State of Development: Week of May 7th, 2018

Release 0.13.0 is ready and it is loaded with a number of exciting updates you can try out.

Firstly, this update provides a version of State Channels that allow for basic off-chain functionality, for example a client can open a state channel, update it (send tokens inside the channel) and mutually close it.

Secondly, we have provided a significant update to smart contracts functionality:

The state of a smart contract can be stored in a Merkel Patricia Tree and retrieved later.

Calls and return values are stored in a separate MPT for one block.

Sophia smart contracts can handle the state.

This allows for the execution of non-trivial Solidity and Sophia smart contracts. If you want to get a taste for yourself, check a Sophia smart contract implementing Dutch auction.

In addition, a first version of the Varna syntax and a compiler were also added.

Another significant update is switching the cryptographic signing to Curve25519. Why? In addition to this curve being all-round awesome, it is fast and it allows us to use shorter addresses, which is a significant UX improvement for mobile-based æpps due to their limited screen size. This update also allows us to implement Schnorr signatures, which are efficient, short and provide multisig out of the box.

We also made a number of fixes and improvements:

Enforcement of contiguous nonces for transactions from the same account.

Enforcement of positive transaction fee for all transactions.

Persistence of the pending transactions in the DB.

If you have any questions or comments, you can share them with us in the Technical category in the Forum or use GitHub directly.

Any support is highly appreciated!

Interested in æternity? Get in touch:

GitHub | Forum | Reddit | Telegram | Twitter | Facebook | Mail