A shorter fortnight this week, due to most of the squad having a couple of days off for a German public holiday. Nevertheless we demand updates from the labs, so here goes.

Progress Since Last Update

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks ensuring that our release process is up to scratch. Previously we were performing quite a bit of git wrangling on divergent branches to get things out the door, but time has been invested to make sure that our git process is up to scratch and that we can release from our develop branch.

We’ve also received the first draft of our audit report from Kudelski Security re. our FROST multisignature implementation. There are no major red flags, which makes us pretty happy. We’ll be addressing the issues that they did raise over the next week, and sending code back over the fence for another once-over.

Aside from that we’re making ETH witnessing more robust, trying to get more information about why our p2p layer is a bit naff, and finishing off some minor but critical work on our chain’s slashing conditions.

Soundcheck Update

Since the last release, Soundcheck has been... stable! Very stable. We’re above the 100 Validator mark consistently now, with the max I saw being 114. There are a few things that we know are probably causing issues (looking at you libp2p) and some optimisations we can make in order to ensure that our keygen ceremonies are a lot more efficient in terms of data sent over the wire which should help ensure that participation is much more reliable.

We’ll be rolling out 0.3.0 hopefully on Monday, which will be the final network upgrade in the Soundcheck incentivised testnet. The network will stick around and you’re welcome to keep your machine on, but there won’t be any reason to other than to say that you did it.

Goals for the Next Fortnight

Some quick bullet points detailing the major points that we hope to achieve by the time the next dev update rolls around.

Development Goals

• Release 0.3.0 to Validators (p2p debugging)
• Epoch-specific witnessing (rollover)
• Push out major Staking App update

General Thoughts

We’re getting pretty close to some code that we could probably release as Sandstorm. However there’s still much work to do on drills and practice upgrades to ensure that we don’t jump into the deep end without at least poking the bottom with a stick.

Until next time.

Tom