Shelley Testnet: Your weekly rollout rollup. Week 21: W/E 15th November 2019

Week 21: W/E 15th 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 over 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. Special kudos and grateful thanks goes out to the folks (and you know who you are!) helping on Thursday evening with the release of the Balance check wallets.

What’s Up
Jörmungandr is entering a longer and more stable phase. The last few weeks of release candidate releases have been a succession of steps toward a more stable network protocol, and a more complete blockchain protocol. In the lower level of the blockchain protocol we have introduced placeholders for the future support of multisig addresses, stake pool management and automatic reward distribution to all the stakeholder account address. The next few weeks, we will focus on exposing these long awaited features to the users.

On the Incentivized Testnet rollout front, we released the special balance check versions of Daedalus and Yoroi yesterday. Those of you who held ada in mainnet Daedalus or Yoroi at the time of the balance check snapshot (12.00 UTC on November 12) can now use these new, dedicated wallets to verify your testnet balance. The official incentivized testnet website has download links and instructions. As mentioned before, this is an optional activity but gives users an opportunity to confirm they followed the necessary steps correctly and for us to check that everything is in working order for the actual snapshot happening later this month.

Along with the release of these wallets, we have launched the first iteration of the Incentivized Testnet-Shelley Explorer. This is a work-in-progress as we continue to develop the testnet and its features. The purpose of the explorer will be to give the community the ability to look up Shelley Testnet transactions, balances and addresses and to better understand the inner workings of the network by monitoring the epochs. Because the testnet is at the beginning of the rollout, you won’t be able to see much interesting data right now but this will change over time. We’ll also be adding metrics associated with stake pools and their performance.

Support
Jormungandr
New Issues - 18
Resolved Issues - 19
Issue Backlog - 21

Daedalus - Balance Check (released ~00:00 UTC Nov 15)
The support team have been hard at work, including working on supporting the new Balance check wallet release.
New Issues - ~ 100
Resolved Issues - ~10
Issue Backlog -~90

Two known issues have been logged with the new balance check Daedalus that the teams are currently working on:

  1. Cannot start the node. An intermittent issue within the Windows build of the Daedalus wallet may cause some users issues with loading times. This is a usability issue - data integrity and security are unaffected. If this occurs, quitting and re-launching should allow the wallet to load successfully. Please see this support article for more information.
  2. Testnet balance is incorrect. Our developers are working on this right now. We do not have a workaround at this time but at the time of writing this, its looking like we may have identified a likely cause. This has only affected a handful of users but if you are also seeing a mismatch when verifying your balance check, we request that you submit a ticket here with logs from the balance check Daedalus and screenshots from the main screens of your mainnet Daedalus and the balance check Daedalus.

Documentation & Content
We’ve been busy updating the Incentivized Testnet website, adding a new section to help prepare users who want to get involved get ready for the balance snapshot. We have also redesigned the original testnet website which is now refocused on supporting developers and stakepool operators. On the backend of the site, we made updates that gave it a refreshed look, faster performance and more logical structure. This was rolled out today! We hope you like it and find the information useful. Let us know what you want to see there!

We have also made some usability improvements to replace static content with references to locations where this is dynamically updated regularly, so that you always have the most up-to-date information available to you.

We have also just released a new video walkthrough showing how you can check your balance in Daedalus. There is also one available for Yoroi.

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.

  • Cardano Ambassador Rick McCracken shared a tweet, mentioned Chris Graffagnino who made a how-to to run Jormungandr for Linux newbies with an intermediate level of IT knowledge. You can find Chris’s guide on Github here.
  • The Cardano Effect’s latest episode dive deep into topics around Shelley, decentralization and staking with a few stakepool operators from the Cardano community.
  • Cardano Ambassador Cardanians.io updated their Medium blog about what staking is all about.
  • Community member Umed Saidov shared a tweet with metrics using a python script from IOHK’s repository to create a list of registered stakepools on the current testnet.

That’s it for now!

Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team

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