An update from our team: we are about to restart the HC Alpha test network.
During the past few weeks we did a lot of work in the area. Most notable changes are:
Improved testing
We fixed a couple of bugs in the consensus smart contract. Those were resulting in the network getting stuck. We tightend up some tests to to help us detect regressions.
Parent chain connectors
A lot of work was done with regards of parent chain connections - the AE one is ready, the BTC one is under development. The node has the functionality to call a couple of different parent chain nodes and to build consensus from their responses. This is how the child chain node will interact with the parent chain: posting and fetching commitments, getting specific hashes and so on. Those are not yet propagated to the consensus smart contract.
Smart contract improvements
We revisited the smart contract with regards of usability and UI:
- an improved interface is being added for accessing validator’s state - now there is a single endpoint that fetches all the data required, no need to do a lot of sequential dry-runs
- the minumum staking and new validator stake limits are now fully configurable at genesis block. Those used to be hardcoded in the contract body. This allows users to spawn their own HCs configured according to their needs
- added additional functionality available only for the validator: now they can set their own name, description and avatar url. This will allow them to build branding of their pool. None of those are mandatorary for a pool to operate
- enforced a minimum amount a validator must persist in their own pool. The old behaviour was really dangerous as users had a minimum stake to become a validator but then they could simply withdraw all stake while still being a validator. This could potentially result in a validator getting staking support by their pool while not having any stake of their own
Revisited configs
The HC settings were a bit messy and this resulted in a corresponding refactoring and clean up. Now seed calls are moved to a json file of their own and they do not polute the config. The naming of seed files is being revisited as well. Furthermore - network ids that do not have a hc_ prefix are allowed to become HCs as well.
Staking interface improvements
The staking UI that showcases staking and unstaking had been reworked to better represent the data.
HC Alpha testnet
Based on the above, the HC Alpha testnet now has different expectations for becoming a validator (1mln AE opposed to 1000 as it used to be). Now some of the 3 validators have additional info - names, descriptions and avatars. It is by purpose that not all of them have it as we don’t want to enforce this on validators.
There is a lot of work ahead but we are moving in the right direction.