What’s Going On Behind the Screens: Ergo Weekly Dev Update August 4th

Armeanio
8 min readAug 5, 2021

The Ergo weekly Dev update is not the sexiest crypto blog. Although all things being equal its a solid choice.

Focusing on the moon is great, but the truth is a rocket takes an incredible amount of engineering.

Designing and building systems that are subject to immense pressure is not an easy task.

It is always the brains in the background that actually get things done. This what the Ergo team is about, building solid tech.

Open source software developers are unappreciated heros who endure an underappreciated grind.

It was a big week for Ergo on the market side. Bitcoin.com went live, KuCoin trading will go live tomorrow at 10AM UTC. A special thanks is in order to Kushti, Ilya, Dmytri and Angie for their assistance in setting up the technical and marketing side of these partnerships.

Community members HamdERGler and Cradano are set up as mods for ERGO NFT on discord. It is a one stop channel promoting NFT’s on Ergo Platform. I think this is an awesome way to see collaboration between artists and set a foundation to grow the NFT market on Ergo. If you are an artist or a collector take a look, you won’t regret it.

On a side note, one of these days I hope to see more audio NFT’s. I think that has a large potential to support established and grassroots musicians. Those of you within the community please consider reaching out and being a part of that development.

https://discord.gg/bcmvstHScZ

Ollie dropped a new ErgoCast Episode in the last week centered around NFT’s check it out in the link below.

https://ergocast.io/episode/ergocast-s1e7-articulate-artists/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ergocast-s1e7-articulate-artists

Speaking of NFT’s on Ergo, Landopixel has been doing some great work on implementing metadata, as well as putting together a website to increase the tooling, and viewability of NFT’s on Ergo.

LADOPIXΣL

www.ErgoNFTs.org

- Detecting the metadata entered in R5 and displaying it correctly.

- Creating a FAQ section.

- Investigating to include the identification of each NFT relating it to the block height and the address with which it was created in order to verify its authenticity.

www.ErgoTokens.org

- Working to be able to access the details of a token by its ID from the URL.

- Creating a FAQ section.

- List of last tokens created.

www.ErgoDapps.org

- Creating some videos for the use of ErgoUtils.org, ErgoAuctions.org and ErgoNFTs.org

Yehor and the tesseract team are in the process of integrating Ergo onto Ledger. No video update this week.

yehor-tesseract

Update for the Tesseract team: No videos this week — working on the huge Attest UTXO call. Right now I am implementing the Ergo transaction parser (and trying to squeeze it in 3kb of RAM).

Morphic is always improving the Ergo stack on multiple fronts. This week he worked on improving the sigmastate-interpreter, the Appkit, as well as the node. On the side this week he did some work related to the Ergo Android Wallet and ErgoDex contracts.

Morphic-

Sigma:

- PR to support Appkit on RoboVM (the experiment to run Appkit on iOS by MrStahlfelge)

- Two PRs towards v5.0 are waiting for @kushti’s review (https://github.com/ScorexFoundation/sigmastate-interpreter/pull/733, https://github.com/ScorexFoundation/sigmastate-interpreter/pull/734)

Appkit:

- Appkit v4.0.6 release candidate is waiting for ergo-wallet v4.0.13 publishing (or v4.0.14) then will release.

Ergo:

- PR is waiting for @kushti second round review, hope this can land into v4.0.14

(https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/pull/1330)

Misc:

- discussions related to Android Wallet and ErgoDEX contracts

Next up:

- Create next incremental PR towards v5.0

Pragmaxim is working on improving the node.

Pragmaxim-

Node :

- handling db errors at higher level https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/pull/1414

- adding error to wallet status https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/pull/1416

- not allowing wallet restore when pruning is enabled https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/pull/1417

Scalahub is back in action, the primary focus on his side has been the ErgoDex and the Ergomixer staking solution.

scalahub

I had been off last 2 weeks. Last few days I’ve been working on

1) ErgoDEX contracts with @Ilya

2) staking solution for ergo mixer with some community/core devs

Mr. Stahlfelge is continually working to improve the user experience of the Android Wallet. The new improvement with Anon_real’s support for QR code is a welcome edition.

MrStahlfelge

Android wallet:

- Made additions to appkit: Mnemonic validation, P2S/P2SH payments

- Integrated these additions to Android wallet

- Made node url configurable in the app

- Prepared new release 1.1 with a lot of additions — with the changes made by @anon_real to ergoutils, new tokens can be issued by scanning a QR code. Release is already on GitHub and on Google Play Open Beta channel which users can opt in

Anon_Real has been a busy character. Anon’s assistance has been invaluable across multiple fronts. The staking solution is making the rounds, all the dev’s input and review is extremely valuable. ErgoFunds continues to be refined and reviewed as well. ErgoUtils saw some improved functionality for minting NFT’s.

ErgoTeam will get some sneak peek images live soon on Github, definitely looking forward to seeing that.

