Witnet Monthly Report — July 2020

Testnet 9.1 goes live with crucial updates — a stable network with extremely high connectivity. Phase 2 bug bounty — up to 5,000 $DAI for finding bugs! New Network Dashboard, Block Explorer and Telegram Bot built by the community, and updates to the node and Sheikah.

Please note: U.S persons, and those under the age of 18 are NOT permitted to participate in this phase of the program. Please see the Program Terms and Conditions for full details.

You can still sign up for Phase 2 of the Testnet Incentive Program! We are looking at a much broader participation, with no limit on the number of participants, and plenty of ways to get involved, regardless of your background or technical skills. Accordingly, the Witnet Foundation has allocated:

Up to 25,000,000 WIT tokens (1% of the total WIT supply)Up to 30,000 $DAI

Full details on the program (and how to sign up) can be found on the page below.

As part of the Witnet Testnet Incentive Program, the Witnet Foundation has launched a Bug Bounty Program.

For uncovering a critical bug or successfully attacking the network, participants can receive bounty awards of up to 5000 $DAI, according to the guidelines laid out in the article below.

On Thursday 11th July, the community successfully launched Testnet 9.1

The launch of Testnet 9.1 also saw block counting resume for the Testnet Incentive Program, and >40000 blocks have now been successfully minted onto the network by participating nodes.

In order to address the scalability challenges faced during Testnet 9.0b, the new T9.1 network has had two crucial upgrades:

Icing — if a node tries to connect to another node and fails (for example, the node is out of consensus or down), it will “freeze” that peer address for 24h. This makes the discovery of healthy peers much more efficient.Inbound Sybil rejection — each node will only accept incoming connections from diverse IP ranges, i.e. a connection from IP 1.2.3.4 will be rejected if it has already established a connection from 1.2.5.6. This guarantees a neutral view of the network consensus, ensures the network is hyper-connected, and reduces the risk of your node going down if some unreliable but well-connected nodes failTo streamline the block proposal process, block candidates are now validated as soon as blocks are received, and blocks are prioritized based on validation.When a node loses consensus, it now moves to an AlmostSynced state, where it can consolidate and validate blocks, but not mine. This way, the state of the network is maintained, and the risk of a network fork is reduced until a new consensus is reached.The consensus algorithm was reassessed, with particular attention paid to superblock consensus — whereby the Active Reputation Set vote on the last Superblocks they’ve seen and try to agree on the current state of the networkA bootstrap committee will now sign superblocks until Active Reputation Set is sufficiently matureAn assessment of Spectron was made as end-to-end test framework. This is because Cypress (our current testing framework) is not compatible with Electron (the desktop application framework that we’re using).It was decided that the time needed to make Spectron work with our current stack would outweigh the time saved through testing, so the proposal was put on holdFunctionality added to allow the export of data requests in JavaScript directly from the Data Request Editor, so that they are now compatible with the Truffle BoxData request templates are now validated before they’re imported into the Data Request Editor

Community members DRCPU and Parody Bit have built the first iteration of the Witnet Block Explorer, which allows users to quickly explore the details of any particular WIT address or block, find out the current spread of reputation, see recent transactions, and more.

Community Member Harsh Jain has built both:

The first iteration of the Witnet Telegram Bot, which allows users to easily keep track on their node activity, as well as see the reputation and mining leaderboards:The first iteration of the Witnet Network Dashboard, which displays the top-level stats and liveness of the current network

A huge thank you to all their hard work so far — these are crucial tools within the Witnet Ecosystem as we move forward.

Feel free to reach out on the Community Tools Telegram Group if you want to help out.

With crucial Witnet updates being deployed constantly, you can now keep up-to-date with all Witnet-related developments on our fortnightly Community Sprint Reviews; subscribe to the Witnet YouTube Channel now.

The latest Community Sprint Review is viewable below.

Join the Witnet Testnet Incentive Program 🤑Read the Witnet whitepaper 📃Check out Witnet’s code on Github 🤖Read Witnet core documents❓Subscribe to our blog 📬Join the community Telegram group and Discord 💬Follow @witnet_io on Twitter 🐦