Things move fast at Komodo Platform. That’s why the Komodo team has decided to release a weekly briefing to cover all of the progress the Dev Team is making. This series of posts is called the Tech Tuesday Updates.
In case you’ve missed a previous edition and want to catch up, you can find all the previous Tech Tuesday updates here.
Agnostic blockchain security: an in-depth analysis of delayed proof of work
This is a must read facts and myths about dPoW for anyone with technical understandings of blockchain technology.
The answer to "Satoshi's Shotgun" (aka spam attacks) for proof of stake chains is codenamed "ram staker"
When proof of stake consensus was being developed (and tested) before release, one of the notary node operators demonstrated an attack which amongst testers in the community is referred to as the dwy attack. More recently and more famously, the same attack type is called Satoshi's Shotgun.
Two mechanisms are being tested by #kmdlabs in discord. One staking method called “ram staker” loads the wallets unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) into RAM and the staking works on this RAM based UTXO store (array), so any spamming on the wallet itself does not affect the staking UTXOs directly from the wallet being spammed (and therefore slowed down) to claim a block. The ram staker expires after a time, currently 10 minutes. No information was sought for 10 minute expiry.
The other mitigation to satoshi’s shotgun (or dwy attack) is to put a wallet into “lock down” mode - once a wallet has received the funding, it can be set to never accept transactions.
Community Portal News
One of the notary node operators referred me to the Genesis Framework for WordPress. It took me about 15 minutes of perusing the documentation to decide to commit to the purchase. Some testing of a beta community portal for the Komodo Ecosystem with WordPress has stagnated because of the Komodo Rebrand, pulling more pieces together for the blockchain starter kit and also with the unifying blockchain technology of the Sapling upgrade that just took place.
This is what the community portal test looks like at the moment using unstylized fonts et cetera:
The coolest feature is the login is handled by the discourse community forum and how we began discussing ways for the forum to be used as a communications tool in an asynchronous manner. The community site was originally a notary pledge for election, but it is something the Komodo marketing team would like to steer for the time being to maximize community involvement.
Some ways for community involvement revolve around a community based coin - for games, for testing - online portal integration and social integration. This is all somewhere in the pipeline, just not at the front. With other technologies like Komodo's Custom Consensus framework and partnerships to cultivate, the community portal has been put on hold - for another portal... for developers! (Not using WordPress as the integration of web into blockchain requires a different set of tools)
Ecosystem: Verus & zCash Sapling upgrades activated successfully - Thank You
The long list of people/groups to thank:
- James Lee (jl777) for being Gaudi-esque in Komodo’s blockchain architecture and being lead developer through the upgrade process
- Members of the Komodo team for testing at a frenetic pace to make sure the biggest upgrade to Komodo blockchain projects went to plan
- The team members (Angelina & Shossain) who co-ordinated with mining pool operators and exchanges in updating their infrastructure
- Exchanges for making sure users coins were always safe
- Mining pool operators for upgrading their infrastructure and monitoring their services with a keen eye
- The Agama wallet contributors, especially lead developer Petr B (pbca26), and testers (Jonathan, Hermes & Nabob) for continuing to release new helpful features which enable users to keep using KMD whilst third party systems continue their upgrade cycles
- The engineering talent in the community that maintain explorers for people to visually verify transactions and block data
- Blockchain projects that chose Komodo technology and have engaged with the community
- Notary Node operators for displaying professionalism and dedication to securely updating the network
- Community for being patient during this mother-of-all upgrades!! Arguably the biggest in the public blockchain industry to date.
Integrating Komodo blockchain technology into your website or web app
This request came late, and time has run out. The way to do it is through network programming, TCP connections just like hitting a REST API.
Connecting to Komodo from your program is simply connecting to http://localhost:7771
Connecting from a browser requires an extra step to get around CORS compliance, so we need to proxy our requests.
For proof of concept phases, using existing libraries will expedite your development process. For production, we recommend using native libraries with a smaller list of dependencies to reduce the attack surface area.
Note: The KMDLABS discord channel (#kmdlabs) is dedicated to testing innovations, upgrades, new features and is a great way to get the necessary skills and knowledge for being a competent Notary Node operator.
Interested in GUI dApps development? Discord's #cc_gui channel will be where most of the work will take place in the coming weeks.
Thank you Komodo (& ecosystem) developers, what an exciting week!