Maritsaarts requested some light on-chain artwork. That is pretty neat. It reminds me of the old school ASCII artwork we used to see before all the fancy emoji’s and gifs hit the internet.

anon_real

On my side:

- Provided my notes on the staking solution to @mhs_sam

- Provided some more notes on ErgoFunds’ contracts to @kushti

- Improved token airdropping in ErgoUtils upon @Foeniculum’s request. Now it is easier to use with Yoroi since it doesn’t require a custom ERG amount.

- Added QR code to both Ergo Utils and Auction House upon @MrStahlfelge. Reportedly, with the next version of the android wallet, it will be very easy to bid in the auction house and use Ergo Utils (issuing tokens/artworks and …) with the android wallet.

- Added detail section for Other Token section of Auction House for lightweight on-chain artwork (attacked image) upon @maritsaart’s request — it seems to not work on windows though.

- Progress on the UI side of ErgoTeam — will put some sneak peek images on Github. Only the proposal page remains to be done.

Greenhat has been doing great work helping to improve Yoroi. As well as improving the sigma-rust.

greenhat

Done:

- helped ErgoDex with swap contract refund fail in Yoroi;

- fixed Scalar <-> BigInt256 conversion #352;

- made more good first issues with bounties — https://github.com/ergoplatform/sigma-rust/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abounty

- switched transaction inputs and outputs to BoundedVec to enforce size requirements on type level #361;

Kushti has been a busy character this week helping to assist in a smooth rollout, especially with the bitcoin.com delay. That is live and going well so far. He is refining the ErgoFund contract, as well as reviewing potential updates. He also dropped the plan for the next iteration of the node.

kushti

* Got feedback on ErgoFund from @anon_real , working on alternative pledge contract

* Reviewed #6 for Scanner, #1408 for Ergo, #733 for Sigma interpreter etc

* Reviewing staking solution

* Plan for node 4.0.14: https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/pull/1409

Illya has been spending a lot of time on the backend of Yoroi lately. This is a critically important aspect for the user experience for ErgoDex beta.

He is also improving the proxy contracts and the backend of the Dex.

Ilya

- Finalized solution for P2S inputs spending with Yoroi team

- Reworked proxy contracts for AMM DEX

- Improvements in DEX UI and Backend

DeatIT is back in action this week. Working with UI’s for the Dex, the website as well as assisting in the integration process with the exchanges that went live this week.

DeadIT

- development DEX version is up at the website for better test.

- working on ci/cd for dev version/landing page

- team processes

- some updates for the website, added new exchange, etc.

Mhs_sam and crew are progressing on multiple fronts. The staking contract for the mixer is under review here as well. Gravity is still being tested and bugs are being discovered and fixed. Raffle is a little delayed but that is the software game. It is better to test, test, test and produce a quality product than release something that has vulnerabilities. I hope everyone is excited. Mhs is also investigating some potential shenanigans with pools. I will continue to try to add pools and shake Nano’s dominance to help on my side.

mhs_sam

- staking: working on staking contract with @anon2020s regarding the comments of @anon_real and others.

- gravity: the tests is still ongoing, we have an issue with Gravity-core signatures. We are in contact with gravity team to solve it.

- Raffle: we had an issue with explorer (the bug which is fixed now). Now, we are working on the storage and disaster recovery to ensure no donation is being lost. I hope the raffle will be online in 10 days. sorry for any delay!

- Pools: continuous support. the 666 pool has an issue with orphan blocks, I’m working on it. it seems to me that we have some greedy miners (selfish mining attack).

WilfordGrimley of smartpools is still formulating potential ideas on how to improve and secure the Ergo network with mining via nonoutsourceability.

WilfordGrimley

Please anyone chime in here.

I know I’ve asked similar questions before but: Before Logarithmic mining is possible, is it possible for willing miners to solo mine with a nonoutsourcabilty tag enabled? Are autolykos v1 and v2 too different too allow for such a velvet fork?

ProSavage released Engimapool EU this week. This mining pool is a little bit different/special vs other solutions available for miners. It is a community driven project with the long term goal of releasing documentation and tutorials allowing miners to create and promote their own mining pools.

I hope that in time this project or concept grows and additional support is offered to encourage Ergonauts to not only participate in mining, but potentially supporting infrastructure as well. I managed to get community funding for this pool to help offset the initial startup costs until the block production is enough to be self-sufficient.

ProSavage

EnigmaPool:

We worked on rebuilding some of our architecture, so that each regional stratum can run pretty much independently like in the USA & EU etc etc.

Everything is now running on Docker containers for our stratum, workers (processor of shares), and redis containers.

We have yet to dockerize the master server: ergo node, rest-api, and master worker.

I am probably gonna work on writing code to confirm blocks and build a blocks webpage on the site today.

The only concern I have is we still have a single point of failure where if our node crashes we’re memed. Should we be using multiple instances of the “same” node? I presume we can somehow use the same wallet right?

Multi instance ergo node would be good as we can have that on the regional server to submit a block faster…

Feel free to chime in on helping with this problem anyone.

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