R&D Update | Sep 2022
Welcome back to our Monthly R&D Updates @ the Subspace Network!
The team has been busy making improvements as usual, especially toward our Gemini 2a launch. Here are some updates on what’s been happening:
⛓️ Subspace Core Protocol
Moving to Gemini 2a — Gemini 1 support has been officially dropped! This cleans up the codebase and the network is now focused on Gemini 2a and onwards. With Gemini 2a, development has shifted towards a focus on SSD usage. This promotes better security with lower CPU usage, lower energy consumption, and better performance and user experience for those participating on the network.
Improved Syncing for Nodes Among Us — Various improvements have been made to improve our node syncing experience, especially during the sync of the early history with heavy blocks. Peer info was extended with sync status information, such that nodes can make better awareness of their own sync state relative to the rest of the network and don’t create forks by producing blocks before fully synced with the network.
💻 Subspace Desktop
Feature Freezing for the Security Audit — We’ve started our security audit on the Subspace Desktop! The team has some final changes in preparation for the audit and has now put the desktop app into a feature freeze. We expect the audit to be completed in a few weeks’ time and look forward to the outcome.
🧑💻 Subspace SDK
2 Merged PRs
The team has started our development on the Subspace SDK. We plan to create a much simpler developer interface layer for folks that want to build against Subspace. This SDK will allow you to interact much more easily and consistently with Subspace components. We’ll be also leveraging this internally to help build out our new Subspace CLI: a more user-friendly version of our command line interface.
📊 Subspace Telemetry
Telemetry Improvements — In preparation for Gemini 2a stress test, various improvements have been made to help us prepare for the traffic we are expected to experience. We continue to work on this to ensure we can have a smooth telemetry experience as the network grows.
⤴️ Open Source Contributions
6 Merged PRs
The team has pushed a variety of fixes upstream to open-source libraries that we use. For Substrate Telemetry, we’ve updated the dependencies and included some fixes to improve our development experience. With Substrate, we’ve introduced some refactors and improved the block response limits. Lastly, we also contributed bug fixes to Parity DB and added debug implementations to improve the overall experience as a developer.
Community member and Ambassador @jim-counter also helped fix our docker-compose example. We appreciate the contribution from our community and look forward to seeing more!
🌲 Ecosystem Partners 🌳
💲 SubWallet
0.6.4 Release and Gemini 2a Support — Subwallet has released a new version of their browser wallet extension that now includes Gemini 2a support! Come check out 0.6.4 on their download page.
Single Chain Mode — The Subwallet team has also been developing a single chain mode for their wallet product. This greatly helps the user experience for the Subspace community. Come take a look and leave some feedback!
🔭 Subscan
Thanks to Subscan, we now have a production live version of our block explorer viewable at https://subspace.subscan.io/. This will help supplement the available resources we have for the community in addition to telemetry.
🌎 Subspace Network Ambassadors
Our ambassadors have been working hard in helping us answer questions and answering issues during our Gemini 2a launch. We appreciate all our ambassadors and look forward to a successful network test! Additionally here are some of the projects they’ve built to help the community out during Gemini 2a:
Subspace Monitoring
Big Jim and counterpoint released a Subspace node and farmer with monitoring stack using Docker Compose
Subspace-utils
jrwashburn created utilities to manage and operate subspace network nodes. It also includes a graphana dashboard for monitoring!
Gemini II installation tutorial bot for Telegram
DmitryZD created a telegram bot that helps users through the installation process of Gemini II.
UI for Gemini II CLI installation on Ubuntu
Yurally has created a beautiful UI to assist users in the CLI installation process for Gemini II. Check out a demo of the project here.
Data collecting script
Beething has released a set of scripts for Subspace nodes like such as journalctl logs / docker logs / ps / open ports / firewall status to improve your debugging experience with Subspace on the terminal!
Thanks for reading and following us through this journey. Please feel free to reach out for any other questions or ideas!
