Week 26: W/E 20th 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 3,500 members and steadily growing, this is a great resource for anyone interested in the Incentivized Testnet. Continued thanks to everyone from the community, especially those that have stuck with us over the past few months. And a special shout-out to all of our Ambassadors who have supported us along the way and continue to do so!
What’s Up
Following the release of Daedalus and Yoroi testnet wallets earlier this week, we saw more than 450 stake pools join the Incentivized Testnet, allowing users to view and delegate to them. We are now in the process of analyzing the network performance under heavy traffic (close to 3000 connections on ITN), and improve the node resilience against multiple connections, by introducing sync issue fixes and performance improvements.
Some network parameter changes we have already applied have shown some progress. Further optimisations are - at the timing of writing - being thoroughly tested internally (and with the help of some members of the community) within a Jormungandr v0.8.5 pre-release. Once testing is complete, we plan to make this release more widely available soon.
Though there have been a few bugs, issues and corner cases to work through, we have been delighted with the level of participation and activity. It’s been a week since the network was spun up and there are already 6.6 billion ada staked in the system. And while our teams continue to work on improvement, we remind you that this is a testnet. We want to find all these issues or bugs now so that we can address them ahead of the mainnet launch of Shelley. Your feedback is invaluable and we ask that you send in your logs whenever you experience issues as these will help us in delivering software updates and new features to Daedalus Rewards.
Support
Daedalus Rewards was launched on Monday, December 16th. Over the course of the week, the IOHK Support team has identified the following main issues:
- Connectivity and synchronization issues
- No stake pools visible in the stake pool list
- Issues with pending transactions
- Rewards wallet balance discrepancies (If you experience this, don’t worry, your ada is safe!)
The Support team has been busy identifying and tracking incidents for our development team, and responding to our users with solutions. They have also created new Help articles to add to the Daedalus Rewards - Known Issues section on the Support Portal. We have received approximately 950 tickets in the first 72 hours of the release. We still need to respond to approximately 250 of these users, so if you are awaiting a response, please bear with us. A member of our team will respond to your request as soon as they can.
As incremental improvements are made to the network, we’ve found that more and more users are able to access Daedalus and delegate their ada to a stake pool of their choice. We continue to encourage feedback from the community. If you encounter any issues with Daedalus Rewards Wallet, please submit a support request through the Help menu in Daedalus, or create a support request via the Support Portal. Our team is here to assist you.
Documentation & Content
This week we focused on making some minor updates and tweaks to the existing content on the testnet website following the substantial updates of last week. Some fine tuning and updates were made to various sections on the site, as we continue to improve the readability of our content. We hope that you have found our new overview and how-to guides useful over the past few days, and continue to use the content, links, and resources on the testnet website.
We have also published a glossary of terms found in Daedalus Rewards to help ada holders understand the delegation process. You can find it on the Cardano Forum here.
DevOps Update
This week DevOps has been engaged in support activities of the Incentivized Testnet including:
- Improving monitoring
- Analyzing and tuning infrastructure and network optimization parameters
- Improving automation scripts
- Log analysis and bug reporting
- Adding and improving related continuous-integration jobs
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.
- Wunderbaer from Hermes pool wrote a Medium article about how to delegate with Yoroi.
- There has been an overwhelming amount of support and interest from the community with the launch for the Incentivized Testnet, and we thank everyone for their participation. We’re not the only ones to appreciate it either!
- Meanwhile our Telegram support channel for Stakepools is still running at full speed. Join here!
- Cardano Ambassadors and stake pool operators, Rick and Philippe livestreamed their discussion going over the testnet, Jormungandr and the community’s involvement.
As we head into the holiday period, please note that even our hard-working developers and support team need to take some much-deserved time off. This means that new releases and support responses will not be happening as quickly during this time. This newsletter will also take a short break and return back into your inboxes in the second week of January. We wish you a very Happy Holiday season and look forward to what Cardano can bring in 2020!
Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team
