2021-03-15 Engineering Update

[nearmax]

CORE

Node Interfaces

• Check out our tutorial on Indexer!
• “Missing Block” and “Unknown Block” errors are now not distinguishable, so we removed the “Missing Block” error;

Berry Pickers

• We merged a bunch of contract standards: Fungible Token, Metadata for Fungible Token, Storage Management;
• Check out contract review of Meta Staking Pool!

Contract Runtime

• We experimented with splitting contract execution and contract deserialization/loading into two parallel pipelines and achieved 3-4x speed on synthetic bench! Exciting!
• We experimented with abomonation and received some improvement, however it is waaaay too unsafe, as expected

Transaction Runtime

• We are working on adding extra limits to make our runtime more resilient to potential attack angles;
• We are also still working on adding versioning to various runtime structures to allow us easy future iterations on protocol improvements.

Chain

• We optimized our migration scripts to run faster;
• We closed a potential angle of attack on our dApp developers by adding limits to our nonces;

Network

• We reduced time spent on edge verification on our routing tables by 10x.

AURORA

Bridge

• Everyone was busy preparing for the bridge launch on the Mainnet – adding upgradability, NEP-141 migration, lots of small things and fixes that needed to be taken care of by a small team of 5 people.

EVM

• We finished refactoring and upgrading EVM contract, it now lives in aurora-is-near/aurora-engine;
• We tested time-locked EVM contract upgradability.