Hello everyone, it's time for another update on Gridcoin Development progress! In this post we want to showcase some new features being worked on for the wallet, some changes coming to the website (gridcoin.us), and testnet progress. It's been an exciting time since my last post, so let's dive right in!

Wallet Development

• @ravonn has been hard at work in the neverending effort to optimize our wallet's syncing time. He posted an excellent article on his progress this week here. Don't let the title of the post fool you! Ravon explains his initial difficulties trying to get the wallet to sync from 0 faster but in the end he comes away with some really cool data (graphs!) and optimizations that should be expected in the Camilla Milestone.

  • Sidenote: Gridcoin is now using alphabetical muppets for Milestone naming. 3.7.14.0 (and 3.7.15.0) were targeted Annie Sue:

  • CBR is targeted for Betsy Bird

  • Beyond Betsy we have Camilla (the Chicken) .
    This is where most of the changes in this post will end up.

  • For all complaints regarding our ridiculous naming system I refer you to @ravonn as it was his decision ;)

• Next up is the implementation of "stake splitting" by way of this PR from @jamescowens. To summarize, this provides for the automatic “splitting” of a stake into multiple outputs to meet a user specified efficiency in the wallet configuration file. This is currently being fine tuned by Jim and @tomasbrod, and is planned for the Camilla milestone. Jim is also working on a more sophisticated version that will allow splitting the reward to alternative addresses.

• For more information on why splitting stakes into smaller UTXOs will be important in the future with CBR, I suggest reading this excellent summary by Jim from a couple weeks ago.

• Finally to round out our ongoing effort to clean up old unused parts of the codebase, @ifoggz has submitted PR 1132 which removes 10 RPC calls that were either unused, deprecated, or duplicated by other command functionality.

Upcoming Website Changes

There are two big PRs coming to the gridcoin.us website repo, 1 has been merged already and 1 is in review.

• PR 112 is filled with many small fixes and user requests. Notable among the changes is the addition of a link to the official Gridcoin wallet snapshot in the Header and Footer dropdown boxes under "Resources". This was a highly requested new feature.
  • We now include a link to the SHA256 checksum for the MSI file under the Windows downloads section. This is a very important security feature and ensures the installer you download from our site has the correct checksum.

• PR 115 is a full-scale rewrite of the old "dev daemon commands" page that was extremely out of date and neglected. The new page is called "RPC Reference" and has been updated with all the new RPC commands added (and some removed) in the 3.7.14.0 release. If you find anything missing on this new page please let me know!

Testnet Progress

Exciting news on the testing front! A little less than two weeks ago on August 1st, on testnet block 629409, the hard fork to block version 10 (CBR) was initiated. Since then we've had every single Proof of Stake block equal to 10 GRC in base reward (note that this can be tuned on testnet). Here is an example of what this looks like on my 24/7 Raspberry Pi 3 testnet wallet:

Look at all those beautiful 10 GRC stakes!

If you'd like to help us test out CBR before it hits the mainnet (release TBD), join us on Slack or Rocket Chat in the #testnet channel! If you need an invite to either of these platforms feel free to comment below and I'll get you set up.

Well that about does it for this edition of the Developer Update. Expect another update from us near the end of August (unless we have a wallet release then). Thanks for reading :)