Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.28 "Hedy Lamarr"

This Trinity release goes out under the name "Hedy Lamarr".

Beam Sync has now reached the status: Working Prototype 🎉 (aka~ it usually works on my computer ™️ ). The impact is that now it now takes under an hour to go from an empty database to executing current mainnet blocks! Read below for more.

With each release we like to highlight one of the amazing women from history and present day. Meet Hedy Lamarr:

At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, intended to use frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, various spread-spectrum techniques are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Beam Sync will get a proper writeup soon. The gist is that Trinity starts as a stateless client, and slowly transitions to a full client over time.

Beam Sync is only one feature in a significant set of changes. Of special note are:

• py-evm upgrade: including performance improvements
• json-rpc server handles requests even if local state is missing
• peer discovery improvements

For the full list of changes, see the release notes.

We welcome folks to try out Beam Sync (it's the default sync now) and let us know your experience. For the fastest and easiest experience, try out: trinity --beam-from-checkpoint="eth://block/byetherscan/latest". There will be a lot of log spam at the console. Consider it a reminder that trinity is still in alpha. 😅

Expect another small release soon, with final Istanbul support included.

See the quickstart guide here for information on how to install and run the Trinity client.