Development

GitHub metrics:

The table above illustrates the low development activity.

Last commits on public GitHub were made on June 23th, 2019 in shift-explorer repository (this repository contains the code for the explorer of the Shift blockchain).

A lot of the information is private at present. Shift has also private GitHub repositories.

Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):

Here is some of the Shift Project’s latest and most important news

The New Shift Project Website

As you are aware, Shift much anticipated new website is live! Created in collaboration with Ibizz, a respected web development agency based in the Netherlands, the Shift Project now benefits from a professional public face that both outlines their core values and offerings, while also demonstrating the innovation and potential of their technology. Hosted on the Shift development network running the latest version of Phoenix Cluster and IPFS, this new website presents for the first time in one place the team’s vision for the project. Over the coming weeks the site will be further improved, with the addition of dynamic content, pages that go into greater depth by covering the specifics of our token locking model, economic formula and other technical information on the Phoenix/IPFS network. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the new website for longtime Shift Community members, however, is that it already presents for the first time essential information on their transition to a new blockchain core, an ambition the team is now pleased to be moving forward with.

Visionary Blockchain Core

It is no secret that for a long time the team has had some dissatisfaction with the historic Lisk Core. While it has served the purpose of protecting the blockchain against 51% attacks that have afflicted many Proof-of-Work projects admirably, the team believes a migration to a more optimized core is required to meet their objective of provisioning an invaluable decentralized hosting application. In light of this, they have been intensively researching existing secure and well-established modular cores and reaching out to their developers. From among these the team intends to select the one that will provide the optimal foundation for the specific use case and its need for scalability. The advantage of a modular core is that maintenance will be far less labor-intensive, allowing them to devote more time to their custom transaction modules and to Phoenix, the main value proposition. Thanks to the assistance of a new member to the Shift Team, their research is close to completion and the team plans to start on the migration during quarter three of 2019, finalizing the process by the conclusion of quarter four. Though they are not yet able to reveal the modular core they will be adopting due to ongoing discussions with several projects, the team would like to assure the community that a binding decision to port will soon be made and announced.

New Developer

Since the beginning of September, Shift has had the benefit of an additional talented member working on its development team. Arriving at Shift following the conclusion of a long term role at another blockchain project, Francis M. has been taking the lead in researching the various modular cores the team has been considering for migration. Once this task is complete, it will be he and Ralf who will then be managing the core migration collaboratively, after which they will devote themselves to Shift’s custom transaction modules and features related to the Shift Core.

The team considers Francis an asset to Shift and is excited to see his contributions as a member of the growing Shift Team.

Next Development Phase: Proof-of-Capacity, Proof-of-Storage & Incentive Model

In addition to research and preparation for the core migration, a further reason the team has been very busy lately is the time they have been devoting to laying the groundwork for their next major development phase. Once core migration has been completed, they will be fully instigating work towards the completion of three major development milestones that will be responsible for the extension of platform functionality to include compensated storage provision. In chronological order, these are: a Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) algorithm, a Proof-of-Storage (PoS) algorithm and an incentive model for the storage node operators. These three components have already passed the initial design stage and are now ready to be moved into full development status once core migration is complete. Furthermore, in order to speed this process once it is fully underway, the team has submitted several grant applications intended to support this development phase, some of which they hope to shortly hear responses from.

Recap: Shift Core v7.0t and Phoenix v0.9

A brief recap of the updates that the team has recently made to the two key components of Shift Project’s technology suite, the Shift Core, their blockchain, and Phoenix, their IPFS daemon.

Since the release of the last newsletter, the team succeeded in troubleshooting a message relaying issue with Phoenix that had resulted in the postponement of Shift Core v7.0t until its release in July. Prior to its release, they had discovered that messages were not being relayed effectively to all peers in the network and, as a result, Phoenix peers were reporting very different values for the cluster size. As cluster size consensus is integral for the correct functioning of the economic formula used to dynamically determine the value of tSHIFT tokens relative to storage capacity, and a lack of consensus would result in forking of the testnet blockchain (due these values being stored in blocks), the team turned their full attention to finding the root of the problem. After a great deal code changes and testing, they finally solved the issue. It was successfully combated by adjusting the way Phoenix works to allow messages to be received by peers even if the sending peer is not recognized from the recipient’s peer list. This change, released in the form of Phoenix v0.9, has resulted in all storage peers of the Phoenix Cluster now reporting the exact same values for the cluster size, the major breakthrough necessary to activate Shift Core v7.0t.

During the period of troubleshooting, the team also created a working demo of the hosting abilities of Phoenix and the blockchain released as the interactive storage demo. This demo was released shortly after the release of Shift Core v7.0t and was positively received. The demo, being a proof-of-concept for the end user interaction of their decentralized cloud hosting platform, showed the simple steps involved in their blockchain-enabled storage and file management. With a faucet created to allow anyone to try it out for themselves, it can be accessed here.

Check out the Shift project at its updated website shiftproject.com: