Chainflip Development Update—January 14th 2022
And just like that, it’s next year. That snuck up on me, welcome back. I hope that you all got a good break over the holiday period and told your parents that you love them regardless of their political affiliations. You did manage to do that, right anon?
Into the fun stuff, I won’t waste your precious time (much).
Progress Since Last Update
Most of our time since the last update was spent getting ready for and then juggling the Soundcheck Testnet. We gave birth to the chain on December 15th, and have been working hard to ensure that it can grow into the very first fully-fledged Flip-a-tron 9000 ever since.
As you may have noticed though, we keep saying that Soundcheck is broken. It’s knackered; a dumpster fire; a complete and utter FUBAR shambles.
Well, the good news is we’re probably exaggerating. The bad news is that it definitely isn’t doing what it needs to be doing right now. Get down from that tree, Soundcheck. Stop pointing the banhammer at all our Valdiators, Soundcheck.
So what the heck?
We're currently facing some software bugs that are preventing us from growing the Active Set of Validators. For a brief period there we hit 36 Active Validators, which is awesome, but it’s not what we’re gunning for. We can’t declare Soundcheck a success yet because we’re here to post the big 150 (and beyond?).
The major issues at present are most likely caused by a lack of ability to process multisignature (keygen/signing) ceremonies in parallel. This is invalidating some protocol assumptions on the chain and causes intermittent crashes on the chainflip-engine.
When the engine restarts after a crash, it doesn't have any of the old signing state, and so it just happily forgets about the crashed ceremony and waits until the next ceremony, whilst its peers try to finish the previous ceremony.
This results in CFEs all trying to participate in different ceremonies (looking around like a bunch of John Travolta memes), and all the while the State Chain is requesting more and more ceremonies by trying to synchronise the Ethereum token supply.
The good news is that we're pretty sure this is the major source of crashes and other problems, and we're working as fast as we can to release a good fix.
The bad news is that it will take some time. Probably not as long as you think, but we're talking days, not hours.
Is that it?
Otherwise, we’ve been working on hiring the next cohort of burger Flippers, who will be helping us hit the goal of launching our swapping app this year, as well as spending some time solidifying our infrastructure setup.
On top of that, there’s always some UI bugs to squash as well.
Goals for the Next Fortnight
Some quick bullet points about what we hope to achieve by the time the next dev update rolls around.
Development Goals
- [SC] Remove auction coupling to session rotations
- [CFE] Resolve parallelism issues in CFE
- [CFE] Release 0.2.0 to our Active Validators
- [WEB] Resolve my nodes / claiming bugs on Staking App
General Thoughts
Soundcheck was described by a community member as “the cosiest” testnet that they have participated in. It warms my heart.
Until next time.
Tom