Marlin Dev & Community Updates – January 2021

February 1, 2021 | Contributor

Here’s the latest from Marlin for January 2021!

There’s a lot to cover so let's get straight to it. Feel free to bug us or join the discussion on all things Marlin and Layer 0 on our discord server.

Engineering Updates

January 2021

OpenWeaver

- Keystore integration in beacon to provide identity

- Identity tracking in bootstrap beacons

- Add cosmos bridge
- New discovery protocol to fetch client keys
- Replace beacon addr with client key as identity in pubsub
- Stake tracking based on client keys
- Quadratic stake weighted cluster selection

Marlinctl

- Added beacon and relay_eth to v2 ctl
- Added config editing commands like reset, diff, modify, apply

- Added command to show config
- Enable users to recreate or restart resources
- Modularized command tree to maximize code reuse

Build automation

- Did a v2 rewrite to match marlinctl conventions
- New artifacts repository for prebuilt binaries
- Multiple release channels
- New metadata repository with release information

Staking

- Subgraph for the graph covering the staking contracts

Audits

- To ensure security, Marlin smart contracts were audited by Peckshield, Certik and Knowsec.
- POND and MPond Tokens contracts, Flowmint contracts and MPond<-->POND Bridge were audited by Certik and Knowsec.
- Staking contracts were audited by Peckshield.

Misc

- Reliable log processor for parsing log files, sending them through processing pipelines and storing events in a SQL db
- Governance alerting bot to send alerts on any key events in the governance contracts
- APY simulations based on propagation delay data

December 2020

Flowmint

- Developed a stakedrop website for users to bond their stakes and participate in Flowmint
- Built stakedrop backends for various chains
- Built a monitoring setup to alert on issues
- Wrote devops scripts for managing Flowmint infra
- Will be open-sourcing with details published in a separate article

Marlinctl

- Add a replace command so users don’t have to explicitly destroy and create

- Add a logs command so users can directly tail logs using marlinctl

- Begin v2 rewrite to solve fundamental issues with the original marlinctl, more info on our blog here
- Track resources in a state file
- Semantic versioning based updates

OpenWeaver

- Add support for different attesters in clients
- Add a signature based attester
- Add a generic length prefixed attester
- Deterministic identity for the near gateway so it can be used in automation scripts

Deterministic identity for the near gateway

- Add a bridge for the dot gateway
- Standardize port allocation so there are no clashes
- Support multiple near nodes using the same gateway
- Support old handshake versions in the near gateway
- Add iris bridge for use with the TM connector
- Gateways now send to five clusters chosen randomly

Staking

- Wrote staking contracts to reward cluster operators for relaying messages
- Developed a staking frontend where users can stake/delegate and cluster operators can manage their cluster parameters

November 2020

Integrations

- Developed a Tendermint gateway to integrate with Tendermint based chains like Iris and Cosmos
- Developed a polkadot gateway

Marlinctl

Added versioning support to run specific versions of components

- Added default values for parameters for ease of use
- Prints command status after most commands to check if it worked fine or not
- Added dot gateway support
- Added iris gateway support
- Added near gateway support

Devops

- Developed CI scripts to easily build binaries for various components

OpenWeaver

- Propagate make parallelism properly, can now be built on low resource machines

Stakedrop

- Developed contracts for the stakedrop

Community updates and posts you might have missed

- Partnered with StaFi to integrate Marlin’s layer-0 scaling protocol and creating liquid staking derivatives of our network token POND.

- POND is trading on Uniswap, Huobi and many others exchanges. CoinMarketCap has the full list.

- Participation by DOT stakers and validators in Marlin FlowMint has reached record highs with +$339m in total DOT bonded and +100 validators.

- Spoke about Marlin's incentivized network layer propagation, its role in solving networking bottlenecks for blockchains & how Marlin Cache accelerates DApp queries for DeFi at the Korea Blockchain Week 2020.

- Introduced the next version of marlinctl based on feedback from Eggnet participants.

- Opened the bridge and released a tutorial on how to convert POND to MPond for those looking to operate Marlin nodes in the Larvanet.

- Deployed the MPond and POND token contracts

- Introduced MPond and POND, the Marlin Network Tokens

- Announced FlowMint, a cross-chain stakedrop where 20% of the genesis supply of the Marlin token MPond will be distributed to different blockchain communities over the next 24 months. FlowMint currently supports Binance Smart Chain, Cosmos, Fantom, IRISnet, Matic Network, NEAR Protocol and Polkadot.

- Concluded our eggnet with 1100 nodes participating at its peak and announced larvanet.

- Spoke to the Paris Blockchain Week Summit 2020 about the role of an efficient and secure network layer in building scalable public and enterprise blockchains.

- Can centralized relay networks scale blockchains at layer-0? We explore how it sets itself up for double spends, 51% attacks & censorship while providing insights into the design trajectory of Marlin's chain-agnostic scaling protocol in this post.

- Explore how OpenWeaver's low-latency communication can help you make the most out of your DeFi trades in “Farming Underground: Flood OpenWeaver, Milk DeFi”

Lots more in store for the rest of the year! Stay tuned in!

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