Week 23: W/E 29th 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 steadily growing, 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
Earlier today at 12:00 noon UTC, we performed the scheduled balance snapshot for the Incentivized Testnet. More specifically, this happened at epoch 159, in slot 6886. In 12 hours time from the snapshot, the team will be able to confirm that all ada balances across mainnet Daedalus and Yoroi wallets were successfully captured. We tested this snapshot process during our previous balance check so we do not anticipate any issues at this point.
The next step now is for the dev team to provision the network by setting up a new genesis block with this snapshot data. This will allow people like yourself to get set up as delegators or stake pool operators. In the coming week, we’ll be providing further content and inviting stake pool operators to get fully set up. During this interim period, stake delegation and rewards will not be available.
Once we are confident the network has sufficient pools in place, we’ll make the new Rewards Daedalus wallet, dedicated to the Incentivized Testnet, available. If you signed up for this newsletter out of interest of running a stake pool, we invite you to head to the testnet website where we have added more documentation. More will follow soon, including videos and a comprehensive guide which includes useful information for stake pool operators.
Meanwhile, over in the Jormungandr code team, while network syncing issues are being addressed with ‘nightly’ releases on 0.7.x, the team is pleased to start working toward the 0.8 release. This release will contain all the necessary parameters for stake pools and stakeholders to experience a true decentralized network with incentives for stake pools to maintain the blockchain and for stakeholders to delegate (and to get rewards back). If you feel adventurous, you can already start a blockchain in the self-node mode and experiment with the incentives parameters with the pre-release 0.8.0-rc1.
Support
This week, the most observed issue by the Support Portal was syncing on the Daedalus Balance Check wallet. The team worked extensively with users and created a new, dedicated help article for this issue. The support portal was also substantially updated this week, mostly in the Shelley Incentivized Testnet category to provide solutions and education for consumer users of the testnet in the community.
New Issues - 96
Resolved Issues - 395
Issue Backlog - 201
Documentation & Content
This week we added some new sections to the developer-focussed testnet website. It includes details on stake pools and setting up a node, along with some links to new materials such as recent videos and blog posts. We are also close to finalizing a stake pool operator’s guide with a range of useful information for stake pool operators. We hope to publish this on the website soon. In addition, we are working on some new tutorial videos which are also coming soon.
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.
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Twitter user “kdog” is running a Shelley node on their laptop with a hotspot next to a helicopter in Alaska. Can we get airborne next time?
Community member Umed, ran a node on a train. Unfortunately, you are not the first one as we’ve seen StakeNuts achieve this too. Nice accomplishment however!
Also from StakeNuts, his monitoring updates shared over Twitter has been helpful as always for the community and it seems that the network is running smoothly.
That’s it for now!
Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team