[ROADMAP] Aeternity Roadmap Q-2023

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 æternity 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 .

Our goal remains the same: to make the ænode faster, better and lighter and the æcosystem more attractive for the users. The Hyperchains network using the ænodes has been designed to attract enterprise customers and their users. On top of the faster æternity network and hyperchains network the decentralized applications (æpps) can be run with higher performance and in a private context. Therefore, the whole æternity ecosystem will perform with higher availability, scalability, security and performance.

Q1 2023 Recap

A short tasks review as follows:

  • HyperChains

    The initial implementation is in the process and a lot of work was done. The commitments are being consumed and they are used to elect leaders. The fork difficulty is being calculated according to the accumulated stake. The docker-compose script is ready and successfully working with node 6.8.1.

  • AENS Auctions

    In preparation for the upcoming Ceres protocol upgrade the AENS auctions were adjusted to have a shorter auction time with a real time extension (no reset) when new bids are made. A generic AENS delegation signature was added to allow a contract to handle all your current and future names on your behalf.

  • Garbage Collection (GC)

    The GC Old States task is completed. It also required some HTTP endpoint fixes and those are done as well.

  • Network Monitoring Tool

    This work on this tool is in progress: a prototype was created, it connects to nodes and asks for their peers but needs to be finished.

  • Advanced State Channels

    Some Improvements were made in order to make nodes serving many state channels connecting on the same port more scalable and robust.

  • The Plugin System & Devmode

    The packaging and the loading of plugins were improved as well as the plugin build support. Also, several API improvements for plugin initialization and configuration management were made. Prefunding dev mode accounts is also supported now. Documentation and incremental improvements are still needed.

  • Middleware

    Some significant improvements were done to the system’s functionality, performance, and reliability of the middleware. A new activities filtering feature is introduced. The optimized data indexing for nested resources and the enhanced web sockets are ensuring a better performance and reliability. Several different metrics for tracking the system’s performance were added for quick identification and resolution of issues. As a result of these improvements the middleware has become more stable and efficient.

Q2 Roadmap

Hyperchains

Hyperchains have still the top priority. The following tasks need to be finish in order to complete the hyperchains working prototype:

  • Lazy leader - an elected leader is not producing a block
  • Fork awareness for the parent-chain
  • Revisit the staking UI to make it working with the latest contract changes
  • Implement the pending contract changes

Tx Execution Parallelization

While creating a block, build a tree of dependencies for all transactions so that they can be executed in parallel while applying them. This will change the block structure and can be applied only with a hard fork (Ceres).

Snapshot Sync

Since now there is an efficient GC, then it can be implemented a snapshot sync approach. It will sync all the block headers till a certain height and then start asking for DB objects from different peers.

Front-End Playground

A front-end UI for inspecting transactions and interacting with the chain needs to be implemented.

Advanced State Channels

There are ideas on how to evolve the State Channel Market demo into a more complete, usable and practical demo. A more mobile-friendly interface than WebSockets has also been requested, as well as a different packaging, making it possible to run State Channels outside of the actual Aeternity node.

EIP-712

The implementation of EIP-712 typed structured data hashing and signing will allow the user to inspect the message they are signing in a wallet.

Middleware

The primarily focus is on upgrading the system from V1 to V3 while implementing a new strategy to separate the endpoints exposed from the middleware indexing. Along with this, the middleware will also provide support for new node API modules and expose additional data related to the hyperchains. These updates will ensure that the system remains up-to-date and efficient, providing users with improved functionality and a more robust experience.

JS SDK

Continuous redesign, refactoring and improvement is planned.

Sophia and Dev Tools

An important improvement of smart contract development on the æternity blockchain by building new tools (debugger, REPL and editor) needs to be done.

All regular reports on any grant application progress can be found in the æternity forum, see ae maintenance , middleware, js sdk , sophia and dev tools, etc.

The updates on the ærelease schedule will follow dynamically in this topic. The previous roadmap can be found on the AETERNITY ROADMAP Q1 2023 .

You are welcome to contact us under the Email: [email protected]

Release 6.9.0

Release Date: Apr 25, 2023
Type: Maintenance, see forum post and release notes.

Release 6.10.0

Release Date: Juni 28, 2023
Type: Maintenance, see forum post and release notes.

Here is the recording of the Ask Me Anything Session for the Q2 2023 Roadmap:

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