Week in Dfinity Global R&D Recap for November 2, 2022
Today Dfinity held their monthly Global R&D Recap. Below is a recap of the event.
- Internet Identity canisters were moved to subnets.
- 32gb of stable memory added to all canisters.
- Updated public roadmap at http://internetcomputer.org/roadmap
The #InternetComputer ecosystem continues to grow with public resources available. Anyone can contribute and the website has new updates. http://wiki.internetcomputer.org
http://github.com/dfinity/portal
The coming month has some big conferences which @dfinity will be attending including Token2049 in London.
Team members from many #IC ecosystem projects will be attending Token2049 in London also
Many @dfinity team members will also be attending Token2049 event in London.
A sustainability report was published recently, and @dfinity is ranked as the most sustainable and green blockchain.
The sustainability report commissioned arose out of a community proposal #55487.
The current energy consumption of the #IC is less than 100 US households annually. The carbon footprint is less than 275 tons of CO2 per year. An excellent number.
How does the #IC compare to other blockchains? It's 25x lower than the nearest competitor and 6000x lower than Cardano.
The #Internetcomputer sustainability is 350,000,000x lower than bitcoin The goal and design intent of the Internet Computer was clearly achieved by delivering significantly lower emissions than everyone else.
Two recent motion proposal passed and @dfinity foundation voted yes on Spam Prevention and NNS treasury. Details are explained on the intent of Dfinity foundation and goal of fostering dialogue with community.
The next demo of the global R&D meeting is covering rotation of IDKG encryption keys + ECDSA key resharing that the foundation is focusing on and will release soon. This will enable more nodes, shuffle of nodes, and SEV-SNP
What is rotation of IDKG encryption keys? It is a encryption technique which prevents corruption of keys, where no single party knows the full key.
Any set of keys is only used for a short period of time which increases security and gives adversaries less time to steal. Nodes can easily generate and update rotation of IDKG keys. Work is ongoing on this and should be completed soon.
The next topic on the agenda is what @dfinity is doing in the big data space. - Work to allow bigger and faster canisters. - How to make larger canisters easier to use.
How do canisters on the #internetcomputer store data?
A canister has two forms of memory: main memory, and stable memory.
- Main memory is fixed and can't grow.
- Stable memory can grow. Stores data independent of compiler.
Currently a canisters memory was increase from 8gb to 32gb, and a subnet has 350gb of memory. In the future the goal is to reach 1TB.
What are the benefits of vertical scaling vs horizontal? Easier to manage, upgrade, and faster. Enabling large applications.
What does the future hold for canister memory? WASM-native stable memory to increase speed, and further memory size increases.
The next topic for the Global R&D meeting is relating to SNS Updates. A highly anticipated demo and feature.
On the dashboard you can see the two subnets which will manage the SNS canisters. Proposals where recently approved and blessed with the approved SNS wasms. "Governance, root, index, archive, a few more.
Users can interact with SNS through a command line tool and initialize the SNS. A new topic was added to the NNS app. Now every neuron can follow "SNS and Community Fund". For related proposals.
What is SNS-1? Stay tuned more will be released soon. It's a test to make sure the entire system operates as planned. Anyone can join, it will be a fun and engaging experience to make history, and learn how the entire system works.
The next demo topic for today's Global R&D Deterministic Time Slicing (DTS), supports long running messages. #internetcomputer Prior to DTS, If execution is long running, it delays processing of next block, and reduces block rate = bad for latency and progress. Limit imposed
There is an inherent Tradeoff between instruction limit and blockrate. DTS goal is to remove this tension, by allowing long running instructions without limiting block rate by slicing into small chunks pausing, and resuming in next block.
With DTS enabled, block rate remains steady, despite longer running messages. DTS has already been rolled out for some messages, and will be added to more message types soon. Congratulations to everyone who achieved this milestone.
Motoko Developer Experience is next topic on Global R&D agenda. Motoko is an official smart contract language for the #IC, emphasizing reliability over speed. With the recent VS Code Extension, install it and improve your coding experience. Highlighting, importing, and more!
Final demo is @Astrox_Network the first team to receive a grant from @dfinity, won global hackathon, and are presenting their new wallet solution.
Demo of a Token Swap on Desktop Uniswap, from Mobile wallet, sign transaction from #IC Canister, and broadcast to Ethereum.