Chainflip Development Update — Feb 3rd 2023

Dear Readers of the "Dev Update",

These are times of rapid growth. As you might or might not have noticed, the Perseverance Testnet has recently reached 1 Million Blocks and the number of Blog posts I've authored has pretty much doubled since last time! But we should not be complacent, so on Wednesday we took Perseverance for a spin and ran some performance tests on it. It didn't disappoint and even managed to outperform our private testnets in terms of signing ceremonies per second! During the stress test we also learned some new things about the behaviour of validator nodes in the wild and our findings will help us to further improve the performance of the chain.

Other progress since the last update

• The changes required for deprecating Ethereum's "SELFDESTRUCT" function are being implemented and turn out to be quite elegant.
• Bitcoin support is coming along as well. As a side effect of developing against the somewhat baroque rules in the Bitcoin protocol, we are getting some cool features that will help us with integrating other chains more easily, too.
• We are currently conducting  user testing on a prototype of our swapping app, with a group of selected community members. This will help us gather valuable feedback and refine the app to better serve our users.

Outlook

Soon we will release a new version of our Chainflip Block Explorer with better performance and an improved and more consistent user interface. We will also perform a major upgrade to the Perseverance Testnet in the next weeks. This will include support for the Polkadot blockchain, a much improved process for unstaking/claiming tokens from validators and various performance improvements under the hood. One of these has to do with the already mentioned fact that Perseverance now has over one million blocks. This means that syncing new nodes from scratch takes more and more time. To compensate for that, we'll release a "warp sync" feature, which allows the validators to squash historical blocks into a single state representation of the chain. This will drastically reduce the time needed for new validators to join the network.

Vibe check?

Talking about squashing... Simon invited me to a round of squash on Wednesday. I fought hard — and achieved an honourable second place against him. The next day, he boarded a plane to South Africa, probably to avoid a rematch, but also to prepare for the annual Chainflip off-site that we're all looking forward to. The next "Dev Update" will thus come from the sunny, temporary Chainflip Office in Cape Town where the warm weather will put our morale and productivity into overdrive.

Until next time, then!

Martin