State of Development: Week of June 25th, 2018

This week, we focused on merging Bitcoin-NG codebase into the master branch of Epoch, which only involves switching our Epoch node to Bitcoin-NG consensus.

The tests are green, merge conflicts have been resolved, and we are ready for deploying in on the testnet! To finalize the new consensus mechanism, the next few sprints will be spent implementing Proof of Fraud functionality, testing and optimizing performance, and finishing a number of smaller outstanding tasks.

Also, several tasks unrelated to Bitcoin-NG were completed this week:

We were able to decrease storage overhead for chain state trees in DB by compressing the storage format.

We carried out a number of performance tests that confirm that an increase in the number of transactions per second is linearly proportional to the increase of the network size and results in a manageable throughput (compared to quadratic or exponential increases, for example).

This weekend our smart contracts team is attending a workshop dedicated to State Channels to meet academics and practitioners working in this space, exchange knowledge and pick up new ideas. Fore more information on the workshop, click here.

Here are some photos from the workshop: