The state of Gossamer mid August - mid September

[P1sar]

Highlights

Web3Summit Participation

Out team participated at the Web3Summit with a nodespace for everyday of the conference. We talked about client diversity and the state of JAM implemetation.

Hiring

We have hired a new engineer! Welcome Haiko our new Protocol Engineer!

Infrastructure

Along with Westend and Paseo instances we lunched an instance to test full node functionality on the Polkadot network.

Development

Syncing

We have sucesfully synced with the Westend network and as mentioned above now we are syncing with the Polkadot network. Due to the amount of undocumented runtime upgrades in Kusama we decided not to sync with it yet.

Eclesio has refactored the sync package to be more in line with Go best practices by using interfaces which makes syncing strategy selection within Gossamer to be more modular. This is a requirement for implementing Warp Sync in the near future.

Peer Reputation

Eclesio discovered a problem regarding our nodes not receiving new block announcement from other peers. It might be related to our node acting incorrectly which decreases our peer reputation. An investigation is in progress.

Work on runtime execution stability

We generally stopped to get out of memory panics, also be more aligned with the full functionality of the WASM runtime, using compilation caching to reducing the amount of time to execute blocks.

Warp Sync

We are in the process of implementing Warp Sync. Diego is working hard and expected to finish in the coming month.

Polkadot Storage

Tim Wu is integrating TrieDB into the larger refactor/client-db branch to enable efficient caching and proof generation while managing multiple tries. Diego's TrieDB was completed in the previous months which enables lazy-loaded ephermeral tries to be able to be constructed on-demand.

Polkadot Parachain protocol implementation

Axay has finished integration tests for the Candidate Baking subsystem and is in the process of writing an article about it.

Kishan has finished the work on network bridge subsystem (all the communication to other nodes for collation and validation protocol will happen through network bridge). We have also designed and created skeleton code for statement distribution subsystem and provisioner subsystem, making them ready to be worked on. And we have ongoing work to add tests to the collator protocol.

Ed is continue working on Candidate Validation subsystem and has grown candidate validation from an independent validation function to a subsystem that talks to overseer and is now working on PVF Host which will let us validate multiple candidates faster and efficiently.

GRANDPA

Tim Wu merged the standalone GRANDPA package into development. We will be introducing some of the ongoing grandpa refactor into development now to be able to properly verify justifications (PR) during syncing.

JAM protocol implementation

Eclesio has finished PVM interpreter implementation based on the graypaper specification and the test vectors. We are getting ready to test it against other implementations (eg. PolkaVM) using PVM debugger written by Tomasz team that we met during Web3Summit and is also working on implementing JAM using TypeScript.

Jimmy was working on state transition functionality and JAM codec. State transition for disputes system and safrole already implemented. New JAM codec is passing all test vectors.

Diego's have finished our MVP MMR implementation that is is needed for JAM state transition.

Product

Decent amount of our attention now goes to JAM when it comes to product development.