Launch Communications — June Community Update

Interchain

Published in

Cosmos Ecosystem Blog

5 min readJul 2, 2018

July 2, 2018

TL;DR

Coming soon, to a terminal near you: Ethermint 2.0.
Ledger Nano code is implemented and about to be sent for review by Ledger.
The Tendermint repository is being transformed into a monorepo and several other repo consolidations are also under way.
Gaia-7000 should be coming online in the first week of July. Watch out for that.
Cosmos documentation got a makeover! Check it out!
Preliminary Interchain Standards for third-party integrations are being specified.
A new roadmap is launched.

Dev Update

Go-Amino is now Protobuf3-compatible. The end objective is to improve the programmability of blockchain development and make it easy to serialize and deserialize any logic that you need. It’s a component of the SDK and is part of the toolset to make blockchain programming easier. Go-Amino is unique to Tendermint and the ergonomics is improved over existing serialization formats like protocol buffer. However, the SDK is designed so that, by default, you can choose to use whatever serialization format you want.
Ledger Nano code has been merged into the Cosmos-SDK. We’re about to submit it for review by Ledger.
Version 2 of Ethermint with Go-Ethereum integration is now undergoing architectural re-design. We have a preliminary specification done and implementation will soon follow. Watch the Ethermint GitHub for updates.
Staking and slashing modules now implement the unbonding period, an essential part of the Proof-of-Stake security model. The unbonding period will be set at 3 weeks. This means that if you decide to unbond, it will take 3 weeks to “thaw” your Atoms. While Atoms are thawing, delegators are still liable for slashable offenses committed by their validator by “following the stake” which contributed to the infraction, even if it has since been redelegated. Note that thawing, i.e. unbond-ing, Atoms are non-liquid. Redelegating them is the only action that delegators would be able to perform using non-liquid Atoms.
Go-Crypto, tmlibs, and ABCI have been merged into what’s now become the Tendermint monorepo, and we’re working on other consolidations to the Cosmos-SDK monorepo. This enables streamlining development and release processes as the consolidation substantially cuts down on multi-repo refactors.
Our information architecture has undergone some heavy reupholstering. The new documents can be found here. The look and feel, we hope, should be much cleaner. Happy reading!
The initial set of Interchain Standards include a TendermintAPI, KeyAPI, TokenAPI, StakingAPI, and GovernanceAPI. A follow-up announcement regarding the TokenAPI will go into deeper depth about what third-party platforms like wallet providers should look out for.

Testnet Report (Gaia-6002)

We are gaining steam and making solid progress toward beta testing the feature-complete Cosmos software. With each new testnet comes the finishing touches of the last modules to be implemented. We are almost there, Cosmonauts.

Notable achievements:

Gaia-6002 reached upwards of 700,000 blocks.
Gaia-6002 saw multiple releases of the Tendermint and Gaia software which fixed various bugs, including memory leaks.

During this testnet run, some issues came up:

Unbonding bug. One of the Cosmos Hub Validators reported a serious bug where voting power would remain the same even after unbonding steak.
Long startup sync of Gaiad. Several community members have complained about a long state sync time, next to the issue of state syncing slowing down over time. A PR to reduce sync times in Issue #1805 explains that signature verification is the bottleneck. A fix of state tree pruning is also being implemented.
Then the chain halted on July 1. We are currently debugging the issue and will start up Gaia-7000 with the same validator set and same amount of voting power rolled over from Gaia-6002.

These issues are being addressed and the majority of them will be fixed by the time Gaia-7000 is deployed in the first week of July.

To create support tickets when running into bugs like these, please submit an issue in the Cosmos-SDK repo.
Questions about Sentry Node Architecture can be posted on this discussion board in the Cosmos Forum. List of up-to-date Validator Candidates is additionally kept on the forum.

New Roadmap

A Guided Tour of the Network

The old roadmap had been stalled at around 90% because the features for the version 1.0 software releases had not yet been defined; indeed, it still hasn’t been defined. At this time, we are not yet able to commit to a backward-compatible feature-complete software release.

As such, it no longer makes sense to aim for 1.0 as the indicator of minimal viable product completion. Instead, what’s left is essentially a list of items we need to check off before launch. Executing on those items allows us to definitively make certain security, liveness, and performance guarantees, giving the Cosmonaut community reasonable estimates about how the mainnet will operate.

To that end, we have published a new roadmap that’s shed from the old. The roadmap will no longer highlight versions of software because each software stack is more or less complete. The new roadmap instead lays out a rolling launch. It has a renewed purpose: to communicate network milestones rather than software release milestones to the community.

View the New Roadmap

Announcements

A Testnet of Steaks

Read the Announcement. The goal of launching this game prior to launch is threefold: to harden the security of the Cosmos Hub, foster greater decentralization by getting a number of potential validators interested for a more diverse validator set, and attract a demographic of technical minds beyond that of developers. By tossing players into an adversarial environment, we aim to simulate a high stakes real network environment where anything goes and only the strongest survive.

Interestingly, we noticed a huge spike of users abusing the testnet faucet where steak is given out when we made this announcement last week. While it was fun to witness people trying to game the game before it even began, please note that there won’t be a public faucet for the Game of Steaks network. The only way to receive steak on the game network will be to KYC.

NOTE: Game is not yet live. KYC instructions, conditions of entry, in-game rules, waivers, and program policies will be announced with a follow up blog post when those are ready.