Qortal 3.0 and beyond – What is happening now? April 2022

Posted on by crowe

Hello Qortians!

 

It has been a while since my last blog post, so I figured it would be a good time to give a more dynamic picture of the current development of the project overall. There is a LOT going on right now, and since our releases have been less frequently needed, I didn’t want people thinking that development had slowed in any way. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Qortal Core version 3.2.4 

In the next release of the Qortal Core, we will see multiple changes, including:

  • Only sync with peers on the same or greater height – this should hopefully be a big improvement to syncing
  • Fixes for some QDN issues
  • Name registration fee reduction – the new fee will be 1.25 QORT.
  • Q-Chat difficulty reduction – this is for new users thinking they’re having issues when they aren’t. Reducing the mempow for 0 balance accounts.
  • Add member counts to group APIs – for ease of use checking number of users in a group on the chain.
  • Don’t send PRESENCE updates if not synced – to prevent orders being listed that are not actually backed by an active node.
  • Performance improvements – to help with overall performance on all systems.
  • Translation updates – support for multiple new languages on UI side.

The information below will be AFTER 3.2.4 and beyond… just giving a bit of a ‘road map’ for the Qortal Core development.

 

EPC fixes

This is a MASSIVE new networking rework to the Qortal Core, this will not only improve massively the networking and data usage, it also fixes a long-standing bug where CPU usage would be increased over time. Many of the changes I will mention below, are reliant upon the EPC fixes. This is a dramatic enhancement to the core of Qortal. EPC is essentially the new engine that coordinates the networking threads. This is a huge overall improvement.

QDN Direct Connections

This will allow direct connections for data as opposed to relying upon relay nodes. Once we have the EPC fixes, this is ready to go.

Bandwidth Reduction

Again relies upon EPC fixes, but our brilliant developers have come up with some methods to hugely reduce network traffic.  These improvements will be rolled out bit-by-bit over the next several releases.

Pirate Chain Support

This is a BIG one that we’ve been talking about for quite some time, and will certainly make the ARRR community happy. We are now directly working on this.

  • We have already built out the ARRR Equivalent of the ‘electrum network’ for submitting transactions to the ARRR network. This allows for the majority of our TradeBot functionality.
  • We are currently awaiting some wallet fixes from the ARRR team, once that has been taken care of we should be able to finish the Pirate Chain implementation.
  • This will give Qortal a fully functional ARRR wallet, and ARRR/QORT Cross-Chain trades in the Trade Portal. 🙂

DigiByte support

This is mostly complete now, development team is just finishing adding TradeBot support. This will allow both DGB wallet and DGB/QORT Trades on the Trade Portal.

RavenCoin support

This is less developed so far than DGB, but it isn’t too far behind.

MemPOW for minting signatures and Online Accounts

This is fully developed, just needs more testing, and will need to be rolled out SLOWLY over the next multiple releases to be sure it doesn’t cause any unwanted negatives. This is an EXTREMELY high risk addition, so we will need to be VERY careful with the roll-out of this one.

Lite Nodes

I am personally quite happy about this addition. This will allow full mobile compatibility to be built out very easily for Qortal. Lite nodes are nodes that do not need to synchronize the entire chain, but instead communicate to their connected full nodes for the chain information necessary. At the moment we already have lite nodes with the following functionality:

  • Developed and tested for wallet, chat, and name registration transactions.
  • Does not yet support showing registered names in chat, a bit more development is required for that.
  • This can probably be merged into one of the upcoming releases within the next couple weeks.

Massive Q-Chat improvements

  • Q-Chat messages are getting their own local database for messages. This will allow setting how long you would like to keep your Q-Chat messages on each node.
  • Q-Chat messages are being turned into their own protocol instead of using unconfirmed transactions, this will be a DRAMATIC increase in speed, and message propagation.
  • Q-Chat UI is getting MASSIVE reworking done, to include all of the functionality seen in centralized messaging services like Telegram and Discord.
  • This is going to be taking place in the very near future, and we are very excited for this opportunity to become one of the best decentralized messengers and give the world TRUE freedom of speech back.

Self-Sponsorship Algorithm

All of the backend data needed for the algorithm has been discussed, and the work on the algo itself will begin shortly. The days of self-sponsorship are coming to an end very soon. Be warned those who still attempt self-sponsorship.

 

That’s it for this blog post, hopefully everyone found this information as interesting and exciting as I did. Until next time!

– crowetic