Development Roadmap – August 12, 2019

In the spirit of an update:

Technical Development:

The Saito network has shown excellent stability since our TESTNET upgrade about a month ago. We have continued to work to eliminate problems as they have surfaced and have eliminated the “ghost block” phenomenon. Improvements to how browsers handle websockets and keep track of transactions they have already sent (but not yet seen confirmed) have also delivered a significant improvement to the stability of games in the Saito Arcade. Performance is particularly better in China, where websockets are often dropped by the Great Firewall.

Additional work has also gone into expanding and debugging the roster of blockchain games we have available on the Saito Arcade. There are now cooperative as well as competitive games available for play, and we’re working on expanding the Saito Game Engine to support deck-management techniques needed in card games like poker and hearts. As gaming is currently driving the majority of transaction volume, application development work will continue to focus on improving Arcade stability and possibly expanding the set of available games.

With that said, our core focus with software development has shifted from maintaining the current javascript client to building the next version of our Core software client, which is being written in RUST. We will be updating with benchmarks in the future, but initial tests suggest that the introduction of multi-threading on transaction validation, using shared memory to eliminate significant amounts of data-copying, and shifting to binary file formats to avoid the need to parse and handle JSON will give this next version of Saito roughly an order of magnitude increase on throughput capacity compared to our current javascript version.

Business Development

We have several partnerships underway that we should be able to comment on more publicly in the future, and are continuing to make progress with IP and patent work generally. Much of this latter work involves work on techniques to increase the security of Saito-class networks during periods of relatively low transaction volume, such as immediately on the launch of the MAINNET network.

How to Help

One of the real challenges Saito has is getting people to understand the underlying economic problems that Saito solves. Most people in the blockchain space do not understand that the technical challenges affecting scaling in POW and POS networks are caused by collective action problems (market failures) and thus cannot be fixed by the introduction of higher-level markets. If you’re new to the Saito world and looking for a way to help, reach out — we’d love to work with others on ways to help communicate these problems (and their solutions) to fellow developers and other projects in the space.

Thanks for reading!