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.
We are excited to announce Iris monitoring and alarm tool AeCanary was released as planned and is online. This tool will be continuously improved and extended to be used by miners, exchanges and any ae user. AeCanary is a very important tool for the cyber-attacks prevention. It is also a useful tool for bugs and accounts tracking.
Short review of the planned tasks in Roadmap Q2: DB refactoring is not finished due to a bug in a library and pending external dependency. Maintenance mode is WIP and still in progress. Fate improvements went into Iris. Beam sync is not started. Rosetta - some RnD was done, this depends heavily on different node modes (the maintanence mode). What was not planned but done was the revisit of the mempool, the upgrade of librares, and solving the other Iris-related issues.
Continuous improvement of the documentation and the tests as well as the upgrade of libraries is a basic part of the maintenance of the blockchain.
The quarter Q3 2021 continues to have the focus on improvement on the User Experience (UX) und User Interfaces (UI). Additionally to Beam Sync and Rosetta the following features are planned:
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Chain Simulator
The node has a special consensus mode for running tests. This is already used in our internal tests but can be exposed so other developers can test Sophia contracts, similar to Ganache. Exposing this might require some refactoring of the exsisting code and providing an API. How the testing tool would access this API is TBD (HTTP, WebSockets, CLI…). What this API will consist of is still TBD, but it would revolve around mining keyblocks and transactions. Core team will not be developing the tool itself but rather the API. -
AeCanary
Provide more monitoring features and improvements:- Finish tracking of tainted accounts
- No keyblock being mined for the past X minutes, where X is configurable. This would be a symptom of a stuck blockchain
- No transactions being included for X minutes/keyblocks. This would be a symptom of a stuck blockchain
- Chain difficulty and miner hash rate
- gas_price used per generation
- Key block production intervals
Integration with other systems:
- Telegram - add bot support so events can be sent to Telegram chat rooms
- AE Node - connect to a node directly. Discuss if we still need the MDW or AeCanary can talk only to a node instead
Refactoring:
- Fetch all transactions for the past X days - currently exchange monitoring is a rolling update of selected accounts. This has a good solution but scales poorly with regard to tainted accounts for example.
- Keep transactions a rolling window - delete transactions older than X days
-
Node operator interface
Currently a node operator can only start and stop a node. There is almost no way of interacting with the node. We plan on providing interface(s) for allowing node operator to access and modify state of a running system. Examples are:Transaction pool:
List transactions in pool by filters: origin, transaction type and etc.
- Delete transactions from the mempool - transaction by hash, all transactions in the pool, all transactions from/to a certain address and etc.
- Modify minimum required gas_price of the local transaction pool while the system is still running.
- Impose filters on transactions in order to enter the pool: by origin, by transaction type and etc. Modify those while the node is running
Peers pool:
- List peers: currently connected, unverified and blocked
- Add/remove unverified peers
- Initiate a connect to a specific peer
- Disconnect from a peer
- Block/unblock a peer
Those will be available via HTTP API and a small portable user frendly GUI.
-
Configuration tool with GUI
Users seem to have problems working with aeternity.yaml. This is a barrier we want to remove - instead we will provide a small GUI tool with checkboxes and buttons to produce the file for them. -
M1 CPU compatibility
Update the libraries so we have support for Apple silicone. Already tracked as issue. Note that this depends on external dependencies we have little control over. -
Node running modes
Provide different running modes for the node. This is already in progress. It is needed for Rosetta API and various CLI. -
CLI tools
Different tools for DB manipulation. This depends on the modes above. -
OTP 24.1
OTP 24 comes with nice features, one of which is the JIT. The node could take advantage of this performance boost. Note that this depends on OTP release we have little control over. -
Revisit the JS encoder/decoder
The JS encoder/decoder of Sophia calldata is almost done, it still needs some love ex. tests. Currently users have to call an external trusted service for this. Since the work is almost done, we shall wrap it around. -
Database backend improvements
Refactoring of the mnesia_rocksdb backend has been in the works for some time. It requires an upgrade of the erlang-rocksdb library, which now seems to be forthcoming. The idea is to increase sync speed, reduce IO pressure, and maintain database consistency better than today. -
State Channels improvements
We plan to support updates of the channel service and improvements of the SDK, aiming at making it easier to get started with State Channels.
The Aeternity Foundation (AF) supports the aeternity protocol and ecosystem.
Simultaneously the HyperChains (HC) development has proceeded. and a new HC Roadmap will be published soon.
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 Q2 2021.
You are welcome to contact us under the Email: [email protected]
Release 6.2.0
Release Date: August 2021
Type: Maintenance, see release info.