Development Update from the Gridcoin Devs

Hello everyone, I know it's been a while since I posted an update about development progress. This post is intended to give an overview of what the core development team has been working on in the past few weeks as well as our current testing goals over on testnet.

First off I would like to thank our devs for the tireless work done over the last month to end "The Forkpocalypse" as some in the community have called it. With 3.7.10.0 and 3.7.11.0 we have stability and rising difficulty on the Gridcoin network again. Over the last couple days average difficulty has been rising steadily, from an average of 0.9 yesterday to nearly 1.1 today. Difficulty is a key indicator of network health and I look forward to seeing it increase even more in the coming days.

There is one slight negative I'd like to address and that is the frustration I have seen in the community about exchanges still being closed. I want to let you know that we have done everything we can to get the exchanges back online again and have even created an update (3.7.11.0) specifically to address issues Bittrex was having with their exchange wallet. I would like to refer everyone to this reddit post from our Exchange Liaison, @neuralminer. See below for a summary (note: see linked document for the most up to date info):

CCEX - OPEN
Bittrex - In contact with exchange; no ETA.
Flyp/HolyTransactions - Monitoring network before opening.
All other exchanges - No updates/ETA.

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Now, on to the meat of the post, development progress! The largest amount of work we've seen in the last couple weeks was this massive pull request by @ifoggz. This PR intends to completely overhaul Gridcoin's current RPC system and bring it more in line with current RPC commands utilized by modern Bitcoin clients. This includes deprecating the current execute and list prefixes for various commands and bringing them all under one unified system with proper naming conventions. In addition many new commands have been added. See the PR and commits for details.

For testnet this has been our main priority as well over the last week. Our team in testnet has been extensively testing the list of RPC commands (totaling over 140 unique commands!) for spelling, grammar, and general errors. I would like to include a shoutout to @jamescowens, who assisted stress testing the new RPC commands and lock timers with a custom bash script he made public in the testnet channel. To everyone who assisted (and is still assisting) with testnet, your efforts are greatly appreciated.

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For this last segment I would like to showcase some of the great posts we have seen coming from community members in the Slack economics and development channels regarding CBR, UTXO Optimization, and Staking in general. Here are a few of the posts that are worth a read for those who wish to know more about the subject:

CBR- The Way to Split Coins (DRAFT) by @hotbit

A quick rule of thumb formula for calculating expected time to stake by @jamescowens

Confident Time to Stake by @hotbit

For more in-depth conversation on these topics (and more data!) see the economics and development channels of our Slack. If you need an invite to the Gridcoin Slack, comment on this post and I will send you one.

Well that about wraps up this development update. After gauging interest on the last update I think I am going to aim to post these types of updates every other week unless some other event occurs (such as a new wallet version). Please let me know in the comments what you think about the posting frequency or if there is other information you'd like to see included in these posts. As always, if you have any questions for me or any of the core devs, comment below and I will answer myself or forward your question to someone who can answer it. Thanks everyone!