Witnet Monthly Report — September 2019

This month, we have implemented Data Request transaction broadcasting, moved the ETH bridge onto Rinkeby & Görli, made UX & style improvements to front-end, & lots more. See you all at DevCon 5 next week!

If this is your first time visiting our monthly updates, welcome! For some general background on Witnet and our technology, please read this 3 minute primer, take a look at our whitepaper, or check out our project’s “must-reads” digest.

🏗️ Development Update

With Testnet-4 launched and rolling along smoothly, the dev team have had their heads down, their concentration faces on, and have deployed numerous improvements to the node, Sheikah interface, wallet, bridge, and truffle box.

Sheikah Interface and Wallet component :

Numerous changes have been made to the UX and style of the interface, most importantly in the Witnet requests editor (export/import/save templates, undo/redo changes to RADON scripts, etc).

The Witnet requests that you create on Sheikah can now be deployed into Witnet from the same UI, thanks to full support for requests in our powerful wallet backend component.

You can now also use Sheikah for making “value transfer” transactions, i.e. sending testnet Wit tokens from one account to another, or to a different user.

Incoming and outgoing transactions are now also shown on the main Sheikah UI.

Node :

The “bucketing” system that curates the Witnet nodes’ P2P connections now has a “feeler” process that tests fresh peer addresses upfront, so that your node always knows enough addresses of healthy peers in the network. You can read more about bucketing in this article.

We made an overall cleanup of the protobuf schema so as to remove some protocol messages that are not used any more, as well as giving more descriptive names to all the parameters.

Most command line features have received an important UX upgrade. For example, all the commands that previously operated with PKH (public key hashes) now also support human-friendly Bech32 addresses. You will recognize these by their prefix — they start with “twit…” on testnet and “wit…” on mainnet.

RADON now supports reducing “Arrays” using mode.

The node now has improved capability, and can generate many transactions in the same epoch.

Witnet requests can now be scheduled through timelocks, ensuring they are executed and resolved on a particular date and time.

Ethereum Bridge :

This month saw the bridge successfully deployed to the Rinkeby and Görli Ethereum testnet networks!

We made the decision to discontinue support for the Ropsten testnet. The lack of quality peers makes it impossible to operate a node with the minimum service level that running a bridge node requires.

Truffle Box :

This now auto-generates migrations for the user contracts, with default constructor arguments and automatic library linking or deployment.

The compiler gives feedback on how to fix common issues (not exporting the request, missing imports, etc).

The Request/Result abstractions in Solidity are now must cheaper and efficient to use, and still have the same ergonomic interface.

👏 New contributors and bounties

We’re constantly posting new bounties on Gitcoin — the platform serves a great way to get stuck in to Witnet’s product, and gives us the chance to generously reward you for your open source contributions.

Are you interested in contributing to the development of witnet-rust? We would be thrilled to have you! Visit our new contribution guide for more info!

We are also very interested and receptive to anyone curious about building a separate implementation of the Witnet protocol. Have a favorite language you’d like to try to build Witnet with? Let us know and we’ll be happy to provide support along the way!

🎉 Events

On the 14th September, we attended Tech.Party 2019 in our hometown of Madrid, and lead a workshop to create a Witnet-based dApp — a modern twist on a traditional Spanish custom of sport pool betting, or “quiniela”. Check it out here.

Next up, we flying out this weekend to Japan for DevCon 5! We’ll be engaging with attendees, giving a presentation on “RADON: a Domain-Specific Language for Oracles”, and handing out Witnet-branded t-shirts. If you’re planning on attending, please do come say konnichiwa — we’d love to chat face-to-face.

💜 Team

This month, the Stampery Labs team — which was commissioned by Witnet Foundation to develop witnet-rust and Sheikah — has welcomed our new Community and Comms Manager (Thomas — we now have a Tomasz, a Tómas and a Thomas…!). He’ll be better introduced to you all in our team interviews in the next few weeks, and he’ll serve as the first point of contact for you all across all our social media platforms.

You can follow Witnet on Twitter and stay up to date on our blog.

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