Hey Everyone!It’s been an exciting week around Nano, there was seemingly a new development everyday! I’ve focused heavily this week on covering upcoming protocol upgrades and what they mean for the network.

Epoch Blocks Merged to Master

The epochs block change is the result of nearly 2 months of work by the team, finalizing the upgrade to universal blocks. From https://github.com/nanocurrency/raiblocks/pull/955:

An epoch block will change the account version from 0 to 1, which means:

* It cannot be followed by old type blocks (like how state blocks already work)

* Any future sends will have a min_version of 1

These cannot be received by old type blocks

* When received by a state block, this automatically upgrades the account to version 1

We'll make a script to generate epoch blocks for any currently open accounts and any unopened account with pending sends (except the burn account).

With the merging of this code into the master branch of the source control repository, it enables further testing on our production beta network and was one of the driving forces for getting the beta network working and active.

Lazy Bootstrapping

Right now a block may get voted on thousands of times during it’s lifetime by nodes that don’t actually care about the block or chain it’s on — and further, they’ll vote on other blocks which reference it indirectly, leading to thousands more votes by proxy!Instead, passively listening for blocks and actively pulling down only chains which a node cares about by requesting their frontier and receiving votes on them validates not just the chain but all blocks in all chains which have sent to this account from the latest sending block for which we have received (since that receive was voted on and accepted, the sending block must have also been voted on and accepted, and thus all blocks down in the senders chain must be valid). This allows accounts to chain to the Genesis block of the network with minimal ad-hoc votes, and only if a node is interested in that account in the future! Real-time voting will be entirely passive. This means that most blocks will be voted on directly exactly once, resulting in a drastic reduction in, ultimately, wasted votes!This reduction in bootstrapping will result in less voting, and less peer-to-peer traffic as nodes become largely passive on the network. It will also reduce disk I/O significantly. The mechanism for this is called Lazy Bootstrapping and it should be available in the very near future.

A New Core Developer

Stein Roger, also known as cryptocode, is from Norway and has worked in the Telco and Health care industries as a systems developer for over 20 years, currently developing tools for integration of medical equipment. Stein has been actively involved in the development of the Nano node software since January and will continue to work closely with the protocol team moving forward. We are excited to have Stein join our team in an official capacity and look forward to working alongside him.

Nano KPI Wrap Up

Over the weekend, the Nano KPI team emerged victorious in the CS:GO ESL Masters tournament.

This event gave great exposure to Nano, both through the tournament and the booth at DreamHack where volunteers were distributing Nano and helping users install wallets.Our team would like to extend our thanks to Mike, the CEO of KPI Gaming, Andy and the NanoCenter, azuLeto and his team who manned the booth, and everyone in the community who donated and helped make this happen.

Version 1.0 of Desktop Wallet Released

Yesterday, version 1.0.0 of the desktop wallet by the Nano Wallet Company was released. Among the highlights of the release include:

Code signed releases by Nano Wallet Company LLC

Automatic upgrades for Windows and macOS

Support for older versions of Windows and macOS (Windows 7+ and macOS 10.0+)

Downloads assets using highly compressed container format (shaving >1G from downloads)

Significantly faster asset verifications

Progress percent and ETA available during setup

Several bug fixes and improvements around sending

Several UI improvements

We look forward to hearing your feedback on the wallet and any suggested improvements. Devin will turn to focusing on integrating Ledger support.

Backend of mobile wallets open sourced and geo-located

The server-side code of the mobile wallets is now available at https://github.com/nano-wallet-company/nano-wallet-server.Over the past week, servers were added around the globe to ensure users received the best connection and performance. The ability to change servers will be added to the mobile wallets in future updates.