Happy Wednesday everyone! This week, we look at recent blockchain testing results which showcase the recent code upgrades the team has committed over the past several months. The blockchain and blobber teams are currently fine-tuning some recently merged features while collaborating with our front-end teams to connect API feeds to our numerous apps and platforms. Meanwhile, our business development, operations, and marketing teams continue their collaboration in preparation for the rollout of various programs and platforms.
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Blockchain Testing Results
Before we dive into the specifics of this week’s dev updates let’s explore the results. We take a look at recent blockchain testing performed by Züs Dev Yury and Sculptex. The blockchain team has implemented some major upgrades to our network which has resulted in enhanced stability and performance. Yury reports that his recent benchmark blockchain testing has shown really positive results. These results are in terms of API endpoints, transaction performance, and speed.
He notes that he is using a large data set for testing blockchain functionality, including over 1 million wallets, 2.5 million allocations, 100,000 delegators/stakers, and 10,000 blobbers. Yury adds that the 2.5 million allocations “is close to the set goal. I am working toward 10 million allocations but the generation takes time. It will take likely a couple of days to get to that number.” From the results so far, the team is very pleased but did identify a few small optimizations. These optimizations once implemented could further boost the performance and speed of transactions.
Progressing from Here
With the promising results of blockchain testing results, which is important for scaling the network, the performance of the storage network also needs testing. Sculptex has been working on scale testing of Blobbers and performance for comparisons with other platforms. He gave some sneak peeks of early testing results to Space Force (Hopium) community members but hopes to be sharing more detail in the coming weeks.
During testing, Sculptex uploaded well over half a million files this last week. Results so far have been encouraging with the results so far. Sculptex notes he is aiming to break the million file mark this week. With our Erasure Coding having been tested extensively in the past, storage of actual files is the only way to conduct proper testing. He has his eyes set on hitting a million files shared across two blobbers. Sculptex’s future plans include max network performance as more blobbers join during Active Set.
Development Team Updates
With progress put into perspective, the blockchain team continues its work. They closed 11 PRs and 11 issues on the Züs Repo. Recent updates by the team have resulted in positive results when looking at tokenomics structure and performance, blockchain functionality and speed, and smart contract performance–which continues to be under intensive work. While smart contracts continue to see ongoing work, many team members are optimizing (everyone’s favorite) the recent changes to features. This is a key component and can be viewed as a positive sign. Many major changes have been finished, are compatible together, and benefit from small modifications to further boost performance.
Benchmark Testing
In light of recent success with benchmark testing, the team has implemented a fix for all errors that were encountered with the testing as well as added support to run benchmark testing with pre-generated data, to mimic live data. With an emphasis on smart contract optimization, the team implemented pagination for all APIs on storagesc. This means that when information is called for and there are numerous lines of data. Then the lists will be provided in pages. This is a rather common technique in many apps and platforms but requires a small modification to the smart contract. The currency.coin PR upgraded the transaction value type which enables safe currency calculation for transaction fees, transaction values, stake pool fees, and delegate pool fees.
Work was continued on our read pool structure, which was simplified to keep only one balance field. Previously, there were two fields, the owner and visitor, which complicated token-locking logic without providing any benefits in return. Our team implemented updated benchmark testing processes so that the tests will be conducted for each PR that is merged, ensuring the new code will not break prior test results. The team fixed a zcnsc bridge burn issue, which will prevent issues upon migrating to native ZCN. The team also added nonce validation when receiving new transactions from clients while also adding concurrency safeguards to the current round timeout field. The global configuration was moved to the MPT base configuration to improve performance.
Blobber Updates
The Blobber and GoSDK team closed 8 PRs and 4 issues this week. The transaction nonce gap issue, which has been hidden for some time, resulted in GoSDK users having unstable transaction confirmations. Following several days of debugging, the team identified the issue and implemented a fix. The team has expanded its API providers for ZCN/USD feeds to ensure proper price streaming for users and service providers to refer to when making transactions or new allocations.
The team also fixed an issue with performing a health check on a blobber. Finally, the team implemented support for an offline option for some commands, such as version recoverywallet, which does not require a connection to Züs network. The recover wallet offline feature is an essential function. It will assist in the transition to mainnet by the Active Set. It enables the use of an Ethereum seed phrase to generate wallets, which is a convenient option for users. With the ability to perform this function offline via the official Züs repo, we aim to provide user assurance and security. The team continues its work on a new PR, which focuses on changes to the blobber side in order to simply read-pool process logic and remove unnecessary fields/steps. This PR is currently undergoing work and will be merged following code review and blockchain testing.
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