[ROADMAP] Aeternity Roadmap Q1-2023

aeternity Foundation Roadmaps and Announcements
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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 .

Our goal remains the same: to make the aenode faster, better and lighter and the ae ecosystem more attractive for the users. The hyperchains 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.

Q4 2022 Recap

A short review of the tasks from the Q4 2022 Roadmap.

Areas of Improvement

  • Fixing the potential memory leak
    The memory leak had the highest priority and it was successfully fixed. The issue was a really odd one as it exposed itself only on low CPU nodes with GC enabled. This made it really hard to track.

  • HyperChains
    The hyperchains had the next priority. Some improvements to the smart contract were introduced. Nodes now can make commitments on the parent chain. They also can start from iris hard fork (they used to require ceres). Some progress had been made in the effort of having one docker compose to run the whole environment - with faucet, MDW and explorer. Hyperchains detailed documentation was prepared in order to provide the base for the whitepaper.

  • State Channel Support
    There was a bug identified in enoise connections’s spawning. It was leading to leaking one enoise connector in a funny state that was eager to consume any incoming connection to that node only for it to die right afterwords. The whole process of spawning and killing connectors had been heavily revisited in order to fix this bug.
    A debug endpoint is exposed to provide the amount of currently running FSMs.

  • CERES Hard Fork
    The following list of tasks is implemented and it will get activated with ceres:

    1. Fix delegated signatures for non-existing accounts
    2. Make it possible to call contracts by name (top level in ContractCallTx a name can be given and contract_pubkey will be resolved in the transaction)
    3. Add raw pointers to AENS
    4. Tamper protection for GasPrice and Fee in GaMetaTx

  • Fork Difficulty
    Some research had been done and our current idea is a modified version of the the MESS protocol.

  • GC old states
    The work regarding GC of older states is still WIP. Most of the time this had been blocked by the memory leak mentioned above. The fix resulted in revisiting the GC of the accounts’ tree.

  • Rosetta API
    The Rosetta API implementation is finished. The only pending task here is a proper docker image.

  • The Plugin System
    There was an identified problem in the plugin system: external plugins did not come with their dependencies which causes them to fail to start at all if there is a new dependency. Some significant improvements are coming together.

  • Dev Mode
    The dev mode plugin has seen actively used by the tools teams. Some functionality from the dev mode plugin has now been moved into the core for even greater utility and ease of use.

Q1 2023 Roadmap

Ongoing tasks

All tools ( AeCanary , GUI Launcher , HC UI, etc.) will be continuously improved and supported with bugfixes and small features.

HyperChains

The first implementation of HyperChains will be finished. It will not be production ready yet but it will consume commitments and will elect leaders based on this. This implementation will have fork difficulty and fork resolution mechanisms. The whitepaper will be published. A docker-compose script will be provided for running a HyperChain locally by anyone.

GC Old States

GC old states were discussed and exploratory work has been done, but needs to be finished and released.

Network Monitoring Tool

The network monitoring tool is design to inspect network connectivity of the nodes. It can be used to monitor what happens if some peer nodes are taken down.

MESS Protocol

In a broader sense, this is about improving resistance against attacks in general. A modified version of the MESS protocol is one interesting path. Another area we have glanced at is Byzantine Voting Protocols, for which an Erlang implementation actually already exists (Honeybadger BFT, used by the Helium blockchain).

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.

Plugin System

Improvements in build, packaging and internal APIs are underway, and need to be documented and improved upon the feedback from actual uses.

Dev Mode

A number of feature requests have been made from the tools team, and need to be considered. A WIP task is support for provisioning pre-funded accounts for dev mode.

Middleware

The middleware application will provide support for the hyperchains as well as some additional filtering features. It will add as a service the account “roles” distinction on the activities endpoint. Some refactoring and sync time tuning will be done.

JS SDK

The aternity js sdk will support the hyperchains and the middleware. Continuous redesign, refactoring and improvement is planned.

All subsequent tasks of the hyperchains project are documented, see hcproject.
All regular reports on any grant application progress can be found in the ae forum, see ae maintenance, middleware, js sdk, etc.

The updates on the aerelease schedule will follow dynamically in this topic. The previous roadmap can be found on the AETERNITY ROADMAP Q4 2022 .

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

Release 6.8.0

Release Date: February 23, 2023
Type: Maintenance, see forum post and release notes.

Release 6.8.1

Release Date: March 1, 2023
Type: Maintenance, see forum post and release notes.

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Join the Ask Me Anything (AMA) Session with the Foundation’s Core Developers and Middleware team tomorrow starting from 5 PM CET:

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