Marlin Dev & Community Updates – September & October 2020

November 10, 2020 | Contributor

Here are the latest dev updates for last two months!

September 2020

As part of our multi-chain efforts, the ABCI usage was rewritten to be generic so different chains can plug in custom ABCIs.
Discovery and registry use cases were split in the beacon to allow them to have different access controls.
The relay and beacon executables were rewritten with structopt for a better cli experience.
Added support to use multiple beacons for discovery and registry.

October 2020

Address discovery was added to allow people to specify reward addresses for the testnet.
Beacons can now register with bootstrap servers to join the wider Marlin network.
Discovery and pubsub are both cluster aware and manage connections accordingly.
The send/recv syntax was unified across transports and CRTP scaffolds were added to make writing transports much easier.
A gateway for NEAR was built to enable support for relaying NEAR messages
Observing the need for a low latency caching system for dApps, we introduced Marlin Cache to accelerate dApps by improving their latencies. Check out our documentation for more information.
Integrated Marlin Cache with The Graph and Infura, significantly improving latencies.
Our workshop video shows why Marlin’s Cache is needed, how to integrate within 3 minutes, and a live demo showing how the Cache improves UX.
Completed the spawn-net where validators simply joined the network without any explicit promise of incentives. This provided us valuable feedback on incomplete documentation required to set up nodes, missing scripts required for installation, compiler version and OS specific errors.
Started off the eggnet, an extension of the spawn-net where we sought introductions to experienced validators. 400+ nodes joined by the end of October. Statistics are visible on our dashboard.
Introduced marlinctl to simplify the onboarding process and reduce difficulty in setting up nodes and running various components.