Testnet 8.0, new CLI methods, huge improvements to Sheikah, implementation of VRF, wallet server functions, Witnet-hosted ADO public demo of EIP-2362, new documentation and tool groups and more. 🔥

📺 Keep up-to-date on our YouTube

With crucial Witnet updates being deployed constantly, you can now keep up-to-date with all Witnet-related developments on our fortnightly Community Sprint Reviews; subscribe to the Witnet YouTube channel now.

The latest Community Sprint Review is viewable below.

🏗️ Development Update

Witnet Testnet Version Updates

• After T7.3 tragically crashed, the community carried out a post-mortem analysis. It was found that many nodes were frozen for several minutes, producing a chain reaction of desynchronization. To fix this, nodes now do not pause their workflow if they maintain a minimum threshold on their outbound connections.
• Alongside the improvement above, the latest iteration — T8.0 — introduces the long-awaited Collaterals feature, which greatly enhances the security, liveness and fairness of the network

Node

• The dataRequestReport CLI method has been implemented, which allows you to explore the entire life cycle of any request: from looking at its source code to checking the final result and which witnesses were rewarded or slashed
• CLI methods peers and knownPeers were also implemented, which will allow users to query and retrieve information regarding peers (inbound and outbound)
• A Verifiable Random Function (VRF) is now used in beacons as a source of randomness for Proof of Eligibility (PoE) — a much more secure method of achieving randomness. You can read more about VRFs here.

Sheikah — Desktop Wallet App

• Numerous design features have been added and styled, including a “welcome back” view, balance and sidebar components, and an improved mnemonics interface
• Node and wallet statuses are now tracked and displayed in the sidebar — simply subscribe to — and keep track of — all your wallets and nodes!
• Sheikah users can now display transaction details as gathered and precomputed in the Wallet
• The witnet-radon-js library now supports RADON subscripts as operator arguments, bringing us closer to a achieving a “feature complete” request editor
• You can watch the latest demo of Sheikah on our most recent Community Sprint Review here

Wallet Server

• Wallet and node status can now be reported via real-time notifications or polling
• Improvements have been made to wallet transaction indexes: the server can now compute details regarding wallet balance movement (e.g. input values and miner fees) and additional address information (e.g. payments received, timestamp)
• The server can now notify clients regarding synchronization status and estimated time until block synchronization
• All of these implementations will greatly improve the capabilities and experience of anyone building user-facing Witnet wallet software

Ethereum Bridge and Smart Contracts

• A new price-feed example was added that retrieves the ETH/USD price
• All price feeds were grouped into a single repository and adapted so as to beEIP-2362 compliant — ready for implementation into a common interface for multiple oracle providers
• The price feed poller is now able to trigger multiple price feed contracts at once, so long as they share a common application binary interface (ABI)

Research

• Numerous technical discussions have been had regarding BLS signature aggregation in Witnet — stay tuned!

🤑 Witnet’s Incentivized Testnet Program!

The Witnet Testnet Incentive Program is your chance to explore and experiment with Witnet before Mainnet, and get generously rewarded for doing so.

Phase 1 of the Witnet Testnet Incentive Program is drawing to a close in the next few weeks, and will officially end on Friday May 15th. Participants still have time to improve their score on the community scoreboard and increase their slice of the 10,000 $DAI reward allocation for this phase!

Phase 2 is imminent. Full details on the program (and how to apply for Phase 2) can be found here:

Announcing the Witnet Testnet Incentive Program!

📝 Documentation and Tools

On April 21st, the first Witnet Community Documentation Meeting was held live on the Witnet YouTube channel. These meetings will be held regularly in order to build upon and improve the current Witnet documentation.

A shoutout to:

• De Hero for this new walkthrough on the Witnet YouTube Channel on how to run a Witnet node on a VPS
• Bertrand for the new docker-compose documentation, which allows operators to run more than one node on a machine
• vbstreetz for improvements to the request editor, which now includes setCollateral, allowing requests to define collateral parameters. We encourage you to try it out!

Want to contribute to tooling or documentation? Join the new Witnet Telegram groups — focused on Witnet Documentation and Tools.

Please also check out v1.0 of the Witnet Documentation Guide and Task List, and let us know if you’d like to take on a task.

🎉 Events

The Alliance of Decentralized Oracles (ADO)’s first public virtual demonstration and workshop (hosted by Witnet) was a huge success.

The ADO’s first collaborative project, EIP-2362, is a proposed standard interface for price feed contracts. The aim is to enable smart contract developers to consume price feed contracts powered by several oracle solutions using a single, plug-and-play API.

You can watch the demo (which aired live on Wednesday 22nd April) below.

With the COVID-19 crisis unfolding, most of our community members are suspending attendance to all physical events, and the whole community is working remotely.

We are, however, on the hunt for online events, channels and forums to discuss Witnet. If you have an online event you’d like to see Witnet represented at, let us know.

For more Witnet-related content:

• Read the Witnet whitepaper 📃
• Check out Witnet’s code on Github 🤖
• Read Witnet core documents❓
• Subscribe to our blog 📬
• Join the community Telegram group and Discord 💬
• Follow @witnet_io on Twitter 🐦