Happy Wednesday! Today Sculptex returns with a new segment on the block explorer. Last week the dev team focused on fixing the Züs block finality variation issue by merging events across transactions in the same block, instead of performing bulk update events in the same transactions, as previously mentioned. Meanwhile, the growing team is continuously fixing the blobbers rate limit and upload issues that occur when performing DDOS tests while supporting the frontend teams for both gosdk, wasm APIs, and blobbers bugs. In the following weeks, the team will start closing trivial issues and work on load tests to ensure network stability.
Sculptex’s Corner: Block Explorer
This week Sculptex released an independent version of a Block Explorer that he has been working on. This is a 3rd party implementation of a Block Explorer for Züs, similar to etherscan/polygonscan. Check his demo in action here.
According to Sculptex, the current default explorer deployed with Züs networks has been neglected due to rebranding and restructuring to be launched in the near future. He explained that just like other blockchain projects, the default explorer allows users to peruse blockchain activities. However, the explorer was extended to also perform many wallet and storage functions. Since these functions were generally run via a proxy layer, they are not ideal for security. Although the team has been updating the explorer tools with a wasm layer for increased security, Sculptex decided in the meantime to fill the void of a functional explorer for Züs. In addition, he recently added some specific ZCN-related functionality including the ability to browse network nodes and check Smart Contract activity.
Summary
“Writing this explorer has really helped me understand the way our Miners, Sharders, and Blobbers interact with each other (via Smart Contracts). It’s particularly cool to perform a task via the command line and browse its interaction on the blockchain within a few seconds! If there is sufficient interest, I’ll try and polish it up and release it on GitHub” — Sculptex.
Blockchain Team
The blockchain team added batch updates for events for adding users, adding transactions, updating blobber total stakes, and updating blobber total offers. Moreover, they refactored to simplify the provider rewards updating, and refactored to change the blobbers table to have the same rewards and total_reward fields as other providers so that it can be reused for code for updating.
Furthermore, they added an event merger to abstract the merge process. The idea was to facilitate and simplify the merging of new events when needed. Previously, the team had to declare a map for each event type to ensure uniqueness. They now support different kinds of merge logics, which can be applied with the defined eventMergeMiddlewares.
In addition, they implemented an event merger for stake pool rewards. It splits the reward and penalty into different maps to simplify the process, aggregate all of the provider rewards, and delegate reward pools, and penalty pools in a block. They discovered that the stake pool save method would emit a stake pool total offers increase event. However, the stake pool is hard-coded to update blobbers delegation pools. Since this method is also called by validators, it would cause the event saving to fail. As a response, the team did a workaround fix but will do a common fix later. Finally, there are further bugs in merging the events that need fixing, you can check the progress here.
Closed PRs
Beyond the events merge commits, the dev team closed the following PRs:
- Added challenge pool tables and emitted the associated event.
- Removed the /v1/chain/get API endpoint from sharder.
- Fixed the AddAuthorizer smart contract response structure.
- Applied the util and logging packages from https://github.com/0chain/common package.
- Integrated playlist API for wasm player to improve performance.
- Used the response with a status code of 200 when it is tied with some other status for a dominant response from sharders.
About Züs
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