testnet-1.2 — The One With Protobuf

Includes many improvements and new features:

• Changed our serialization format from FlatBuffers to ProtoBuf, which is more standard and robust
• Revamped node synchronization process to make it more reliable and performant
• Implemented a novel strategy for preventing replay attacks in case of hard forks (nodes with incompatible protocol constants will refuse to peer with each other)
• Rewrote our TCP codec to support longer messages (bigger blocks, basically 😏)
• The logic for enabling mining once the node is synced is now smarter than ever
• Many dependencies have been upgraded to more stable versions
• You can now customize the synchronization period of your own node
• Started to build the witnet-wallet Rust module, which will act as the backend for Sheikah, our desktop wallet app. This will also make it super easy for anyone to write their own client apps (wallets, block explorers, etc)

testnet-1.1

General stability improvement.

testnet-1 — The First One (aka "The One On The Boat")

The testnet that is now live showcases the core features of the Witnet protocol and its blockchain as depicted in the Witnet whitepaper. Namely, it allows for decentralized and trustless retrieval, aggregation and consensus-building around datapoints from multiple online sources by using a game theoretic scheme that creates incentives for a subset of nodes in the network elected through a cryptographic sortition algorithm to perform such tasks without tampering with the data.

This testnet, which is already live and publicly available for anyone to join, is conceived as a sandbox for proving the robustness of the protocol and experimenting addition of new features.

In our road to to taking Witnet into the mainnet stage, we will be making subsequent releases of the testnet. This will allow us to keep the current pace of innovation and ship radical improvements without having to deal with backwards compatibility.