Testnet Incentive Program Phase 2 is here — 25 million WIT and 30,000 DAI up for grabs! Testnet 8.1 running smoothly, BLS signatures and SuperBlocks implemented, total redesign of the Sheikah Data Request Editor, an external audit of Witnet’s smart contracts and more. 🎆

A Message from the Witnet Foundation

These are exciting times for the Witnet community: after 3 years of passionate work, Mainnet launch is right around the corner, and Phase 2 of our Testnet Incentive Program is here.

The purpose of the Foundation has always been to kickstart the development of the Witnet protocol, alongside helping to create a decentralized, open ecosystem that anyone can participate in on equal terms.

We knew that if the protocol depended on a single entity (i.e. the Witnet Foundation), it would never be resilient and censorship-resistant; a guaranteed failure. That’s why we’ve worked hard from day 1 to build an ecosystem that is truly open.

We are happy to see that these efforts to ensure the Foundation is simply a contingent player in a broader ecosystem are paying off. At this time there are hundreds of independently-operated nodes on the Witnet Testnet; changes to the protocol are debated and decided through an open, community-driven process; and multiple developers unaffiliated to the Witnet Foundation have full administrative privileges in the code repositories of the most crucial parts of the protocol software.

For the time being, the Witnet Foundation remains committed to support the ecosystem — always with a hands-off approach — and to serve the community, performing diverse, ministerial tasks. However, we can see a possible outcome in the near future, whereby the Witnet Foundation completely ceases its operations. As the number of individuals contributing to the Witnet community continues to grow, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Foundation could disappear today and the Witnet protocol and its development would continue chugging along, unscathed. That’s one of the most important goals we had when we started working on Witnet, and we are happy to see that the full decentralization of the ecosystem is, inch-by-inch, becoming a reality.

🤑 Witnet’s Testnet Incentive Program Phase 2 is here!

Please note: U.S persons, and those under the age of 18 are NOT permitted to participate in this phase of the program. Please see the Program Terms and Conditions for full details.

For Phase 2, we are looking at a much broader participation, with no limit on the number of participants, and plenty of ways to get involved, regardless of your background or technical skills. Accordingly, the Witnet Foundation has allocated a much larger reward pool:

• Up to 25,000,000 WIT tokens (1% of the total WIT supply)
• Up to 30,000 $DAI

Full details on the program (and how to apply) can be found on the announcement article below:

Witnet Testnet Incentive Program Phase 2 has arrived!

📺 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

Testnet 8.1 has been deployed, with several new features:

• Sentry — added support for automated bug reporting, which is already helping the community to troubleshoot and prioritize bugs and issues
• Improved collateral feature to help reduce memory footprint
• Included BLS signatures and SuperBlocks (more below)
• As suggested by community member Igor Line, a secondary address can now be added in MintTransaction, so that mined WITs can be automatically transferred to a separate address (e.g. your personal wallet)

Node

• BLS signatures and the SuperBlocks structure have been implemented. These features help improve bridge security and trustlessness when relaying to external blockchains (such as Ethereum) via bridges
• Implement programmatic backup factor and extra rounds for Data Requests, easing the UX for Data Request creators
• A new CLI method getNodeStats has been added, which retrieves the mining stats for your node — For a full demo of this CLI method (and many others), don’t miss this video walkthrough.

Sheikah — Desktop Wallet App

• A complete rebuild of the Data Request Editor, to make it more intuitive, user-friendly and scalable

• So far, implementations on the editor include: a new toolbar, undo/redo functionality, improved operator and argument specifications, a No Wallet Found view, and a complete set of request editor “stages” (data sources; source, aggregation and tally script; default values)
• For a full demo of Sheikah’s updated Data Request Editor, head to Community Sprint Review #38 here

Ethereum Bridge and Smart Contracts

• An external audit was carried out by Red4Sec over the last few months. Overall the report was very positive (💪), with a total of 19 vulnerabilities and suggested changes. You can read the complete external security audit report here
• The issues reported by the auditors have now been addressed. You can read about the process here
• Brand new bls-solidity library: the first step towards having a Block Relay which verifies BLS signatures
• Several assessments were performed in the Block Relay with regards to BLS validations using BLS aggregated signatures
• Three methods were prototyped into the Block Relay: aggregatePublicKeys() which verifies and aggregates public keys, validateBLSSignature() which validates that signatures belongs to Active Reputation Set members, and proposeBlock()

🎉 Events & Content

In late April, Adan (Tech Lead and Co-Founder of Witnet) spoke with Tom Heavey — a popular YouTuber in the crypto space about all things Witnet. Tom is a really great guy, providing a breath of fresh air in the space. You can subscribe to his channel here.

With the COVID-19 crisis unfolding, most of our community members are suspending attendance to all physical events, and the most of the 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:

• Join the Witnet Testnet Incentive Program 🤑
• 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 🐦