Over the past several months, a number of zocteam members took time away from the project to focus on work, family and life in general. Although progress in the project did slow over the summertime it by no means stalled completely. Most zocteam members now have renewed availability to work on advancing the project, and so renews our Project Update series. This Project Update will give a cursory overview of what has been occurring since our last update all the way back in June.
Community Updates
- Admittedly, this is the area of the project in which we have been most remiss over these past few months, and the timing for this was unfortunate given the closure of all ZOC markets during this period.
- But the good news is there is good news on this front! So far, the ZOC markets on Graviex, Crex24 and our newest exchange platform - Northern Exchange - have all reopened, with deposits and withdrawals enabled.
- The ZOC wallet at CryptalDash remains in maintenance as of this writing, but they assure us that they are working towards re-enabling ZOC deposits and withdrawals there too any day now.
- Some info about our newest exchange partner, Northern Exchange… Northern Exchange opened recently on September 5. It is operated by the Northern crypto community (Discord link here). At this time, it is a small, low-volume exchange, but we here at 01coin are really excited about it and here's why:
- Northern Exchange offers direct fiat-to-ZOC gateway on-ramps for all sorts of currencies via PayPal. You can now buy ZOC directly with USD, EUR, YEN, CAD, AUS, and RUR. As the exchange matures, this easy access to ZOC will no doubt prove to be especially convenient for users of 01VPS.net.
You can now buy ZOC directly with fiat at Northern Exchange
Wallet and Core Development
- Three 01coin wallet versions have been released since our last project update, and the latest version is now 0.12.3.7. This is an important release, and if you have not updated yet, you can grab it from here.
- As you might recall, the zocteam introduced IPv6 masternodes with the release of v0.12.3.5 in July in response to popular demand from the community. This had some unintended consequences. Nodes were commonly becoming stuck during mnsync, and fake nodes and duplicate addresses were showing as ENABLED on the masternode network, so something had to be done to address these bugs and challenges.
- In September, we released 01coin v0.12.3.6, which introduced several important improvements.
- The mnsync processing was adjusted and fixed to eliminate the stall-out problem.
- Cointype features were improved to enable easier integration for potential future software and hardware wallets.
- So called "shark miners" were blocked from being able to alter their wallet code and earn 100% of the block reward instead of sharing with masternodes. Furthermore, any block reward that is not shared with a masternode instantly becomes unspendable; essentially insta-burned.
- The masternode network now checks for and bans duplicate IP addresses as well as masternodes that do not respond to any kind of network request such as block reward voting, InstaSend, etc. As such, any masternode that cannot be verified by the network - a trait common among so-called "fake nodes" - is banned.
- A lot of general code cleanup and removal thanks to enforcing protocol version 70211. The core is no longer backwards-compatible with previous protocol versions. Wallets older than 0.12.3.6 will no longer be able to connect to the main chain.
- Despite these improvements, v0.12.3.6 failed to address one critical issue: since introducing IPv6 masternodes in 0.12.3.5, the 01coin network had a tendency to split due to the low frequency of intercommunication between IPv4 and IPv6 nodes. This chainsplit issue is, in fact, what forced the zocteam to close all ZOC markets to ensure nobody lost coins as a result of attempting to transact across chains.
- The zocteam attempted to resolve this in v0.12.3.7 with a novel chain "auto-healing" function developed with original core code exclusive to 01coin. Wallets have two methods with which they can attempt to revert to the "correct" chain in the event of a split.
- First, the wallet is able to detect if the node's local copy of the blockchain has become stuck (after 10 hours of no new blocks processed), will reindex back to a point in time one day earlier and start again.
- Second, the wallet will reindex to a target block known to exist on the longest available chain whenever it detects a verified node on a substantially higher block height. In this way, nodes will all aim to keep themselves on the same chain, with the most trusted nodes on the network leading the way.
- As you might imagine, a great deal of original blockchain development work has gone into these improvements. What this process has revealed, more than anything, is that 01coin has outgrown the Dash 0.12 codebase upon which it is based, particularly since the next major core development goal for the project is the implementation of our proposed governance solution.
- As such, work has begun on a massive code merge to bring 01coin up-to-date with the latest Dash 0.14 core. This is no simple task and will take considerable time to implement properly, however, it is the all-important next step towards governance.
Ancillary Services Development
During the period when chainsplits were rampant throughout the 01coin network, we found you can never really have too many block explorers. In addition to our official block explorer here, and our backup block explorers here and here, we now have a fourth available at https://openchains.info/coin/01coin/blocks.
Preview of the new 01coin block explorer at Open Chains
01VPS.net Updates
- Here's where things get interesting. If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook (which you really should), you might recall seeing this tweet float across your feed back in September:
Attention all 01VPS.net users: We will be undergoing scheduled maintenance across all of our datacentres from September 7 to 10. We will keep you updated throughout the maintenance period here: https://discord.gg/wq5xD6M
Thank you for your understanding. pic.twitter.com/9eEJJn8adg- 01coin Community (@01CoinTeam) September 3, 2019
- Obviously, that maintenance never took place. For a variety of factors, 01VPS.net has determined that it can no longer maintain a relationship with our current datacentre partner. As such, massive, sweeping changes are coming to 01VPS.net.
- 01VPS.net will soon be moving to a new datacentre in the US. Our current Canadian, British, French, German and Polish servers will all be decommissioned. Current users will have their VPS instances automatically migrated to the new datacentre, however, and this is important: everyone's IP addresses are going to change as a result of this move. That means, unfortunately, that you will have to reconfigure your masternode.conf files and restart your nodes.
- However, the plus side of this is that it will help 01VPS.net remain competitive in the evolving VPS market. Packages will essentially double in size in terms of available RAM.
- Plus, with the transition from OpenVZ to KVM, it means much better baremetal Linux support. Better baremetal support means standard kernels, so your software will always work as intended; it means standard OS images so you can use Ubuntu 18.04 or Debian 10, for example, which we couldn't before; it also means user-configurable swap files so you can add a bit of extra room in case your node starts to run out of memory.
- Lastly, this move will put 01VPS.net on the right trajectory towards reaching its ultimate goal of revenue sharing. Once operating costs are covered and our (rather sizeable) debts are paid, the goal is to eventually be able to share revenue generated by 01VPS.net with the community.
So concludes this Project Update. We've probably missed a lot of important things since it has been quite a while since our last update, so if you have any questions or feel we failed to mention something, please don't hesitate to reach out to us on any of our social networks:
Discord: https://discord.gg/wq5xD6M
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3457534
Twitter: https://twitter.com/01CoinTeam
Telegram: https://t.me/ZOCCoinOfficial
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/01CoinTeam
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/01coin/
Medium: https://medium.com/01coin-community-blog
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@zeroonecoin
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWpXI8H8JnJiiaalFM8e3FQ