Shelley Testnet: Your weekly rollout rollup. Week 25: W/E 13th December 2019

Week 25: W/E 13th December 2019

Each week, this is where we’ll share a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on in the Shelley Testnet program. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in our Jormungandr GitHub.

If you are not already part of the conversation, we invite you to the Shelley Testnet & Stake Pool Best Practice Telegram group. With over 3,300 members and steadily growing, this is a great resource for anyone interested in the Incentivized Testnet. Continued thanks to everyone from the community, and a special shout-out to all of our Ambassadors who have supported us along the way.

Breaking News!
We’re excited to announce that we have released Jormungandr v0.8.2, from which our teams were able to spin up the network that will effectively become the Incentivized Testnet. This is the start of our launch sequence towards the Shelley era!

If you are planning on running a stake pool – it is now over to all of you… We invite all of you to check out the newest documentation, which is a how-to for stake pool operators. It includes detailed information on all the steps you need to complete in the setup process, including how to register your pool on-chain. Check out the rest of the newsletter to read up on all the updates across the Shelley stake pool testing teams.

What’s Up
On the code side, following a few more releases candidates, we have now reached the stable 0.8 branch. Those of you who have been following our progress will have seen many changes and improvements since the first iteration of v0.8.0-rc1 two weeks ago. All these improvements and bug fixes have been packaged up into this final branch, which will effectively be used to set up the Incentivized Testnet network. As always, we’re continuously making changes and today we’ve already released v0.8.1 and v0.8.2. This brings some new optional settings for the overall rewards, and the network has received some further improvements and polish. It is also now the signal for having a more stable protocol.

With a stable network, stake pool operators are now able to register their pools on-chain and finish setting up their pools. This is in preparation for next week’s release of the testnet Daedalus and Yoroi wallets. By providing this setup period, Cardano users who participated in the balance snapshot will have options on which pool to delegate their ada to when they open up Daedalus Rewards and Yoroi next week! We’ll also be performing some confirmatory, final testing before the full rollout next week.

Support
The Support team is working hard to update the Support Portal with new content for the new functionality that will roll out soon; for example the Stake Pool Operator’s How-to Guide.

New Issues - 24
Resolved Issues - 17
Issue Backlog - 42

The new Incentivized Testnet network release is landing today, on a Friday, so we do want to point out that support will be limited over the weekend. But our Support Team will be back at it in full-force come Monday. If you run into any problems, please submit an issue directly at the CF GitHub here. Otherwise, put the knowledgeable, helpful Cardano community to use by heading over to the dedicated Shelley testnet Telegram group.

Documentation & Content
This week our developer-focused testnet website was updated with additional content on registration as well as some updated links. We have also made a How to guide for stake pool operators available to further assist you with your setup and configuration tasks. We also plan to release a set of associated videos over the coming days. For our Korean and Chinese communities, the stake pool operator overview guide PDF is now available in these additional languages. You can find these PDF’s here.

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.

  • Watch another great episode from TCE with stake pool operators answering community questions.
  • A community member made https://pooltool.io/ to display the statistics of the Shelley Testnet such as epoch, slot, height and current blocktime.
  • PegasusPool shared a tweet with their node performing as it should be. Well done!
  • And as expected, a lot of websites like this one, promoting new stake pools for the Shelley Incentivized Testnet are popping up here and there. Decentralization, here we come!

That’s it for now!

Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team

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