We are excited to share with our community the launch of DxChain Testnet and SDK, named Alps Mountains, after 3 months of development and testing since the release of Testnet Beta — Andes Mountains at the end of September 2018.

The launch of Testnet and SDK has again showcased the DxChain research and development team’s capability of delivering the project on time, and implementing the distributed storage powered by blockchain as promised. Moreover, the DxChain Testnet SDK will provide blockchain engineers, researchers and DxChain’s partners with solutions to data storage and file management in a distributed and secure system.

Alps Mountains Key Breakthroughs

In the previous release, Testnet Beta (Andes Mountains), DxChain introduced major functions including transaction, file storage, a block browser, and started the scalability testing. Please find more details on our official blog.

After the release of Testnet Beta, DxChain team continued focusing on the development of the data storage features. In a nutshell, features and performance of the DxChain Testnet are significantly improved in this release. Key breakthroughs of this release include:

Fully supports transaction types for storage contracts: In the new version, DxChain testnet is able to support three transaction types for storage contracts, including form contract, revise contract and storage proof contracts. All nodes on the chain can work as either storage clients or providers to get involved in the distributed data storage service. Finalized the storage proof algorithm: In the previous release, the initial storage proof and Merkle Tree algorithm were implemented. In this new release, the algorithm is heavily tested and optimized for validating data storage and building trustable storage, thus is finalized and beyond challenge. Now the DxChain Testnet can complete the verification without the raw data with high efficiency. As a result, we are able to keep high data integrity with comparatively low redundancy. Implemented the provider auto selection algorithm: The provider auto selection algorithm was redesigned to meet the demand for provider selection for multiple needs. The algorithm takes financial metrics, storage reliability, and network bandwidth into consideration, making an optimized decision on selecting qualified candidates. Stabilized storage contract handshake process: In this release, our team focused on the handshake protocol in the storage contract negotiation and revision, improved the stability and efficiency in both normal and abnormal communication scenarios. Provides privacy protection: Information security with the encryption-sharding mechanism for data encryption can protect user’s privacy. And data stored on DxChain Testnet are protected using public and private key signature technique to verify the proprietorship. Performance optimized for file uploading: Compared to the last version, the performance has been increased by 54% in efficiency and 60% in memory usage for file uploading.

Testnet Application Products Overview

In addition to adding features and improving the performance of the testnet, we also updated new features of the DxChain Testnet Explorer, and released the DxChainPy SDK and a brand new product — DxBox.

In this release, we improved the function of the DxChain Testnet Explorer, and added some new features. For example, detailed information about all types of contracts and transactions are searchable, including the file contract id, initial settings, current status, etc. You can find out the various possible status of the storage contracts:

(1) Ongoing, means the lifespan of a storage contract, from initialization to expiration;

(2) Verified, means the contract has been verified by blockchain and the storage provider has got the reward from storing the data;

(3) Vacant, means the contract is established but there is no file uploaded by the client, therefore, there is no need for the providers to submit the storage proof;

(4) Failed, means the provider is not able to submit the storage proof before the contract expires.