6.30.2020
4 Weeks in to Argon
The testnet is growing up fast. We are now four weeks into the Argon phase, and thrilled to see all the tinkering and experiments being done with Clarity and the testnet. Don’t forget that we have whole set of bug bounties available for those that want to help build Stacks 2.0 and earn some Bitcoin.
Here are the highlights from the past week:
- Added service for a Prometheus endpoint to stacks-blockchain for monitoring health and other statistics of network nodes. This is helps in gathering metrics like block processing time, peak node count, miner participation, and other fundamental blockchain benchmarks. → Github
- Switched to u64 instead of u16 for block heights. This addresses various bugs such as mocknets crashing at a certain block height. Thanks to a community member for the suggestion! → Github
- Check out the new Stacks Testnet Status Page where you can monitor the heath of the network. Anyone can now check the current status of the master node, Sidecar blockchain API, and explorer. There’s also some other useful details such as last chain tip block height, time since last chain reset, and estimated time until the next chain reset.
- You can now specify initial STX balances with clarity-cli. Initially, the VM would start with 0 balances by default, which could add an unnecessary step during development. → Github
- Various nonce fixes were applied to stacks-blockchain. These included uniqueness changes in the mempool sqlite table, which allow you to apply the unique property to individual elements instead of an entire tuple. This PR also enabled transaction chaining up to depth 5, as well as a myriad of other fixes that should alleviate indefinitely pending faucet transaction issues. → Github
- A number of bug fixes were applied to the Explorer this past week. The speed for transaction generation was dramatically improved. Performance efficiencies were applied to ID generation & saving. Major design improvements were merged including the refactoring of components, tweaks to the sandbox redux state, and header enhancements. → Github
- We’re hard at work overhauling documentation for Stacks 2.0 and all the new tech being rolled out this year. Unused/obsolete pages were removed, a single navigation bar was established, old static assets were removed, the reference page was cleaned up, materials for Blockstack Connect have been updated, and a new singular layout was standardized. → Github
- Opened a PR for the ability to generate multi-signature transactions using stacks-transactions-js. This will enable partially signed transactions that can be passed on for additional signatures. → Github