Happy Wednesday! Hope you are all having a great week so far. This week, we look into continued dev progress, nearing the completion of another major milestone in our progress to mainnet. In addition, we have recently showcased a recent video put together by Sculptex. This video demonstrates the use of our dStorage video streaming capabilities.
Sculptex Use-Case: dStorage Video Server
Sculptex released a recent video that was shared with the community. This video showcases his deployment of a dStorage video streaming service that leverages Züs as the underlying storage mechanism. He previously wrote an article that breaks down what is happening. You can access the video here:
When a video file is uploaded to Züsnetwork, it can be streamed via a media player (think like YouTube). The ability to download chunks of the file at the same time offers good speeds and the ability to skip around. He is essentially showcasing the capability of using Züs as the storage layer for media applications.
To try the media server yourself, click here. https://mediaserver.zcdn.uk/
Development Team Updates
In the past week, the blockchain team has closed 13 PRs and 12 issues within the Züs Repo. This builds upon last week’s major progress. With the blockchain team’s recent merging of the Transaction Nonce PR, they were able to shift focus to address the final few remaining tasks on the Miner Reward PR. The team is currently fixing an issue uncovered during systems testing and once that has been fixed, we will see the merging of all Miner Reward-related PRs.
Another key PR that was merged over the past week is the challenge table PR, which provides the API for blobbers/validators to get open challenges. Previously, there was an issue during the challenge generation process, which would interfere with blobbers/validators’ ability to complete the challenges. By fixing the underlying issue, the PR was able to successfully pass testing and improve network stability. In correspondence to this, the blobber team is now implementing updates on the blobber network to reflect changes made to the APIs.
Other Fixes
Other fixes include benchmark issues and updated conductor tests. The fixes to the benchmark issues include the test being able to auto-populate data into the event database (such as pools, and markers) to simulate scenarios which helps expand testing capabilities and reflect PRs that were merged over previous weeks. Our new allocation request PR was approved following an internal review and will be merged following the passing of systems testing. When the PR is merged, it will allow us to resolve a few final conflicts on our ALL_BLOBBERS_KEY PR and conduct systems testing. If the PR passes testing, these PRs will be merged in a quick, successive order.
As our team implements new processes and enhances others, our consistent testing helps us identify potential issues. The team began work on two new security issues that were identified. One issue includes the process in which miners verify the responses to challenges and the other results in the tokens being burned due to a rounding error. We are glad that our robust testing has helped us identify these potential threats to minimize issues following our launch.
Blobber Updates
The Blobber team has closed 6 PRs and 5 issues in the past week. The main issue addressed is the merging of the disk utilization enhancement PR which addresses the problems that could cause the crowding of directories with the concurrent storage of millions of files. Distributing the files among different directories based on its content hash helps with the scaling of the network. Another PR was raised which helps limit the number of directories and files an allocation can have in order to avoid a slowing of performance. This is a decisive measure to ensure that Blobbers will be responsive from the mainnet launch. Recommended limits will be determined over the next few weeks that strike a good initial balance between user demand and performance.
Ongoing optimizations in this area will continue after the mainnet launch to enable further scaling. Due to the ability to create multiple allocations per wallet, this should only be a minor inconvenience. The recently added feature of the naming of allocations will assist users in organizing their files between multiple allocations. This week, the Blobber team will continue its work on the challenge completion issue while also implementing API changes from the challenge table PR, mentioned above in the blockchain section. Thank you for reading.
About Züs
Züs is a high-performance storage platform that powers limitless applications. It’s a new way to earn passive income from storage.