If this is your first time visiting our monthly updates, welcome! For some general background on Witnet and our technology, please read this 3 minute primer, take a look at our whitepaper, or check out our project’s “must-reads” digest.

Testnet-1 Development Continues

Since our last update, we have released versions 0.1.1 and 0.1.2 of the witnet-rust node, which include many improvements and new features. In February, we:

• Changed our serialization format from FlatBuffers to ProtoBuf, which is more standard and robust
• Revamped node synchronization process to make it more reliable and performant
  
• Implemented a novel strategy for preventing replay attacks in case of hard forks (nodes with incompatible protocol constants will refuse to peer with each other)
  
• Rewrote our TCP codec to support longer messages (bigger blocks, basically 😏)
  
• The logic for enabling mining once the node is synced is now smarter than ever
  Many dependencies have been upgraded to more stable versionsYou can now customize the synchronization period of your own nodeStarted to build the witnet-wallet Rust module, which will act as the backend for Sheikah, our desktop wallet app. This will also make it super easy for anyone to write their own client apps (wallets, block explorers, etc)
  
  Content:
  
  We have been excited to publish 2 new long-form pieces from within our team in February — one focusing on how stablecoins leverage oracles and the second on how Witnet approaches incentives in our decentralized network design. Read more here:
• The Next Step for Stablecoins: Decentralized Oracles - Analyzing stablecoin price feeds
• Anonymizing Commit and Reveal Transactions in Decentralized Oracle Solutions - Malicious incentives, laziness and non-responsiveness can easily jeopardize decentralized networks if not fought…

Open Source Contributors:

Are you interested in contributing to the development of Witnet-rust? We would be thrilled to have you! Visit our new contributing guide and development guide for more info!

We are also extremely interested and receptive to anyone curious about building a separate implementation of the Witnet-rust. Have a favorite language you’d like to try to build Witnet with? Let us know and we’ll be happy to support you!

The Witnet Foundation has open positions for Rust/blockchain developers, so if you are aware of the impact a decentralized oracle network will have on the blockchain landscape and want to get involved, be sure to check them out and get in touch!

You can follow Witnet on Twitter and stay up to date on our blog.

You can also:

Read the Witnet whitepaper 📃
Read the FAQ ❓
Join the community Telegram group, Discourse and Discord. 💬
Follow @witnet_io on Twitter 🐦
Discover other Witnet community channels 👥