The Aeternity Foundation (ACF) supports the æternity protocol and ecosystem

The ACF is giving funding grants for application on the promotion of the success and growth of the æternity ecosystem as well as the æternity blockchain maintenance. Weekly detailed reports on the progress of the developers can be found in the Active Grant Applications under the forum’s ACF Grant Category.

Our goal remains the same: to make the æternity node faster, better, and lighter and the ae ecosystem more attractive for the users. The Hyperchains network using the æternity nodes has been designed to attract the Aeternity enterprise customers and their users. On top of the faster æternity network and Hyperchains network the decentralized applications (aepps) can be run with higher performance and in a private context. Therefore the whole æternity ecosystem will perform with higher availability, scalability, security, and performance.

During April 2021 the æternity core team had focused on Iris:

• voting on Iris Hard Fork was made
• Iris release candidate for testing was produced
• a final stable and secure Iris release had been prepared

Simultaneously the private Hyperchains (HC) were intensively tested. As a result, the HC protocol and HC whitepaper were further improved. The HC Roadmap for April 2021 was published on HC Roadmap.

The continuous maintenance process resulted in a new release, 5.11 in April 2021 with fine-tuned features, bug fixing, and polishing.

The remaining part of the quarter Q2 2021 has the focus on the User Experience (UX) and User Interfaces (UI). The following features are planned:

• DB refactoring is resulting in stability and performance improvements.nThere is currently a large Scale DB refactoring going on and it will result in better node stability. This DB refactoring might provide some performance boost. It will also allow us to improve the node in some new ways.
• Introduction of a maintenance mode for the node and improving the cyberattacks prevention.nThe maintenance mode will allow the node operator to disable whole sections of the application in order to perform some actions on the node. This mode will help the node stability. It will also provide the foundation for running different scripts on the node in a maintenance mode. Such scripts would be the ones that produce whitelisted block headers or even rolling the DB back to a certain point in time. These scripts and tools are in development and will considerably improve maintenance flexibility. They also are useful for the prevention of the 51% attacks.
• AeCanary to be released in May 2021.nThe monitoring tool AeCanary link is already in development and will be released soon. It provides the tracking of the tainted tokens. Also, it delivers to the exchanges an exposure at a given point in time.
• Sophia New Data Types and Fate Improvements are actively under development
• Beam sync – a radical optimization of fast sync
• Rosetta implementation
• Continuous extensive testing as part of the maintenance of the blockchain:nDuring all this time we had been doing some extensive testing. There are some tests to be improved and new ones to be written. It is important to note that from a user’s perspective a node has all the infrastructure for doing local tests of æpps. We plan on exposing those in an HTTP API so a client can be built on top of it. That would mean that the node will be producing transactions, mining on demand, not mining, and so on. This will be useful for all æpp developers, in hackathons and etc.
• Continuous improvement of the documentation as part of the maintenance of the blockchain:nRegarding developers’ onboarding, we have plans to considerably improve the documentation of State Channel WebSocket API: currently, the integration tests produce a lot of logs that expose the actual communication from the client to the server and back. The tests need to be improved and produce actual examples for the flow. We want as result to achieve a fast and smooth development experiencing for the State Channels.

A new public bounty program for bug finding, tutorials, and videos as well as a new award program will be launched soon.

The updates on the æroadmap and the ærelease schedule will follow dynamically in this topic. The previous roadmap can be found on the AETERNITY ROADMAP Q4 2020 / Q1 2021 3.

You are welcome to contact us under the Email: hello@aeternity-foundation.org

We are excited to announce the following æternity release schedule from April 2021 until June 2021 which will be regularly extended and updated:

To stay up-to-date on the schedule, follow the announcements at the æ forum.

Release 5.11

Release Date: 14.04.2021nType: MaintenancenRelease 5.11 can be found on v5.11.0 with the release note

Release 6.0 (Iris Hard Fork)

Release Date: 05.2021nType: Hard ForknRelease 6.0 will be publishnRelease Candidate 2 until 30.04.2021nRelease Candidate 1 on 15.04.2021, see Iris RC1 6nVoting starting on the 15.03.2021nPlanned Release Date: 25.02.2021nImportant Condition: A positive result on community Iris Hard Fork Voting was achieved prior to Release 6.0

This medium article was originally published by the Aeternity Crypto Foundation on this forum post

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