Week 20: W/E 8th November 2019
Each week, this is where we’ll share a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on in the program. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in the community GitHub.
If you are not already part of the conversation, you’ll find a hive of activity over at the stake pool Best Practice Telegram. With almost 3,000 members and loads of engaged users, this is a great resource for anyone interested in contributing to the program. Continued thanks to everyone from the community, especially our amazing Ambassadors.
What’s Up
It’s been 20 weeks since the first release of the Shelley testnet and we are very pleased with the progress we’ve seen so far! This week we announced another important first step as we head towards the Incentivized phase.
Next Tuesday November 12, we’ll be doing the balance check for the upcoming Incentivized Testnet. This is a practice run of the actual snapshot that will occur later this month. It provides users with an opportunity to validate that the value of their mainnet ada balance has been accurately captured. While we recommend you do this just to be sure, this is an optional step. Users who do not take part will still be able to join the program later in the month. For more information, head to the official Incentivized Testnet website.
The Jörmungandr team is also really excited about the latest release, this week’s v0.7.0-rc7. This is by far the most performant and most stable release. It is way faster than before. The decentralization algorithm has been redesigned entirely to offer better connectivity between nodes, as well as blazing fast event propagation. Another exciting feature that has been added is the ability to delegate to multiple stake pools at once, which reduces the cost to delegate.
For those of you following along with the Nightly builds, you’ll have seen all the changes and constant activity with our code! Inevitably, each new release can introduce new issues while they fix existing problems. For example, in the process of introducing a new algorithm for fetching blocks that will help reduce bandwidth, a new issue appeared that caused some users to to have network syncing issues in 0.7.0-rc5. But this is already being worked on by the devs team with the next release candidate, so keep an eye out for the fix.
Support
New Issues - 8
Closed Issues - 23
Issue Backlog - 18
Documentation & Content
This week the team was busy finalising the layout and creating content for the Incentivized Testnet website. The guys were also busy preparing content to support the Balance Check that is happening next week on November 12. Further information will be added to the website in the coming days, including a video on how to prepare your funds in advance if you want to participate.
DevOps Updates
This week, DevOps updated the Nightly cluster to rc5. And tonight, they have deployed the latest release, rc7. These releases implemented a breaking change and required new trusted peers and genesis hash. To find the latest nightly configuration and genesis hash needed to connect, head to this page.
Community Content
Please note, these community resources are shared in good faith for you to use at your own discretion. You’ll always find ‘official’ documentation and instructions within IOHK & Cardano channels.
- Community member @Stakenuts shared two stats on Twitter: about the amount of pools participating on 0.7.0-rc3 and the quality of synchronization.
- Some community members talked about how we almost reached the 3,000 user mark in our Telegram group on Twitter. Surprise… we are over that now! Thank you everyone for your continued contribution!
- Cardano Ambassador Cardanians.io published a Medium post about the upcoming snapshot.
That’s it for now!
Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team