporting Whiteblock team in test net observation and testing Optimizations to integration test coverage



Applications Development

Kayvan gives a Rholang voting demo



Greg mentioned that Dan was following a Solidity design pattern for the voting contract and much of the design pattern shrunk because of the object capabilities that are baked into Rholang.

The co-op is going to be able to use a lot of the work Mycelia group did on creating artist profiles because there’s not too much difference between person co-op personas and artist personas. Greg discussed rebranding the RSong template so more people can just pick up the back end piece of it and modify it to get MVPs quickly. It can be used for other kinds of data market applications such as photo sharing and video clip sharing. Jonathan added that it’s fundamentally a supply chain on the blockchain solution.

Kenny’s Progress Report

See the RChain blog for full details of the progress report.



The draft for Member Participation in Governance will be reviewed by the Governance Committee

Variables are being defined for the monetary policy

The RChain Improvement process and the charter draft are still in progress

A Governance Committee meeting was held on January 8 t and the initial five voting members were determined. Input on governance committee decisions will be welcome from all members



and the initial five voting members were determined. Input on governance committee decisions will be welcome from all members Unofficial minutes are published on GitHub for the Board special meeting on December 21, 2018, at which Steve Ross-Talbot and Mark Pui were appointed as interim board members

Next board meeting is January 10

Q4 financial report is on track to be released by January 20

Comments and QA

Discussion about the problems with the co-op having control over transactions

Events

Part of the team will go out to the Binance Blockchain Week in Singapore from January 19-22

Board member Kevin Goldstein is attending The Cooperative.com CEO Close-Up conference for electric co-op managers this week. They have expressed interest in a transactive grid

RChain Asia Update

Jonathan: One of our Singapore members of RChain Asia had a very promising meeting with an institution and facility in Singapore for ongoing RChain development education based in Singapore that may also propagate elsewhere in Asia. Details should be available in February.