Summary
Here are some of the main things to highlight since the last dev update:
- The Safe Network has been voted the Most Exciting dWeb Project award at the Noonies 2020.
Many thanks to everyone who voted. - We’ve been adding our first proptests to
sn_routingandsn_data_types, and are enthusiastic at the value they will offer the project. - Internal testnet progress continues, with the focus switching slightly towards improving performance.
- More significant refactoring and solidifying in
sn_routing, mainly surrounding the DKG process.
Safe Client, Nodes and qp2p
Safe Network Transfers Project Plan
Safe Client Project Plan
Safe Network Node Project Plan
Following on from last week, we’ve implemented a change to remove PublicId and ClientFullIds from the sn_data_types, instead just relying on Keypairs to identify clients and nodes. This change has been propagated through the various crates and is now in place.
With that done, we’ve also started to more thoroughly test our data types, beginning with setting up proptests for the sequence data types - see our PR here which is currently working through our peer review process.
On the testnet side of things, we are now seeing consistent results during network startup and section formation. We are now focussed on optimising and improving some things under the hood to boost performance during network deployment and churn. A couple of refactors are underway regarding DKG sessions during the network start-up phase which aim to boost the speed of the initial section spin-up. We are also bringing back exported tests that incorporate the client test suite into sn_node and help in continuous integration and testing.
This week we also completed the implementation of the --fresh and --clean flags that help us prevent the use of older qp2p configurations. The --fresh flag keeps the older configurations on disk without using them. The --clean flag clears all older configuration files on disk. Both flags use the default configuration or the new configuration passed via other command line arguments. This is now working its way through testing and review in sn_node and qp2p.
Meanwhile, work is ongoing at solidifying the transfers system, with regards to consistency, performance and anonymity. 
Routing
This week we got a bunch of refactoring work merged, mainly surrounding the DKG part of Routing. The Refactoring, more tests and fix DKG work removed the rng module, replacing with the rand::thread_rng instead, and refactored some other modules and helper functions to simplify the code. The Extract most of the DKG logic out of Approved and into DkgVoter work further simplified the lengthy approved.rs, and expanded the DKG test suite to cover more scenarios.
We also decided to remove the routing specific log_ident, as we believed it could cause confusion when looking through the code, and it was inconsistent with other crates.
It is also worth mentioning that we introduced our first proptest into the Routing codebase. This demonstrates the usage of proptesting with an initial example. This paves the way for a more thorough test suite, helping to locate issues that unit testing just wouldn’t catch on its own.
safenetwork.tech Website Updates
A quick note to let you know about a couple of updates to the safenetwork.tech website made this week.
Firstly, we added the UK based crypto brokerage firm BC Bitcoin as a new option for buying and selling MAID. You may notice the link to their site has appeared on the Safecoin page, as well as under a couple of our FAQs.
The second update PR, which was merged today, was an attempt to bring the site content a little more in line with the current status and direction of the project. This website (and others) have been neglected in recent times as we focus all our energy towards the Fleming goals, which we know you understand. We thought it was worthwhile taking just a little time out to make a few quick updates which had been suggested in the forum a few times recently. We realise that there are still several further updates required, indeed we think that much of the content could do with an overhaul, but we don’t want to be distracted too much right now so we’ll come back to that in the near future, when time permits. Some of the low hanging fruit that was picked off:
- removing mentions of PARSEC,
- removing outdated press kit images,
- switching Twitter and Facebook social links to point to maintained accounts,
- removing Medium blog links,
- removing the newsletter signup option, and
- various text updates to try to better reflect the project’s current status.
Useful Links
Feel free to reply below with links to translations of this dev update and moderators will add them here:
As an open source project, we’re always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so don’t be shy, join in and let’s create the Safe Network together!
