Roadmap Update Q4 2024

Koinos Community,

Back in October I shared with you the new Koinos Technical roadmap. If you have not had a chance to review it, you can do so our Medium blog as well as https://koinos.io/#roadmap. As 2024 comes to a close I want to give you an update on the roadmap and what we have planned for 2025.

As I mentioned in the original technical roadmap post, planning a roadmap is more of an art than a science and that has certainly been true the last couple of months. We had some reports of nodes halting. These reports were coming from community members, block producers, and business partners. We were seeing the same behavior on our nodes. Thankfully, due to running api.koinos.io and KoinosPro in Kubernetes with health checks, those nodes were automatically restarted, preventing any down time. Unfortunately, that was not the case with others and this led to regular down time of block producers and other services. We spent a considerable amount of time debugging the issue, finding several problems while doing so. We currently have a release candidate branch that has been promising. It has not been perfect, but we already have some final fixes that will allow the node to recover without needing manual intervention.

The two roadmap items that were slated to be completed by the end of 2024 are the KCS-4 upgrade for the KOIN and VHP contracts and Mempool v1.5. The previously mentioned work on p2p impacted both of these items. For the KCS-4 upgrade, we successfully deployed the updated contracts to the Harbinger testnet where they are currently running. This test used an expedited version of the mainnet governance process, which performs the same operations. The upgrade was successful and happened without any interruption of service and without nodes needing to upgrade or restart. Testing on Harbinger testnet has concluded and we are ready to create the proposal. However, we arrived at this point a couple of weeks later than expected and due to the month-long proposal process overlapping with the holidays, we decided to postpone the proposal until the beginning of January. This decision was made out of an abundance of caution. While we are confident of the success of the proposal, we did not want to place extra work on ourselves or our community during the holidays and want everyone to be able to enjoy some much deserved time off with their families!

With regards to Mempool v1.5, these changes were tightly coupled with the other p2p changes. Because of this, we needed to have the other p2p changes resolved before completing this work. As a reminder, this will update the Mempool and other microservices to be able to handle sequential transaction nonces. Currently, an account is only allowed a single transaction in the mempool at a time. For many users, this is not a problem. But it can be a problem when a user needs to make multiple transactions in quick succession or when a dApp has to batch many transactions at the same time. With these changes, they will be able to send all of the transactions at once, queuing in the mempool and being added to blocks in order. The primary changes were to the mempool, but touched the chain, block producer, and p2p microservices as well. In particular, p2p is important because transactions sent via gossip can be sent out of order. The p2p mircoservice needs to reorder transactions based on the nonce before adding them to the local mempool. It just so happens that the code that does this for blocks contained the aforementioned bugs and needed to be fixed before extending the capability to transactions. Testing is ongoing for these changes and is expected early Q1.

Coming up in 2025, we have the REST API v1.1 and the public snapshot service. We expect that both of these are still on track for Q1 of 2025. During my Thanksgiving holiday, I did some work on the REST API for fun and was able to complete a good amount of the requirements for v1.1. A couple more features need to be added and the entire update tested. The delays in 2024 likely push back this release to mid Q1 rather than early Q1 as we were hoping.

Thank you for taking the time to read this update. Steve, Ron and I are all excited about what 2025 has in store for Koinos. This is our first bull run and we cannot wait to show the world what Koinos offers them!