May 24, 1018
It has been a couple of weeks since I last posted an update.
There are some important changes to our plan for rolling out NRD kernels.
- NRD kernel support will activate at HF3 for floonet/testnet
- NRD kernel support will remain disabled at HF3 for mainnet
The primary motivation for getting NRD kernel support in for HF3 was as preparation work for our payment channel implementation.
There is no immediate use case for NRD kernels and no tangible benefit until we support true multi-party/multi-sig outputs. And for this we need full musig and the multi-round tx building flow for musig (secure exchange of committed nonce values etc.)
So we plan to roll this out via a “feature flag” with it enabled on floonet/testnet and disable on mainnet.
The feature flag also allows us to have comprehensive test coverage of both scenarios (enabled and disabled) to ensure the subsequent smooth activation on mainnet, presumably at HF4.
This will allow us to take advantage of the period between HF3 and HF4 to fully leverage floonet/testnet for testing NRD kernels alongside multi-party outputs which are tentatively being discussed for inclusion in HF4.
The NRD RFC is at the end of the final comment period and likely to be merged shortly.
The ser/desr PR has been reworked to incorporate the “feature flag” as discussed above and is in final review. We are hoping to get this merged in the next couple of days.
Once this is merged I can shift focus to finalizing the NRD rules implementation here.