Tech report Jan, 29th - Feb, 8th

During the last two weeks our development team has been working hard to finalize major features of the upcoming testnet release.

The following tasks were completed in the period January, 29th — February, 8th:

• Core: Blockchain persistency. Blocks are stored on disk now but no transaction pruning is applied.
• Core: Node bootstrap. A new node can connect to any Stegos nodes to download the blockchain.
• Core: The special Data UTXO type has been removed and data functionality has been rolled into the payment UTXO.
• ValueShuffle: DiceMix
• ValueShuffle: Composing the super-transaction. More unit tests are needed.
• Networking: Global Network Peer Store. Based on Kademlia DHT.
• Networking: Node Discovery. Including node authentication.
• Networking: Unicast Messaging.

Our next sprint will be dedicated to thorough testing, bug fixing and launching the very first Stegos testnet!

Tasks for February, 11th — February, 22th:

• Testing: Meticulous testing and bug fixing applied to transaction processing, block processing, initial randomness (VRFs), consensus, persistence and bootstrapping.
• Core: Node CLI enhancements.
• Core: Orphan transactions processing.
• Core: Limiting the maximum size of a block.
• ValueShuffle: First working implementation
• DevOps: Collecting and processing metrics and logs (Logstash, Prometheus, Grafana, ElasticSearch, Filebeat, Kibana, etc).
• DevOps: TestNet deployment on AWS.

We are planning to freeze new features early in the second week of the Sprint 10 to release the testnet binaries and launch the tesnet by Thursday, February 21st.