Hedera Engineering Insights | August 2020
TA4 E41 NBF UBD3 YHHR7 fa1e51d38172 512
Aug 31, 2020
by Brady Gentile
Director of Marketing, Web3 Application Ecosystems

Note: the hashgraph platform has been open sourced (Apache License 2.0) as of 5 August 2022. Read more here: hashgraph/swirlds-open-review: Swirlds Hashgraph Platform code for Open Review. See the LICENSE.md file for the Hashgraph Open Review License. (github.com)

Hedera just hosted its second monthly “Engineering Insights” webinar, presented by Donald Thibeau, Director of Product Management, and Brady Gentile, Product Marketing, and attended by members of the Hedera developer community.

The Engineering Insights series is a monthly virtual event where members of the developer community come together to learn and discuss the latest updates at Hedera. Each event features a presentation from Hedera Engineering and Product leadership about the latest features, functionality, developer updates, and direction of the product roadmap.

In addition to an initial presentation at each webinar’s onset, this virtual event is geared towards community members engaging in informal technical discussion. We encourage members of the Hedera community to take this time to ask relevant questions with technical experts on the Hedera team.

The next Hedera Engineering Insights webinar will take place on Thursday, September 24th, 2020. Everyone with a Hedera Portal profile for testnet will receive an email with information on how to register, or follow us on Twitter at @hashgraph.

Recap of Hedera Engineering Insights | August 2020

Overview of the v0.7.0 release & enhancements

Purpose of the v0.7.0 release was about delivering components needed in order to reach open review of the hashgraph codebase. It also is helping move mirror node strategy into its next phase, such as moving towards full mirror node operation and out of beta, and implementing bug fixes, updates, and improvements on the services and platform layer.

Release notes and details on the enhancements for v0.7.0 can be found here: https://github.com/hashgraph/hedera-services/releases/tag/v0.7.0-rc3

Bug Bounty Program Details

We welcome members of the Hedera developer community to review and contribute to the Hedera network services codebase.

If you find a non-sensitive bug or issue in any of the Hedera network services code, you can open a new issue to report it or submit a pull request to fix the bug yourself from within the network services GitHub repo. It’s important to the team that pull requests are very specific in scope and include a detailed description of what’s being committed.

If you've found a highly sensitive bug, we've created a bug bounty program which rewards researchers in hbars and encourages the discovery and reporting of serious vulnerabilities. Please send an email to [email protected] with a highly detailed description of what you’ve found. Hedera has set a period of three to six months to implement bug fixes. After we’ve fixed it, we’ll publicly announce the finder (unless you want to remain anonymous).

If you have a new feature request that you’d like to see as part of the Hedera services codebase, the Hedera improvement proposal (HIP) program continues to be open and we strongly recommend submitting your feature request there. The Hedera engineering team may not be able to respond to every community contribution, but we expect to learn and get better at accommodating these requests over time.

Live Q&A with Hedera Community Members

  1. What was the whole fungible token service project about?

Our objective for tokenization is to support a multitude of token issuance models. The first was to use Solididty smart contracts. The second was to use tokenization via the Hedera Consensus Services — this allows a high-level of performance and control of who operates the token network, accessibility, and representation (fungible or non-fungible). We are exploring more in terms of native tokenization — you may have seen some content that came out on that topic and we’re hoping to learn from our community about and identify what requirements are needed to enable tokenizations beyond the initial two services.

  1. Is the Rust/C SDK still supported? What about an SDK targeting iOS? Is that assumed to be a community-delivered SDK?

The Rust/C SDK is a community supported SDK. We’re also looking to support SDKs that will support iOS. We’re also evaluating things like React Native support in the SDKs, as well.

  1. What is the purpose of zero-stake nodes (read-only)?

It’s the next iteration of moving towards full mirror nodes — the information can be found in the enhancements and release notes at the link above.

  1. What is the state of Coinbase rosetta implementation?

Rosetta is an open source model that defines a simple set of API’s exchanges use to interface with networks in a standardized way. We’ve been exploring how to align our mirror node APIs to that rosetta implementation as a standard exchange-agnostic way to support a common set of functions.

  1. When do you think Staking would be available in the mainnet? Any rough ETA?

That is something that we’re likely looking at in terms of next year — we don’t have a rough ETA on when that will be; it’s dependent on a number of things we’ve been building and implementing to the services codebase over the past couple releases.

  1. What is Hedera doing in DeFi?

Our hope is that through users and developers like yourselves, DeFi use cases can be realized. Organizations like hashing systems, who’s been exploring models like hbars on different networks in the form of whbar. We see these projects as a gateway into the broader decentralized finance ecosystem.

  1. Is there a timeline for non-council nodes?

There is not currently a timeline for non-council nodes. It’s at the discretion of the council and when that decision gets made, that’s when we’d talk about the process of non-council node operations.

  1. Any collaborations with Polkadot/ Substrate framework?

Obviously those are two different parts of the stack — we believe substrate is a cool blockchain development framework and would love to support integration with HCS to that framework. It’s something that’s not directly being worked on now.

  1. Can you comment on recent testnet disruptions? Do you believe testnet is somewhat stable now?

The testnet as everyone knows gets code deployed to it in advance of the mainnet. Part of the reason is to determine what issues come to fruition when deployed to a large number of users. We saw bugs as part of this deployment over the past week or so, based on changes to the code itself; it’s been a great insight to help improve the stability of the code to prevent issues on the mainnet.

  1. How many Nodes are running on Hedera Hashgraph?

There are 13 nodes running on the Hedera mainnet — you can find network status for the previewnet, testnet, and mainnet at https://status.hedera.com/

  1. Can we get some insight to what % of the team is working on what right now?

The bulk of the team is working on the network services codebase. Portions of the team are working on the mirror node ecosystem and developer tools (SDKs, etc.). It’s hard to give exact percentages but those are the areas where our team is focused.

  1. Any updates on Hyperledger Avalon and TEEs (trusted execution environments)?

It hasn’t been an immediate focus because we haven’t seen a huge demand for those components in our technology. If this is of interest to you, please reach out to the Hedera team on Discord and provide some requirements of what it would take to support what you need.

  1. Progress about interoperability with DLT chains?

HCS currently integrates with permissioned frameworks (Hyperledger Fabric and R3’s Corda) — we think long-term this could be a path to easing interoperability between those private networks. We’ve been exploring interoperability with other chains from a token perspective, but it’s still early days and we don’t have much to share on that.

  1. What is the experience level of the team working on everything you are talking about?

It’s hard to estimate — as I’m sure many of our team members would say we have a rigorous interview process. The team consists of folks across a wide range of educational and business backgrounds.

  1. Is anyone building some type of generic appnet to support something like Self Sovereign Identity? I read Paul Madsen’s latest blog where he said an appnet is needed to do such things as resolve DIDs, check validity of Verifiable Claim, etc. Who will create the appnet(s)? Any early thoughts?

With the DID SDK, you can build a permissioned network which establishes credentials for a specific organization or network of organizations or people. That DID SDK is the best tool to get started building a generic self-sovereign identity network.

  1. There are v0.7.0 regressions that break the cost query feature in testnet (working in previewnet) — what is the plan for mainnet? Will 0.7.0 deploy to mainnet before this is figured out?

You can track the issue here: https://github.com/hashgraph/hedera-services/issues/472

  1. Which wallet and exchange is the most promising in your opinion? Which is going to offer more security and growth to users?

Hedera does not endorse or sponsor any wallet or exchange providers; you can find a list of known third-party wallets and exchanges here: https://www.hedera.com/buying-guide