15 Sep Symbol blockchain news update 15/09/21
OK, bear with me today, not feeling so great and I think I need more coffee for my brain to start functioning correctly! A lot happened whilst I was asleep regarding the finalisation issue so I will try to bring you up to speed in this Symbol Blog update!
Upgrade your nodes!
As we have reported over the last couple of days there was an issue where finalisation was stalled for several days. The pirates have been working night and day to resolve this and today/yesterday (depending on where you are in the world) a hotfix was released. You can see a summary of changes below.
I am sure that I don’t need to tell you this but UPDATE YOUR NODES ASAP! 😁
I updated mine (xymharvesting.net) this morning but at time of writing it seems that only 191 nodes are running the latest version. Please, please, please keep your nodes up to date – it is important for the network and your delegates 🙏
We are catching up! 😎
As I write it looks like finality is back up and running and catching up rapidly as Twitter is pointing out..
Looking at the block explorer now we are only about 3 hours behind at time of writing so looks like it is problem solved and business as usual! 🥳 Edit: I have just checked again after writing the rest of this post and we are all caught up!
What happened?
Rather than summarise everything here (I am feeling lazy 😁). I will point you to this post mortem article listing what went wrong and how it was resolved.
Going forward..
It does seem that voting will be incentivised in the near future which hopefully will help to ensure that people maintain their voting nodes properly. If you have more than 3,000,000 XYM and are voting I would have thought that you would want to ensure that you do this anyway rather than requiring additional compensation 🙄
In the current version of Symbol, there are no rewards or penalties for voting nodes. While this simplified our finalization implementation considerably for launch, it doesn’t create the correct incentives that we intend for voting nodes. We will be adding a proper system to reward voters in the (near) future.
https://hackmd.io/@syndicate/postmortem-140921
And as a silver lining to this story it seems that it has been a bit of a wake up call and that a lot of work will go into infrastructure as a priority.
We have realized we need to invest in better tooling. Being able to monitor the number of active voting nodes and a decline in voting stake would have alerted us to an issue before finalization stalled. We’ll be prioritizing our infrastructure for the next few months, including a new block explorer, improved REST API’s, and data analytics that are easily understandable and helpful to users and researchers alike. If you’d like to work with us, come join us at Discord.
https://hackmd.io/@syndicate/postmortem-140921
For more information about the situation, past and present, check out this thread (and links) from Hatchet or get yourselves over to XYMcity on Discord.
To the pirate crew 🏴☠️
I just wanted to say thank you on a job well done – I guess the last few days have been insane so get some rest! 😁
In other news..
New Symbol logo designs
I have seen many different designs going around and I don’t think that anything is official yet but I am guessing that something similar to the logos below will be adopted. I like them although I am struggling to make out what is different between some of the designs. B2 looks weird but I would be happy with any of the others. Really looking forward to seeing the redesigned website and branding, not long to wait now either.
QUEST boost er.. boost
@QUESTofficial5 is giving an additional 50 XYM boost to new quests posted in the gaming category!
There are some conditions but the autotranslation isn’t perfect so apologies if anything is wrong!
- Delivery (streaming?) or video upload
- It must be a game. Any genre is fine.
- Tweet your own announcement of the quest
- 1 boost per person
- Excludes those that do not seem to be active
- Overall budget 3,000 XYM
Thanks!
Thanks for reading, thanks to the pirates for their hard work and thanks to node owners who have updated! We will be back again soon, hopefully I will feel a bit brighter and will do a better job of my next blog post 😁
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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