Update summary

This week’s Debrief includes a technical explanation of RSong, updates on validator bonding and cost accounting, and news from the marketing team about website and onboarding improvements. Portfolio companies are starting to set up nodes and write smart contracts. The script used to capture RHOC balances is available for the community to use and review in GitHub. This script supports the issuance of REV in a genesis ceremony. Greg Meredith reminds us of the importance of our relationships and that “our actual work is our best marketing.”



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Timeline

Technical update: Validator bonding and cost accounting

Reflective Ventures update: Node setup and smart contracts by portfolio companies

Pithia’s update: Possible Lucidity side chain and GeekWire summit Oct. 1-3

Marketing update: Website and member onboarding experience updates

RSong architecture: Pluses and minuses of the architecture

Announcements

The release of RNode 0.7 is scheduled for the second week of October. Look out for an update on the developer website

Interested in validator bonding? Get updates about validator bonding and learn how you can participate in the RChain Discord node testing channel .

Validator sale is now being handled by Kenny Rowe.

Check out RSong in the Android play store .

Contents in brief

Technical update

The dev team entered new sprints on Monday. The sprints are large, and the team is aware of how aggressive the goals are. Program management team is focused on ensuring no blockers or churn comes up on work to ensure consistency in progress.

Medha is working on the Mercury release specification and RNode 0.7 release announcement. Look for an update on the developer website

The team plans to test the process for bonding new validators to the network.

Look for updates in the node-testing channel on Discord for how to participate. There will likely be some pre-requisite hoops to jump through around provisioning test Rev for bonding.

Rholang team

Cost accounting pull request has been cut. The team is moving on to testing and documentation. A compromise was specified to solve the matching issue in the tuplespace related to cost accounting. The documentation is being reviewed.

New block storage architecture design is specified; the initial draft will be done this week.

The registry has been completed and the team is focused on using it. This involves porting contracts to use the registry and crypto functions. They are also removing the ability to listen on forgeable names. Pull request is under review.

Progress was made in making the interpreter stack secure. All variants of AST and Pretty Printer are now stack safe.

The team merged and enhanced the algorithm to find the most common ancestor in the DAG. This addresses the InvalidBondsCache error and also the new in-memory representation of the DAG. They have also ported the Clique safety oracle to use new in-memory representation.

Validator bonding has been merged. It includes basic support for minimum and maximum fees. They are also implementing validator bonding fees to deter sybil attacks.

The team is refactoring Casper to use new comms status messages. The communication team is working on message queues (chunking & unlimited block size).

Storage/Node team:

Kademlia and RChain protocol are now separated . The bootstrap node address format has changed as a result. See RNode bootstrap addresses for the new format.

Fine-grained locking (disjoint channels) initial work is complete and pull request merged. This gives an improvement in processing speed, but not the expected throughput improvement.

Node shutdown – There is complexity in the process of shutting down Casper, RSpace, and RNode. Work planned for next sprint too. Plan to orchestrate the shutdown across the components and provide a good experience for RNode operators.

A Node now reports its GitHash version.

Work on threading improvements for RNode, RSpace, and Casper is a high priority for this sprint.

SRE team

The team is on track to have a new CI system in place by the end of the sprint. Looking forward to an upgrade to Java 10 before the end of the sprint.

Working with the RSong team to bring the project into RChain CI.

REV issuance

The script used to capture RHOC balances is available for the community to use and review in GitHub . This script supports the issuance of REV in a genesis ceremony.

Testnet

Work in progress to develop the incentivized test net. Look for more information in October and the start of the challenges around December.

Reflective Ventures update

Reflective Ventures team and RChain will be attending the San Francisco blockchain week Oct. 7-12. Interested persons should reach out to the Reflective team.

The team is excited to announce that a handful of portfolio companies have nodes set up and are writing smart contracts. Others are actively engaged with Ned Robinson to get started.

Greg Heuss plans to educate the co-op members on the portfolio companies they invest in and the company milestones. He has seen good progress in the portfolio companies.

Greg Meredith will be making himself available to the portfolio companies for an architectural discussion.

Pithia’s update

The Lucidity team already have an Ethereum based side chain and it would be exciting if they move it onto RChain.

Pithia is syncing with Ned Robinson, Medha, and others from the development team to follow up on the smart contracts coming up from the portfolio companies.

The team is still on track for getting companies on board. Their current deals are with two companies a tax company and a finance company. Look for more details and updates on Pithia’s website

The team will be attending the GeekWire summit taking place in downtown Seattle on Oct. 1-3. This will get national coverage. Interested persons can send their requests to pitches@pithia.com .

Notes from comments

Greg Meredith anticipates a demo day with the portfolio companies before main net launch.

Marketing update

The team is working on brand consistency.

They are looking towards updating the website for better information on membership, portfolio and partner companies, the Board, and leadership team. The membership portal will include pieces to support member onboarding and member contribution experiences. Deanna is taking the lead on the secure member election coming up in October.

The blog is undergoing some design updates. It will be integrated with the main website.

The team plans to have an eLearning portal for developer education. Joshy Orndorff is a lead on that and will be syncing with Jack from Pyrofex. Based on community feedback, they want to learn by PoCs and playing.

The team is working on an information piece describing the organizational chart and visual understanding of the ecosystem.

Email communications infrastructure is in progress for internal and external membership communication.

A new subscriber newsletter will go out every Thursday.

The team published 7 articles on the blog last week and is expanding community content to include more about RChain Asia, RChain Europe, and peer learning groups like CoLab

Social media marketing is on a steady growth track. Calling out for community members to increase social media engagement.

A formalized information resource to support meetups and events is in progress. It will include an organizational framework for a meetup, the order of operation, brand use, presentation templates, and policy for meetup reimbursement.

Six months conference outreach and sponsorship strategy; the team have a list of conferences to attend from blockchain to non-blockchain centric conferences.

Community development: the team is brainstorming on how to participate and help invigorate the rebooted bounty system. They are also syncing with the European co-op for tools to aid community building.

Notes from comments

Greg Meredith stresses the importance of RChain’s relationships and making them more visible on the website.

Greg: “Our actual work is our best marketing.”

RSong architecture