AMA, February 3: hackathons, workshops, development progress, bounty program

Dmitriy Gerasimov, CEO of Cellframe, announced the launch of hackathons and bounty program and talked about the development progress of the last two weeks.

Hackathons

One of the most long-expected pieces of news is hackathons’ announcement. Webinars, a series of tutorial videos, and hackathons are being prepared with the company’s partner FinStreet in India. The schedule has already been coordinated. So, by February 10, they will publish short five-to-seven-minute videos on local short video platforms. And by February 19, Finstreet — three training video clips on Youtube. After that, the partners will get to work together on college webinars.

Workshops

While FinStreet is producing the tutorial videos, the CEO of Cellframe will do a series of developer workshops that are started tomorrow. So, on Friday, Monday, and Thursday at 11 a.m. UTC, Dmitriy will broadcast on the special YouTube channel. The link to the channel will be published in the comments to this stream and on Cellframe social networks. The topic of the workshops is “How to make t-dApps.”

“Truly distributed applications differ from usual dApps because they are compared to cloud services. As you remember, we do fog service based on blockchain that is more dedicated, trustless, and transparent than usual cloud decisions. There will be instructions on how to create and monetize your t-dApp”.

Cellframe SDK

The team is continuing to work on the TON-based consensus. The instant messaging feature for the Voting channel is made. All the changes are published on the GitHub page. A node-by-node voting channel is also developed as a node-by-node broadcast is made. At the end of this work, it will be possible to measure the consensus and compare it with the stock TON code. “I believe that our implementation will be faster. So, I will be happy if TON team decides to use our version”, — said Dmitriy.

Currently, the developers are working on the consensus algorithm, sessions, and rounds. They will have planned to finish it before February 21, the start of the third party audition of Cellframe code.

Also, the development team fixed several important bugs. They correctly deployed trashholds when reading chains, adding atoms to them, and synchronizing those atoms. The basic emission transaction occurs when the mempool is synchronized with the root node. The users now have forced synchronization mode. The CEO will show how to use this command during the Friday workshop that starts at 11 UTC. Anyway, there is an instruction on https://wiki.cellframe.net/ Before one-time synchronization was done only on the first link, now it is done on several links sequentially. So, it has become stronger against a bad network or stops communication. The static nodelist is moved to the local GDB group.

Moreover, the Minkowski network was deployed to debug paid transactions. It is accessible in the master and development branches. For information, Minkowski testnet is the second testnet for KelVPN parachain. And now they start to debug pay transactions, so their economics based on VPN sharing and accepting payments will be shown soon and their token on Cellframe backbone on Sub-zero network. When they overbridge with the backbone, it will be possible to test how Cellframe decentralized exchange works.

Dashboard application

The current stable release still doesn’t include the development changes. They are only available in sources where binary builds. So next week, development branch will be merged, and you will see binary builds. It is better to download sources and build by yourself until an ecosystem like Cellframe has been developed.

The mobile version for Android is being developed, such as completed tabs of wallet, settings, menu, networks; the rest are in development. Support for monitors with non-standard low resolution is added. Our team has reworked the whole networks panel and has added the ability to navigate through the list of networks if there are more than four. So now, no matter how many nets there are, all of them are available for management. The animation on network indicators is added as well. It is turned on at the moment of switching states. The team has made some graphical changes on the dApps tab and has fixed bugs with incorrect data displayed on the Console tab. Also, they have created an auto-add command feature prototype, which is more comfortable to use. Restrictions on the characters entered in a certificate name are added. By now, you can enter Latin characters, numbers, and some common symbols. Finally, the team has added forced updating of wallets when switching tabs. Now there is no need to reload the application to update the balance. The dev team has improved stability, e.x. CPU load was reduced by 5%.

Out of Space partnership

They have developed their own Cellframe based decisions. It starts from the Layer 2 protocol. They have already implemented a functional trading terminal, kick service, MVP of the social network. And the team starts the presale token sale round today. We wish you good luck.

Bounty program

The bounty program is announced with prizes of up to $ 10'000 for finding critical vulnerabilities in the Cellframe SDK. Everything except Proof-of-State consensus, it will be tested in the second phase. Rewards are paid for vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution, broken ledger logic, private data compromise, crypto-level vulnerabilities. Ethical hackers are invited. By the way, this bounty program will have been continued after the mainnet launch in March. And the prizes will be raised.

In conclusion, the team has already had three space chipmunks in the official sticker pack. The last one, with the katana, is about the attitude toward difficulties and obstacles. We are Cell, and we are here!

Some questions:

When mainnet is released, do we have POS consensus and validator running from day 1?

Yes, but with PoA part. There will be verificators belonging to the team that could roll back any state change proposed from the Proof-of-Stake consensus. So, it will work, I think, maybe six months or a year. Just to be sure that it will not be hacked. We will start from not big capitalization and it will be easy to make 51% attacks. So, this centralization only solves the protection from 59% attacks.

What are the main activities that are possible with mainnet, for example, do we have token transfer enabled?

Yes, of course. If we talk about activities, you will first be able to bring up your node to start earning on providing some folk services, e.x. CDN, streaming,

VPN, cloud service, storage, hosting service. There are a lot of possibilities. And everything is working right now. But you could start earning when the mainnet will be launched.

What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?

Quantum proof and service-oriented.

Amazon Web Services do have a very interesting service that you might wanna take a look at — AWS Braket, which is allows you to use quantum computers for scientific purposes, mainly. Maybe you guys could use that service to test the quantum safety of your project, what do you think?

It still has not so many qubits. So we have to wait a few years until they will have at least a few thousand and we could show that ECDSA and classic cryptography is vulnerable and our is not.

Is there a decentralized governance process wich wil constitutes the managemant of the software updating system? Examples: node vote system, staking vote, holders communities or else.

Yes, we are planning big structured governance. Because we have repositories depths that need to be manually reviewed before its inclusion. Now it is in the beginning stages. So, we rule by ourselves, and then step by step we’ll give it to the community, and stakeholders could vote and influence the governance process.

Some time ago you tweeted an article on how projects that work with quantum resistant topics are receiving more and more strategic funding rounds, are you looking from something like this in future?

Yes, we think about making an IPO for Cellframe foundation. Now we are preparing documents and forming this strategy.

I heard some discussions in the chat that having layer 2 services is not possible with Cell, is this the case, can you clarify, please

No, some teams have already implemented Layer 2 services.

Any plans to hire more developers? What is the runway left from the last capital raise? Any traction on the commercial /enterprise side to use Cellframe?

We always hire C-developers. But our budget is limited because markets are low and our sell price has lowered a little and by now we are growing carefully. As you know we have western funds and develop owing to investing funds. So, usually, we spend almost everything from our bi-weekly western. We’re preparing IPO for Cellframe foundation and preparing a roadmap for enterprise implementation. First, we need to run the mainnet to show possible enterprise customers that we are safe enough. That our safety is proved by the community, that we have some real assets based on our software and only after that we could run a massive promotion for our enterprise products.

Are the transactions not showing up in the testnet or are there really not that many yet?

Our transaction explorer is still in development. It will be finished in several days. Everything is done just left to coach all bugs. There are more transactions that it shows. Soon you will see thousands of them because we are preparing to test TPS in a special parachain for speed tests after TON consensus completion approximately in 2 weeks. Anyway, we try to speed it up and some particles of the TPS test may be passed next week.

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