It has been another great week of progress on the testnet as we head towards Shelley on mainnet. Things are nicely on track. Here’s just a quick update, following up on Christopher’s video from earlier this week.
Our new wave of pioneers (who joined last week) has been busy going through the exercises and tutorials that our original pioneers have helped us develop and improve. Next week is our biggest yet on the testnet. Not only for our pioneers but for all the stake pool community and indeed anyone following Cardano’s journey towards decentralization and staking. As we announced last week on May’s live show, on Tuesday 9th June, we’ll open up the Friends & Family testnet for the whole stake pool operator community to join.
Any stake pool operator (SPO) who wants to get on board will be able to visit our testnet site and get started. In time for Tuesday, we’ll have uploaded all the exercises and tutorials we have developed. SPOs will be able to draw down some ada test tokens from a public faucet, access the network keys and get set up. There will also be a dedicated section on the Cardano forum for people to ask questions, share their progress and raise any issues they encounter. And of course, there will be a community of 50+ pool pioneers to help onboard new pioneers!
This stage is all about stake pool operators; if you are an ada holder there’s nothing you need to do at this point. But feel free to follow along as we move closer to the time (downloading a wallet and reclaiming your ITN rewards, for example) when you can get more involved!
Testnet Exercises
Talking of exercises, we have now released 6 exercises and a number of supporting tutorials to help operators onboard and set up their pools. We’re now finalizing the 7th exercise – covering transaction metadata and multisig – which will be released as soon as the supporting code drops; node CLI commands that enable transaction metadata and multisig are planned for the next sprint.
Development progress
On the development side, we’ve had a good week. We just released the Cardano Node 1.13.0 update, which will serve as the default node for the public testnet, when it commences next week. We had a few issues around manual KES rotation this week, but we’re now implementing a fix that should address this going forward.
In terms of testing, things are going as planned with no major issues. Of particular note, we have had good results from our first round of testing of the hard fork combinator. You can read more about this technology – central to the Shelley deployment – in this recent IOHK blog post.
In summary, here’s where things are with testing:
- 18 bugs and 16 feature requests in total, so far for the F&F Testnet
- 8 bugs and 4 FRs have been already resolved
- 9 bugs and 12 FRs remaining
- Bugs are generally usability issues rather than major issues
- On the documentation side - we’ve had 25 issues in total: 21 resolved and 4 currently in progress
Stay tuned to Cardano Foundation and IOHK social channels next week for more news on the rollout of the public testnet. (And spoiler alert, we’ll very soon be announcing the date of the upcoming virtual summit, so you can mark your diaries :-).
That’s all for now - we’ll see you next week!
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