Project Update: Latest Commits and Enhancements

We’re excited to share the latest updates and enhancements for July 2024. Here’s a brief summary of the key changes:

State of P2pool

We are thrilled to announce significant progress in our P2pool projects. If you haven’t heard of P2pool before, it allows miners to combine their hashing power without relying on a centralized pool operator. It works by creating a network, parallel to Tari, where miners share their computing power to find blocks and split the rewards based on how much each miner contributed.

In simple terms, P2pool allows you to still earn some portion of the block rewards, even if there are large mining warehouses also mining Tari.

• Integration for Tari and Other Merge-Mining Coins: The integration with the current P2pool project is ready for testing, focusing on mining with RandomX.

• SHA3x Mining with Tari: Our second implementation, focusing on SHA3x mining with Tari, is in an alpha stage and available here. While currently requiring compilation from source, binaries will be available soon.

Upgrade of Tari Addresses to Include View Keys

The next version of Nextnet will introduce Tari Addresses with an embedded View Key, unlocking exciting new features. A view key consists of a public key and a private key. When someone sends you funds, they will know the public view key, but you should keep the private view key safe. Whoever has your private view key can see all the funds you currently have, but cannot spend them. Here are some examples of how you might use this functionality:

Separate View-Only and Spending Wallets

This update allows for a cold wallet spending key and a hot wallet view key. This is ideal for online stores, exchanges, and other applications that benefit from a secure, view-only hot wallet.

Optional Revealing of Funds

The view key structure enables sharing a private view key to reveal funds to a third party. Future developments may include a lite wallet server that scans the Tari blockchain and provides a simple interface for accessing your balance.

Ootle Developments

Tari’s second layer, the Ootle, continues to progress rapidly. The Ootle already allows validators to join and leave, but there are complications that arise when the shard space splits and joins. We often refer to this as Epoch Management. The main goal of this phase of development is to finish off all development related to Epoch Management. After that, the community will focus on performance and benchmarking.

Improved Syncing for Network Validators

Validator syncing has been significantly optimized by sdbondi, utilizing checkpoints to avoid downloading the entire chain since the genesis. This enhancement is crucial as we anticipate a substantial increase in data generation on the Ootle.

Tari Swarm Improvements

Tari Swarm, a tool for developers to run the Ootle locally with many validators, has received several quality-of-life improvements, enhancing its usability and efficiency.

The Road Towards Gasless Transactions

Gasless transactions are gaining traction in blockchain. The Ootle now supports transactions with multiple signers, paving the way for third-party gas fee payments. Stay tuned for further developments in this area.