This Week in Elrond – 2020-02-15

This week #Elrond team performed and added some amazing features! This update is brought to you by Canada Dry Ginger Ale – Somebody saw the shot and she has a cold $ERD for you! Enjoy the animated news update.

https://twitter.com/TarantuloTV/status/1228570626258063365

The purpose of the @ElrondNetwork #blockchain is to improve the experience of every internet user. But sometimes we are developers building for developers. Our new royalties system and tools should excite our fellow programmers. Here’s our week👇

1/ The final economics model implementation is underway, with the notable addition of Smart Contract royalties: 30% of all the fees from the processing of one smart contract will go to its author.

2/ Our Python CLI & SDK “erdpy” was enriched with features such as new, build, deploy, call and test. The Elrond IDE now uses erdpy as backend, to keep it lean and focused on its intended purpose.

3/ Our system Smart Contracts for staking and auction have gained a set of new functionalities: jail, unjail, changing rewards address, changing BLS public key, all of which take effect at the end of an epoch. Changing or disabling these features will be controlled via governance

4/ Other notable achievements:

• validator rating broadcast from metachain to shards for consensus group selection computation
• go routines used for all database writes which reduces the commit time
• started work on a framework for fuzzy tests

5/ – leaders now broadcast a block before committing it to local storage, reducing consensus time

• overall security increased by removing the node start dependency on redundant private keys
• unfinished metablocks and cross-shard miniblocks are included in the hardfork snapshot

6/ – created auction smart contract unit tests for different scenarios

• leaders and validators now execute miniblocks in the same order to avoid receipt mismatch errors
• created additional tests for our Arwen VM and Smart Contract API

7/ – the validator statistics processor has been improved to process missed rounds in batches

• special syntax added to the Rust API for asynchronous SC-to-SC calls
• migrating away from kyber to the go builtin crypto library for the accounts signature scheme

8/ – improvement in consensus group selection algorithm to ensure fair validator selection based on their rating

• new field for peers allows their distribution to different lists (waiting, eligible) and easy trie recreation
• additional tests for the hardfork mechanism process

9/ – fixed an edge case where a node could participate in the consensus even if it was still syncing

• fixed a block tracker issue that would remove some headers too early
• audit findings implementation
• several hard-to-catch bugs have been resolved
• bugfixes & stabilization

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned for more #elrond tech, leading up to the imminent #Elrondmainnet launch!