Hello Lisk Community!

In an ongoing effort to update you on our development progress, we’ve written a comprehensive blog post to address the status of Lisk Core 1.0 and Beta Testing.

With this blog post and other development-related posts, we aim to deliver in-depth updates in a way that you can understand what it is we’ve accomplished in the past weeks no matter what your technical background is. We want to promote transparency regarding our development to help you understand our decision-making, the reasons behind potential delays and finally to offer a clear overview of the next steps.

Lisk Ranked #3 by the CCID

Before we begin, we have great news to share related to our development. Lisk has been recognized as the top 3 ranked public blockchain project by the CCID: China’s Ministry of Industry & Transformation Technology!

It has been a little over one month since the public deployment of the Lisk Core 1.0 Beta Network, and within this time, 80+ Lisk Core issues have been closed accompanied by 309 commits made towards the advancement of Lisk Core 1.0 and the codebase.

From the 80+ issues closed, six were recognized to be difficult to the point where they were labeled as ‘hard’ issues. A ‘hard’ label means that a vast amount of resources, time, and effort from our team is needed to resolve such complications.

Memory Leaks in the Core Application/Postgres

Within the last month, we spent most of our time and resources working to resolve the primary ‘hard’ issue identified as — ‘Memory leaks in the core application/postgres’, issue #1882. This particular complication (#1882) was discovered during the beta testing process, which stemmed from the network sockets not being properly destroyed in the stage of communication. This was in part due to network-wide duplicate entries of peers objects.

Breakthroughs that brought us closer to solving the issue led to even more code changes needing to be made, allowing us to continue on and eventually find the main source of the problem. For this reason, issue #1882 was persistent and remained open for the length of time that it did.

A Major Breakthrough in Development

We are thrilled to report that four days ago, the Memory Leak issue was finally fixed and completely closed. As a result, we’ve successfully progressed over this 3-week hurdle, allowing us to make further code advancements and headway in the development of Lisk Core 1.0.

Next Step: Fix Issue #2025
At the moment, our team’s focus has entirely shifted to a new, ‘medium’ labeled issue that was uncovered during the time that was taken to fix issue #1882. This ‘medium’ labeled issue, #2025, relates to our network peers not properly staying in one accord or in alignment when it comes to network broadhash and forging new blocks. They tend to, instead of forging the correct block and sharing these details amongst other peers, look to forge the next block without verifying if it has been forged by someone else, leading to a recurring fork in the network. With the discovery of this issue, our team is proactively working to solve it day in and out to successfully get this closed in what is expected to be a short turnaround time.

After #2025 Is Fixed
When issue #2025 is resolved, an in-depth testing and enhancement of the fix will take place, after which we expect to be in a position where Lisk Core 1.0 will be in the final stages of development. The remaining minor issues would then be left as tasks to complete before the final Beta is released.

Releasing Lisk Core 1.0 to Testnet and Mainnet

Shortly after, we will prepare the transition of Lisk Core 1.0 to Testnet where the very final testing of the newly fixed and added code will take place. The highlight here is that the length of time that Lisk Core 1.0 spends on Testnet is anticipated to be much shorter and quicker than Betanet, placing us in position, with great and immense achievement, to have a successful Lisk Core 1.0 migration to Mainnet.

In short, this is a detailed explanation to say that we are very close to completion of Lisk Core Beta Testing. We also want to share the major achievements made by our development team. At this stage in development, the outlook is promising due to the vast amount of time that’s been put into proper testing of the Lisk codebase.

Lisk Core Testnet Announcement
We will in due time publicly announce the details of the migration from Lisk Core 0.9.14 to Lisk Core 1.0.0 on Testnet. This announcement will include the necessary information for a seamless migration to the newly improved Lisk codebase such as a set block-height for when the migration will take place and further documentation to assist our network peers and delegates.

One More Thing…
It needs to be made crystal clear that at any point in time, a major issue may arise which would delay the trajectory of our anticipated timeframe. However, with our team having made great progress as of late, this detailed update and optimism is warranted.

What is Lisk Core 1.0?

I would like to give a final reminder of what Core 1.0 is: Core 1.0 is Lisk’s biggest development and release to date, including over 4,560 commits and 500+ code changes/enhancements in one single deployment.

• A completely new design and new API
• A new P2P transfer layer
• New layer for communication with the database
• Code migration to es6
• Full atomic block writes
• Security fixes and improvements
• Block processing enhancements
• Improved code standards
• Addition to the 64 byte data field for type 0 transactions

Another step that will be taken on the communications side moving forward will be to continue providing regular development updates. For real-time progression of what was discussed above, I highly recommend following our Lisk Core GitHub Repository.

Have a great week, Liskers!

-Jan

About the Author:

Jan Liz-Fonts is a community manager for Lisk at Lightcurve GmbH. Known for being the first to learn about innovative ideas that would change the world, Jan has always found a way to contribute to and support startups that he believes in. Jan first learned about Bitcoin and blockchain technology in 2010 when he was only 13 years old. He moved from Minnesota to join the Lisk project and team.

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