August was a busy month for the Nerva community, and it took more hands than usual. Here is what landed.
Hard Fork 14
Hard Fork 14 is not done, but it has already been through testnet. What is left is the last round of review feedback, merging everything into master, and then running the combined result through testnet once more before we set a height.
Merged so far: PR #117 landed CLSAG signatures, Bulletproofs+ range proofs and CryptoNight-Adaptive v7 on 12 August. Transactions get smaller and cheaper to verify, and the proof of work stays hostile to GPUs, ASICs and pools.
Still open: ring size 16, PR #124. Once it lands, the ring size on every transaction goes from 5 to 16.
The mainnet activation height was pushed to 4,500,000 in PR #134, and it is still a placeholder. It gets fixed after that final testnet round, not before.
Building the fork turned up four bugs that had been sitting in the code for a while:
- A hash context was being freed without ever having been initialised
- The AES implementation seeded itself throughÂ
gmtime, which is not thread safe - An AES self test read past the end of its own input
- A chain reorg left popped blocks behind in the proof of work seed cache
All four are fixed or in review. Verification also got faster: hashing the proof of work for several blocks at a time recovered most of the cost that v7 added to syncing.
nerva.one has been rebuilt
@XelisVault redesigned the entire site as theme v4.1, and it went live this month along with follow-up fixes to navigation, sidebar spacing, fonts, the mining calculator and the blog listings.
A new block explorer
Same contributor, same month. @XelisVault rebuilt the explorer from scratch, and it now has live network charts, mempool view and real-time mining activity. Since then it has picked up dark mode on direct navigation, redirects from the old /detail links, and a mining activity heatmap based on daily average hashrate.
Nerva Marketplace
@benevanoff built a marketplace where you can spend XNV on actual goods. It is in beta at nervamarket.com with real stock, mostly computer hardware, and the code is open source.
Which closes a loop most small projects never get to claim: mine XNV on a CPU you already own, then spend it on more hardware.
NervaOne
Empty states on the Wallet and Transfers screens, so a fresh wallet explains itself instead of showing a blank panel.
Core fixes
Beyond the fork work: restricted-mode RPC input validation hardening, a fix for wallets created while the daemon was unreachable scanning past the end of the chain, and open PRs covering the difficulty window cache, the transaction pool hashes endpoint, an OpenAPI spec for the daemon RPC, a sweep_all fee bug, and 64-bit overflow in the coinbase sum over long ranges.
Thank you
@mmokhi carried most of Hard Fork 14 plus four wallet and consensus fixes. @XelisVault rebuilt the website and the explorer. @sn1f3rt hardened the RPC, fixed two core cache bugs and did a lot of reviewing. @benevanoff is building the marketplace.
Most of them were not contributing six months ago. That is the part of August worth noting.