Ixian Progress Report

2021-10-01 10:35:10

In the recent past, we have experienced network issues. These issues caused the Ixian network to stall, producing unpredictable block times and at times preventing the Ixian DLT nodes from reaching consensus for a prolonged period of time. After an extensive analysis we have identified bugs in the software which appeared to create these problems and we understood that they occurred at times of severely increased traffic.

 

In order to successfully solve these issues and mitigate similar occurrences in the future, we needed to carefully analyze the situation on the mainnet. We have spent a great deal of time and effort doing this, which resulted in the release of 3 maintenance versions of Ixian DLT node software. While these releases have effectively mitigated most issues, they have tremendously improved the stability of the Ixian network. With Ixian DLT v0.8.1b, we solved the most pressing matter, which occurred at times of transaction overload on the nodes. We can see that the network now runs flawlessly, with sometimes slightly prolonged block times.

While we are very pleased that we have had the chance to identify, isolate and fix these issues, it unfortunately had an impact on the delivery of the Ixiac Omega consensus update, which has been delayed by a great deal. However, we are very confident with the status and capabilities of the network and having had the chance to address these issues, it will provide us with a much better basis for future development.

 

Ixiac Omega

Despite the previously described issues that contributed to the delay of the rollout of Ixiac Omega, we have concentrated a great deal of time and resources on the actual development. We have implemented most of the required components and can now confidently state that Ixiac Omega is reaching completion.

The work that remains includes finalizing details that are crucial for the successful implementation of the Ixiac Omega. It will require a considerable amount of testing that will help avoid most unforeseen issues. This is especially important in the light of recent events, as it is crucial to identify and solve issues before the launch. As you could have noticed in the release notes of our latest release, Ixiac Omega will be released before the block-height 2.34M.

"Ixiac Omega is essentially the evolution of Ixian."

As we are moving away from the temporary implementation which had elements similar to those of some PoS models (with some notable differences of course), we are introducing a true hybrid model, where the so-called ‘Stake’ will actually be a form of Proof-of-Work (PoW). While the initial model allowed us to experiment and observe the actual drawbacks, the next iteration will introduce a unique PoW implementation that effectively eliminates most of the drawbacks associated with PoW and PoS.

Key benefits of Ixiac Omega:
- It will prove difficult to run many nodes on a single machine, thus bringing us closer to the ‘1 CPU — 1 Vote’ paradigm.
- Increase in network liveliness that will minimize the possibility for network stalling regardless of the traffic and load.
- Consistent block times

 

A few words about our latest release - Ixian DLT v0.8.2

We have recently released Ixian DLT v0.8.2. Besides the numerous bug fixes which it brings, this release has several new features which are an important improvement of the Ixian capabilities. With the added support for running multiple wallets, users can now run viewer-only wallets and sign transactions offline.

New API calls were added, some of which are intended for loading and unloading secondary wallets and calls for viewing a wallet. Another improvement is the addition of the ‘Sign’ and ‘Verify’ API calls, which allow users to prove the ownership of the private key, without exposing it to potential attacks.

These improvements are essential for secure implementation with exchanges, as it will make Ixian much simpler to implement, while providing a significant boost in security.

Without reducing the importance of all these changes and fixes, this latest version is also laying the groundwork and allowing for a smooth transition to Ixiac Omega.

 

What the future holds

Once we have successfully released the Ixiac Omega, our resources will be focused towards improving and optimizing the codebase. These improvements are expected to increase the speed of block and transaction generation, verifications and block signing. We will introduce multi-threading as well, which will provide a significant boost to the operation of Ixian DLT nodes.

Some notable future improvements include the transition from SQLite to RocksDB. This will allow Ixian nodes to write data in raw version and essentially enhance the speeds of both reading and writing data by orders of magnitude.

Our aim is to optimize wallet storage and more importantly optimize and finalize the network protocol as we edge closer to the v1.0 release.

In our upcoming article, we will touch upon the development of the Ixian S2 network and other products that will fully utilize all of the improvements we described in this post.

 

Stay positive,

Team Ixian