Etho Tech Saturday: Stability

Etho Protocol is a base for storage use cases. That base needs to be stable. Stability will be one of the major indicators we will be measured in the future.  Therefore quite some time is spent just having that: a solid base.

Richlist renewed

We have received several questions from the community to be more informative on the richlist and to tag different accounts. There has been also the aspect that we had from explorers and richlist different results on how many coins have been emitted and are in supply. After a tidious investigation checking both the richlist and the explorer we have been able to narrow it down to:

Richlist: 79,425,675 ETHO

Explorer: 79,646,904 ETHO04

This is a difference of 0.3% and deemed an acceptable error margin of both implementation. One other difference of both implementation is that the richlist counts addresses being used by by looking at transactions. Currently, we have 17k addresses being transacted with. The Blockscout explorer however counts every search after an address as a new address. Blockscout shows 4.5M addresses in use, but it is really addresses in use plus addresses being looked up.

Screenshot 2022-07-03 at 12.50.56

Inventory of infrastructure

working-on-code-2021-08-28-20-02-44-utc

When you are having a growing project there is a lot of demand of new servers, instances, VPSs. Before taking the next step we need to consolidate our base and document - you know the boring part - our infrastructure and where are what assets. That process has been started. This will stabilize our base as it will help to declutter and equalize the load on some servers. But this is just general housekeeping and takes time. It is well-invested time as we want to grow further.

Explorers and stability

The basis of Etho Protocol is its blockchain represented by geth. In order to inspect the blockchain you need an explorer. For this we use a blockchain explorer called Blockscout. We have introduced in the last weeks' several changes in explorer in order to make it more stable and useful.

  • ETHO geth and blockchain have been optimised to be more compatible and generate fewer error messages
  • Move to a larger VPS to have enough storage, memory and CPUs
  • Improved CSS, icon, and linking to the main assets in the explorer
 

 

Screenshot 2022-07-03 at 09.32.54

Soft Fork of ETHO GETH

Our latest hard fork was on the 28th of February when the project took a big leap forward. Since then several improvements have been introduced, however, none of them break the consensus. The plan is to release a new update, which will include improvements like

  •  Fix to allow archiving and full sync 
  •  Updates of boot nodes, this will improve syncing and network discovery
  •  Fixing of formating, error messaging, and other clean-ups

The release will be published as a minor release, 2.0.1 on the GitHub and announced via Twitter once available. Scripts for nodes will be updated. As this is a soft fork it is only needed for the explorers and potentially new nodes.

The next big step

As we now have a working base what is the next step. We have some great ideas but they will require some more vetting before putting them on paper. And hey - we want you to be ready for the next tech blog. Until then...