Development

While the presale has been running, work has been full steam ahead on Rocket Pool. Original development started on Rocket Pool in late 2016 and with Solidity being a new language, it is undergoing constant updates, so part of the work put in over the last few weeks has been updating Rocket Pool in full to run with and utilise the strengths of the latest Solidity 0.4.15.

Contract Updates

Added new addressBook method to simplify contract address lookups. This means that in the future, Rocket Pool can add new contracts to join onto existing contracts easily.

Testrpc the popular local blockchain software recently added some changes which caused a few of the existing unit tests to fail. These methods have now been updated.

Solidity 0.4.15 fixed an existing minor bug which had an effect on how Rocket Pools Minipool contracts read data from their delegate contract. This required adding new inline assembly code (low level) to allow the Minipool contracts to function as they did previously. Certainly more work than your average fix, but turned out great.

Many other minor additions and optimisations.

Smart Nodes

Rocket Pool isn’t only made of contracts, a big part of what makes Rocket Pool unique is its smart nodes. Smart nodes in the Rocket Pool network can listen to the main contract and receive commands, plus check in with the main contract on a regular basis to report on their server load which helps with load balancing users who stake with Rocket Pool. Future smart nodes will also be able to talk to other smart nodes directly and also attempt to automatically remote reboot other nodes that have become unresponsive. All these functions will be possible regardless of which cloud provider the node is hosted on.

Smart Node Services Underway

In order to be smarter than your average node, Rocket Pools smart nodes have background services that run along side the node software which communicates with the Ethereum blockchain. These services help the node listen for instructions from Rocket Pools smart contracts and also allow the smart node to talk back to the contracts and report on various things such as it’s current server load.

These scripts have been in prototype form until now. The first full versions of these service scripts are now underway and already making great progress.