Hello everyone, I’m here to provide all of you with another update.
Since the last post I have been working on finishing all the outstanding points for the final hard fork release. Last week was pretty hectic, but we managed to merge the planned PRs. We subsequently released a beta version of the next major release (v5) for both the node and wallet. I encourage everyone to test them out and report any issues on the appropriate github repo.
Here is an overview of the issues I have been involved in:
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PIBD: The most fundamental PR was authored by me and merged first, after a long period of review and fixes. Both me and antioch wrote several follow up PRs that all went through review and were merged as well. The consequence of this is that all v5.0.0 nodes and up will be able to serve MMR segments. Due to the HF everyone will be forced to upgrade their node, meaning in the future we will be able to parallel sync from any full Grin node.
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Late locking: after initial work by yeastplume, I took this one over and finalized it. While the feature is still experimental, it allows users to keep their UTXOs unlocked in their wallets until the finalization phase. This means that funds won’t have to be locked for prolonged periods of time when the counterparty does not immediately responds with a signed slate. There is a known limitation on fee changes due to a change in the number of inputs. This will be addressed in the future by adding a second kernel that compensates for the difference in fee.
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Deprecate HTTP(s): I took over implementation of this RFC, which removes capability to send to HTTP wallets and changes the foreign API to only bind to localhost.
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Reviews on other grin & grin-wallet PRs, such as the changes to the difficulty adjustment and the changes to the fee semantics.
I’m happy that we managed to push all this work through and release a beta version in the week it was planned. If all goes well the testnet will fork next week and we should have an RC of both binaries before the holidays.
Thanks for reading and see you soon with another update!