The Aeternity Foundation (AF) supports the aeternity protocol and ecosystem.
The AF is giving funding grants for applications on the promotion of the success and growth of the aeternity ecosystem as well as the ae blockchain maintenance. Weekly detailed reports on the progress of the developers can be found in the Active Grant Applications under the forum’s AF Grant Category 17 .
Our goal remains the same: to make the aenode faster, better and lighter and the ae ecosystem more attractive for the users. The hyperchain network using the aenodes has been designed to attract the Aeternity enterprise customers and their users. On top of the faster aeternity network and hyperchain network the decentralized applications (dapps) can be run with higher performance and in a private context. Therefore the whole aeternity ecosystem will perform with higher availability, scalability, security and performance.
Q3 Recap
Short review of the worked tasks in Roadmap Q3:
The chain simulator was rebranded as a devmode. Its initial version is already public and there are ongoing efforts for improving it. Some neat changes to the aeCanary provide now a better view of the network. The node operator interface is still in a PR, but the tx-pool interaction is implemented. What relates to the node operator interface with regards of the peer pool interaction is to be implemented in Q4. The configuration GUI now is rebanded as a full-scale GUI launcher and it’s initial version is coming soon. The node modes are already implemented as well as the CLI scripts depending on them. The JS encoder/decoder implementation is finished and will be included in the SDK. Some small SC improvements had been done.
Unplanned tasks were the fixes done in the tx-pool
. Now tx-pool
supports different strategies for cleaning up transactions that hang too long in the mempool. The algorithm for putting transactions in the microblocks was revisited and improved to get better throughput.
Q4 Roadmap
The node will be continously improved but the focus is put on the HyperChains research, design and development.
Ongoing important tasks
AeCanary and the new shiny features like dev mode and node modes in general wll be continously supported and improved.
Node operator interface
This interface provides the peer pool interaction for the node operator: allows the admin of the node to be able to list the peers, add or remove unverified peers, initate connects or disconnexts, to block or unblock users.
Node GUI launcher
A native GUI application that downloads the node’s code, compiles it, helps the user to configure it and then runs the node. This is an ongoing project now and is expected to present some results soon.
M1 CPU compatibility
It will start in Q4.
OTP24.1
Since now there is an OTP version 24.1 the node wll be prepare to be compatible with it. To a big extent, the node codebase already is compatible, but an upgrade of many librarires and extensive testing is needed.
DB refactoring
The refactoring is almost done but a bug appeared in one of the external librarires. Waiting for it to be resolved. Once this is unblocked, the work will be resumed on this.
Revisit the HyperChains playground
Currently the HC Playground is not in a working condition. It will be polished and improved in order to demonstrate the HCs.
Rosetta API
Now the node modes and plugins can be used to implement the Rosetta API.
Documention of the plugin infrastructure
Write detailed description of how it works so third-party teams can also develop their own plug-ins. This will still require intensive knowledge of the node itself.
GC Names
The accounts are subject to GC but the names are not. This will save a lot of disc space but it will likely happen in 2022.
Tx pruning for non-miner nodes
The new strict mode of the tx-pool applies only when the node is actively mining, this should be extended to non-mining nodes as well.
Ceres improvements
The core team started plannng and developing the new features for the next ceres
hard fork.
They consider the further improvement of the FATE VM, for example adding :
- bitwise operations (OR, AND, XOR, NOT)
- ZK/SNARK friendly hash function(s) - Poseidon hash (+ possibly more?)
- a dedicated MULMOD instruction
- revisit
stateful
endpoints
Other HF-requiring fixes in ceres
are proposed:
- used gas rather than gas when packing transactions (and possibly change in the microblock structure)
- adding a raw-pointer for AENS
The updates on the aeroadmap and the aerelease schedule will follow dynamically in this topic. The previous roadmap can be found on the AETERNITY ROADMAP Q3 2021.
You are welcome to contact us under the Email: [email protected]
Release 6.3.0
Release Date: October 2021
Type: Maintenance, see release info, details.