Network Migration Update – December 3, 2021

The end of November marked our target for getting Rust Consensus running on our network. While technical folks can follow our dev channels and get a close view of what is happening, we wanted to share an update for those who are non-technical but still curious.

For the last several days, our Rust Consensus network has been running in parallel with our public-facing gaming network. We are testing the ability of clients on the network to maintain consensus with module-generated traffic and gameplay. At the moment all of the clients on the network are operating as full-nodes and consuming and publishing full blocks.

As of this morning, everything is behaving a lot like the public network, although we are obviously continuing to find bugs and release patches. We have seen some edge-case bugs around the distribution of golden tickets, the validation of merkle-roots, and the relaying and distribution of blocks that are transmitted wildly out-of-sequence. The introduction of binary block and transaction formats has led to some minor serialization issues as well. All of these issues are manageable and expected.

We expect to be running this network for another week or so before updating the public network that is supporting active gameplay. In order to do that, we need to see chain re-organizations, automatic transaction rebroadcasting and other routing activities working smoothly in a live environment.

In general, we are pleased to share news that our migration is underway and encourage those who want a deeper view of our software development processes to join our dev channels or track developments on Github. As long as there are not significant problems with our clients maintaining consensus we expect to switch our public-facing infrastructure to run on our new clients sometime next week.