Roadmap

Zold is an experimental community-driven project. It has a very ambitious technical roadmap. Join us in Telegram to make this plan real.

This is our current technical focus (most urgent and critical are at the top):

  • Zold-Stress doesn’t demonstrate high-speed results; we have to investigate what’s going on and what need to be fixed.

  • Large Traffic: we send wallet content too frequently between nodes, while it’s possible to optimize that and return “Not-Modified” for all FETCH operations, if they request the content they already have. We may also want to delivery multiple wallets in one HTTP request (“packaged delivery”) and delivery partial content.

  • No SSL: nodes still communicate via an open and insecure HTTP protocol. This is a pretty serious threat, we have to start using HTTPS.

  • Database: currently Zold node software keeps wallet data in files, which makes it difficult to manage and slow. Would be great to introduce a database-backed persistence layer, with SQLite, for example.

  • Windows: at the moment our software doesn’t run on Windows platform, and it’s only sad. We have to make sure that our nodes run on Windows.

History:

25-Mar-19:
Security problems solved, --baseline, --legacy, --trusted, and --depth parameters introduced, which made sure that we are not afraid of 51% attack anymore. However, we seriously depend on master nodes, and this is the problem to be fixed in the future. We may also want to get rid of scores (proof-of-work) and move to proof-of-availability, which has to be invented and implemented.

6-Feb-19:
Queue Overflow problem is gone. The amount of wallets “in process” was growing in some nodes sometimes; this didn’t sound like a valid behavior and most likely meant some dead loops. Indeed, there were duplicate PUSH operations accomplished by most nodes. The problem has been fixed.

20-Jan-19:
Memory leakage has been fixed. Thanks to that the entire network is stable now. Server software runs without interruption for days. This was a bug (or a feature) in Ruby, but we weren’t able to find it for a few months.

25-Dec-18:
--tolerate-edges introduced to increase security; --tolerate-quorum introduced to increase security; legacy wallet content to prohibit overwrites in 24 hours; --shallow merge introduced; “Hungry” wallets added, to improve wallets distribution mechanism; On-demand wallet content delivery to optimize traffic; Garbage collection introduced to remove empty and old wallets; repo JSON attribute added to see the difference between Zold implementations; Score strength increased to 8.

15-Nov-18:
Zold-stress, a stress-test automated command like toolkit released. Score calculating code moved to its own repository zold-score, and C/C++ implementation introduced. Node aliases introduced in #249. HTTP requests performance improved in #176. Reboot mechanism is connected to the RubyGems website, in #181.

30-Jul-18:
#412: Scores are being calculated in a separate process, which makes HTTP front-end a few times faster (but still pretty slow).

22-Jul-18:
#399: PUSH, PULL, and UPDATE are multi-threaded now, which makes them much faster than before.

14-Jul-18:
#402: Critical bugs with nodes connectivity were fixed, the network is stable (over 70 nodes).

8-Jul-18:
This blog has been started and the first article has been published.

2-Jul-18:
The first version of the Green Paper has been published.

16-Jun-18:
We started to recruit Ruby developers on StackOverflow, to build a team.

28-May-18:
The first transaction has been sent.

20-May-18
The first version of the White Paper has been published.

12-May-18:
Version 0.1 has been released to RubyGems.

29-Jan-18:
The idea was born. It became obvious that having our own cryptocurrency would be benefitial for Zerocracy.