Generalized Accounts, State Channels, and the Block Reward Initiative

Here is what the core development team focused on in the period April 22 — May 3.

Generalized Accounts

The team have finished the implementation of generalized accounts (GA) and introduced the necessary updates to the HTTP APIs that return account and transaction information. The GA authorization function was limited (no calls to other contracts, no chain interaction, etc) in order to reduce the base fee for GA transactions. Test coverage has also been increased.

FATE Virtual Machine

The team is in the process of adding all chain objects to FATE and working on the Sophia to FATE compiler.

State Channels

The following tasks were completed by the state channels team:

finished on-chain representation of off-chain updates, based on on-chain environment,
heavily optimized the off-chain-updates-based environment by moving to a Noise session,
implemented a test for checking off-chain contract calls using on-chain data,
significant optimization of off-chain transactions by moving their related updates to the Noise implementation. This has reduced the memory footprint of the off-chain payload to be provided on-chain in case of disputes (work-in-progress),
refactored the State Channels’ Finite State Machine in order to accommodate solo closing and dispute flows. Even more unexpected edge cases regarding long on-chain forks that invalidate off-chain states were handled.

Block Reward Initiative (BRI)

Part of the core dev team dedicated their time on the first on-chain governance initiative which aims to split the block reward recipients. The mechanism that allows the reward split, configuration of recipient addresses, and split ratios was created. The majority of the effort went to fixing and stabilizing tests. The work on the BRI is especially important since it is a protocol-protected functionality.

Expect another update in two weeks! If you have any questions or comments — go to the Forum. You can directly comment on this update, but going to this Forum topic.

Watch the recordings of the weekly Product Coordinators Updates (including core dev updates by Sergei) in æternity’s YouTube channel.

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