As we prepare for the showers that will eventually bring flowers, we wanted to highlight all of the development success that happened on the Factom Protocol in March. This is a brief summary, you can find a longer-form Grant Status Update right here, as well as supplemental insights into Github updates and our JIRA logs for the month.

March kicked off with the release of v6.2.1 which rolled in several months of updates that had been accumulating, even more than what Github displays. v6.2.2 also had a release candidate on the testnet, which fixed some issues that popped up from v6.2.1. March provided the updated factom-walletd, containing two major items: disk encryption and user identities support. It’s already in use by the FAT protocol and some of the voting subsystems that are built on Factom.

Late February has a network pause, which we reported in last month’s update, and a senior developer spent some time doing an incredibly deep analysis of what went on to make it happen. A major takeaway was that the reboot infrastructure needed some work, which was largely handled in March. Updates for it will continue through April, though. Alongside those kinds of updates, we’ve made some progress on refactoring with two parallel efforts. One effort set is a conversion of the holding queue to a map and the other is an update to how directory blocks are being generated in order to give it more flexibility. Both do still need some work that will continue in April.

Wrapping up with a bit of housekeeping, there was progress in on-boarding outside developers, seeing pull requests by developers at Factomize, Layertech, and Canonical Ledgers in March. We also held two sponsor meetings in the month, which you can watch one of right here. Last bit, you’ll be able to find some of us at the following events:

Synchronize, April 17th, New York, NY

Global Block Builders, April 10th – 13th, Austin, TX

Odyssey Hackathon, April 11th – 15th, Groningen, The Netherlands

Thanks for reading and your ongoing interest in our efforts for the Factom Protocol!