Witnet Monthly Report — October 2019

Independent security audits now in progress, devs are full steam ahead on node fine-tuning, wallet backend restructuring and new parameters for Witnet requests. A fruitful DevCon 5 event in Osaka, with RADON presented to an enthusiastic audience!

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 the Witnet whitepaper, the core Witnet documentation or check out the project’s “must-reads” digest.

🏗️ Development Update

Mainnet preparations

Several independent security audit companies will be reviewing and reporting on the entire technical structure in the coming months.

will be reviewing and reporting on the entire technical structure in the coming months. Thorough community planning was carried out for all the remaining features required for Mainnet launch. It’s just around the corner!

Important changes were made to the synchronization protocol so as to increase robustness. It is now much more resilient to network and peering issues.

Witnet Node

With Mainnet launch close on the horizon, development efforts are focused on node preparation and testing; the only component which will be difficult to update after Mainnet, since changes will be consensus critical. The more eyes on code and fingers on keyboards, the better — if you can and want to help, please see the “New contributions and bounties” section below.

Wallet

There is now a proof-of-concept for a backend restructuring of the wallet, which will greatly increase scalability.

Truffle Box

The extra_reveal_rounds parameter was added to the Witnet.Request object within the witnet-requests-js library and the truffle box. This specifies how many extra epochs Witnet nodes will be given to reveal their partial results. This strengthens the security of a Witnet request, preventing miners from withholding reveal transactions, and allowing subsequent miners to include any reveal transactions withheld by a former miner.

👏 New contributions and bounties

As usual, new bounty opportunities have been posted on Gitcoin — the network is a great way to get stuck in to Witnet’s product, and gives you the chance to be generously rewarded for your open source contributions.

Are you interested in contributing to the development of witnet-rust? The Witnet community would love to have you involved. Visit the contributing guide, and join the Witnet Discord so we can help out with any questions you have.

Being Witnet an open protocol, the community is also very interested and receptive to anyone curious about building a separate implementation. Have a favorite language you’d like to try to build Witnet with? Let us know on the Witnet Discord and we’ll be happy to help you set up.

🎉 Events

At the start of October, the Stampery Labs team (one of the organizations in the Witnet ecosystem) attended DevCon 5 in Osaka, Japan, to fly the Witnet flag, connect with other teams in the industry, and continue to build the Witnet developer network.

They had a great response from companies and individuals alike, and they’ll be following up with articles inspired by really fantastic questions posed by attendees.

They also presented an overview of Witnet’s DSL, RADON, which was enthusiastically received. The full slide deck for the presentation is below — please do get in touch with feedback or questions.

DevCon 5 presentation on Witnet’s DSL, “RADON: The Domain Specific Language for Oracles”.

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