Our Testnet Episode 11 is live!

The Episode 11 of the Testnet is bringing some BREAKING changes. Therefore, before going into the updates, please check the instructions below, since they are very important.

Instructions to follow for this Episode:

• We changed the format of addresses
• Instead of having a big part of the ledger in RAM everything is now in the disk.

Before proceding with the new installation, please create a ZIP with your former Massa installation and keep in a safe place the former files.

The first change implies that your addresses are not valid anymore and you need to recreate new ones. This modifications change a lot of things such as the pubkey of the node of the bootstrap list, the privk/pubk/address format so we advise you to REMOVE your directory, update your rust nightly version, and CLONE a new one.

• Follow the install doc : https://massa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/testnet/install.html
• All the doc has been moved here : https://massa.readthedocs.io/ the doc on Github is deprecated and will be removed at the next testnet.

If you have problems of compile with clang install the package with the following commands depending on your OS:

• Ubuntu 18: apt-get install libclang-10-dev
• Ubuntu 20+:apt-get install libclang-dev
• MacOs:brew install clang
• Windows:choco install llvm

If you have any questions we are here to answer in our dedicated Discord Channel.

Episode 11, latest updates:

The hardware requirements have not changed and are available here:

https://github.com/massalabs/massa/wiki/FAQ#what-are-the-hardware-requirements

Major changes introduced in TEST.11.0:

• New cryptographic algorithm and address format: We switched from sha256 to blake3 for hash algorithm and from secp256k1 to schnorr for signature. Massa is the first blockchain that use blake3 and the performance compare to sha256 are way better. This should help us to reach our goals of scalability. We also add a “A” before each address so that there will be no confusion between pubk/privk and addresses
• Ledger stored on disk: in testnet 10 the ledger of smart contracts was stored in the RAM and so if it became too big than your node will consume a lot of RAM. We now moved it to the disk. It should reduce the usage of your RAM especially when we will have more smart-contract on the testnet
• Streaming Bootstrap: When you want to connect to the network you need to bootstrap to be up-to-date about the ledger of the network. In testnet 10, the whole ledger was sent in one batch during the bootstrap that could lead the packet to be really heavy and make the bootstrap process more difficult. That’s why you had node with minimal connection that couldn’t bootstrap at the end of the testnet. Now the ledger is sent by batch of 1MB.

Full changelog: https://github.com/massalabs/massa/releases

Conclusion of the Episode 10, figures:

• Nodes: 6000+
• Transaction Throughput: 1850 tx/s
• Block Throughput: 1.77 b/s

And our community figures:

• 9 non-official communities (Russian speaking, French, Turkish, Spanish, German, Indonesian, Chinese)
• 3600+ followers on Telegram
• 5250+ followers on Twitter
• 19000+ members on Discord
• 350+ followers on Medium
• 350+ registered for our future newsletters
• 110+ followers on Reddit

Other News:

• From the 2nd week of June: Aurélien, Damir and Vincent will animate meetups for developers and builders from the community.
• June 25: Massa will be a Sponsor of the CoinAcademy IRL event in Paris.

• In July: various events are about to be held, with surprises for the Community (Ethcc is in July in Paris, isn’t it?).
• In August: actions and events allowing participation of the community will be launched, with possible rewards.

Useful Links about Massa:

• Testnet explorer: massa.net/testnet
• Tutorials: https://massa.readthedocs.io/
• Source code: github.com/massalabs/massa
• Telegram: t.me/massanetwork
• Discord: discord.com/invite/TnsJQzXkRN
• Reddit: reddit.com/r/massa/
• Youtube: youtube.com/channel/UChVfdvYpn0eFk4B-T7TGmOg
• All releases & changelogs from all versions

With more than 6000 nodes running constantly and a majority of the nodes being routable during the Episode 10 of our Testnet, our network is already one of the most decentralized ones.