Aurora Wallet

The Aurora wallet received some attention from the Tari community over the past two weeks in preparation for the upcoming Tari Testnet Limited (TTL) store revamp. The store will allow those currently mining tXTM with Tari Universe to trade them for exclusive merchandise to thank them for their efforts in shaping Universe’s development. Note: kudos to those who read these updates and discover alpha in them :)

The wallet underwent extensive testing to identify outstanding bugs and issues with the overall user experience. Thanks to the community, users have the following to look forward to in upcoming releases:

• Several UI/UX fixes dealing with issues around the transaction flows (such as the Go button being inactive when the note was empty, reverting to null after a transaction, and Aurora getting caught in a sending loop animation when sending Minotari).
• Major fixes around transactions and how they reflect in the app, such as the balance not refreshing and the transaction history not being accurately reflected in the app. Giving the user better feedback regarding the Aurora app’s synchronization state with the blockchain.

Minotari

General

Minotari community members have been chipping away at some minor rough edges of the base layer, improving overall system reliability and resource optimization. It’s not flashy like some of the new additions to Universe (more on this in a bit), but their efforts will dramatically improve performance and resource utilization. To quote Dave Brandt, “It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.”

The changes include:

• Automatically disconnecting unresponsive peers after a set number of failed pings.(PR # 6655)
• Ensuring that messaging workers stop correctly when a peer connection is disconnected. (PR #6653)
• Efficiently closing unused RPC connections, preventing overloads, and optimizing wallet-to-node connectivity. (PR #6649) Updated build instructions for the Ledger Wallet on Nanosplus and Stax devices to ensure compatibility and smooth operation. (PR #6673)

Libp2p

Community members are actively looking at incorporating libp2p into Minotari. Libp2p is a decentralized framework for peer-to-peer applications, and its incorporation will offer significant benefits: improved interoperability across different operating systems and devices while improving connectivity in environments with strict NAT and firewall requirements.

Libp2p is a significant change and is therefore undergoing rigorous testing to ensure that all necessary components of Minotari can communicate via libp2p. Progress has been positive, and the remaining issues should be addressed shortly. We’ll have more to add once it’s been implemented.

Tari Universe

The community continues focusing on Tari Universe, improving it with each subsequent release. With the latest version, users can enjoy:

• A set of new loading information screens to better inform new users of Tari (and cryptocurrencies in general) what Tari is, what mining is, and other ecosystem elements. (PR #969)
• The ability to set the power levels on your CPU and GPU mining via a slider so that you can adjust system resource utilization by Tari Universe.
• P2Pool! Specifically, we introduced several optimizations, such as storing peers on disk for faster load up and reduced network usage, and stricter rules for maintaining healthy chain dynamics, such as limiting the number of uncle blocks.

The Ootle

The community is currently working to implement RocksDB on the production level. RocksDB is designed for high-concurrency, high-throughput, low-latency environments, making it the better choice for Ootle’s validator nodes in the production environment. You can read some of the particulars of RocksDB here.