The 2020.09.30.1 release is a regular blockchain maintenance update. Notably, the team has added
support for providing witness validity information to Proof of Coverage receipts, fixed blockchain
snapshot determinism and updated state channel client to make device join accepts more robust.
Witness Validation Visibility
blockchain-core now provides visibility for Proof of Coverage witness validation. This would allow
network participants to better correlate their PoC mining rewards with poc_receipts_txn paths.
This is intended to be used by blockchain-etl and the
API. Ultimately this data will be visible in explorer and the Helium mobile wallet.
Snapshot Determinism Fixes
Another minor change was made to make snapshot serialization more deterministic. While this would not normally merit a mention, these serialization issues are making it less likely that any given Hotspot will generate and store a correct snapshot, which has two effects that that a user might notice:
-
It makes it harder for the Consensus Group to generate a snapshot, because two-thirds of the group needs to agree. This means that snapshots fail more often than they should and there are fewer to choose from when it comes time to bless the latest.
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Since fewer Hotspots agree, it's less likely that any given Hotspot will agree about the snapshot hash and store it. New Hotspots coming on to the network have to look around for longer to find a snapshot. Currently, agreement seems to have fallen into two major groups covering around 75% of all spots with a long tail of smaller groups.
Device JoinAccept Fixes
This release also addresses concerns related to client devices not being able to send join requests to the console without repeated attempts. We updated the state channel client on the miner to properly enqueue and dequeue packets once the router accepts an incoming packet offer from a Hotspot.
Blessed Snapshot Update
Finally, this release bumps the blessed snapshot to height 522721 which will improve sync times of
newly onboarded Hotspots.
Related PRs
- Fix snapshot diffs for serialization changes
- Ensure oracle prices are recalculated while absorbing snapshot
- Expose snapshot_height from blockchain
- Add request_block_hash to receipts json
- Add is_valid entries for poc_receipts/poc_witnesses
- Fix snapshot deserialize upgrades for older snaps
- Cleanup poc receipt txn logging noise
- Enqueue packet when sending offer on banner recv
- Dynamically select spreading factor for PoC packets
- Update blockchain-core and snapshot
- Bump core for join accept fix
Plan
We will begin beta-testing 2020.09.30.1 around 4 PM PST on 30th September, 2020 and plan to
release it to GA by 11 AM PST, 1st October, 2020.