Tapped out aggressively from a slow ICE train heading to Eth Amsterdam. If you’re there this weekend, say hi.

Progress Since Last Update

Only 8 official working days since our last update, with the lengthy Christian resurrection festival providing a welcome double weekend here in Berlin.

We’ve since launched the leaderboard for the Soundcheck program. If you’ve been running a node and you have not yet registered it over there, make sure you do so before the end of the program to be eligible for your FLIP rewards.

In other news we’re gearing up to shift our software over to a new set of Ethereum contracts next week. The original contracts were a little too tightly coupled to make us comfortable with the prospect of ever upgrading them, so we made some changes to help us do that. We’re planning to do the upgrade on a live network, in order to give ourselves some practice should we ever need to do this in the real world (unlikely, but possible).

Further to that, we’re simply cracking on with the remaining security and stability items. There aren’t many of these, but they are the prickly ones.

Once you start to get down to the business end, things become a lot hairier.

— Bill Gates.

Soundcheck Update

Soundcheck is still halted at the moment. This is quite frustrating to be honest, since the fix is somewhat out of our hands. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to develop the capability to fix the Grandpa client, as this is highly specialised knowledge and the time could be utilised more efficiently elsewhere within Chainflip.

We do have confirmation of the bug, and some assurance that it’s being worked on, but the conditions to trigger it are quite unlikely, so it’s not a “drop everything” situation at Parity.

Whilst we could bring the network back online by asking everyone to resynchronise from a Validator which did not crash, we don’t think that this is the correct course of events, since it will not give us confirmation that the bug is fixed (we’d have to trigger it again with a new client version).

It is a bit of a spanner in the works as far as the community is concerned, and we’re sorry if you’re paying a lot to keep the node online. If you are concerned about this - you should ask in the #active-soundcheckers Discord channel for some help regarding moving the Validator to a cheaper provider. There are some folks over there paying just over €10/month for their box.

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

• Contract upgrade on an internal Soundcheck fork
• Epoch-based consensus threshold

General Thoughts

I can really see why this soon™ thing is a meme.

Until next time.

Tom