Milestone kickoff: Blockchain & Cryptography

Developers
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Hi everyone!

@mariano and I are leading the blockchain and cryptography teams at cLabs, working on keeping the Celo blockchain decentralized and scalable, and a great place for devs to build. For this current next milestone (through Aug 17th), we’re going to be working on:

  • [Blockchain] Reviewing the root cause of the mainnet stall and updating our consensus protocol to ensure that another outage doesn’t happen again
    • We executed a short-term fix by lowering the gas limit from 50M to 20M, but we’d like to increase it again once we know we can do so safely
    • Consensus changes will be scoped and as a stretch goal, milestone
  • [Blockchain] Exploring ways to make Baklava a better test environment
    • Along with the mainnet, Baklava also stalled but took much longer to get back online
    • We’re taking this opportunity to revisit how Baklava is used and make it a better and more reliable environment for validators and developers
    • Create better incentives to keep Baklava healthy
  • [Blockchain] Start the release process for celo-blockchain 1.6 with the latest upstream merges (1.10.8 and 1.10.9)
    • Upstream merges are critical for us to bring in the latest changes from geth
    • We’ll also release a new way to calculate the uptimeScore which will help us in the event we need to set the blockchain head of the nodes
  • [Cryptography] Resolving dependencies and cleaning up technical debt
    • Getting the celo-bls-go dependency in the celo-blockchain updated to the most recent version will fix an infinite recursion error, add batch verification, and allows us to compile celo-blockchain on M1 chips
    • Getting dkg-cli crate compiling in the celo-threshold-bls-rs-repo; until we do this celo-threshold-bls-rs-repo cannot be updated

The team: @gastonponti, @piersy, @mstraka, @mariano, @monica

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Here’s our end of milestone update:

  • celo-blockchain 1.6 was released!
  • We’re working on testing changes to the consensus protocol (see @pastoh’s post) and will be releasing this in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more details!
  • We’ll be sending an update on Baklava this week
  • Tech debt cleannup still in progress
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