The PIVX network has launched its first development update for the month of October. There are many changes and fixes that came with it, but most noticeable are the Core Wallet, UI, Cold Staking and POS protocol updates. We will be summarizing the patch notes and give you all the information you need in this article.
Week 1, October 2019 Update in Detail
The changes that we will be covering below represent the amount of development work done between the last update at the end of August, up to 1st October. This is approximate of five weeks’ worth of work and from the looks of it, the PIVX team can boast with very high activity. Let’s go through each major change in detail.
Core Wallet Update – v3.4
On 27th August, there was a major update released to the network containing the mandatory release of the PIVX Core wallet version 3.4.0. It contained the new Stake Modifier v2 along with PoS changes that will rectify any issues and possible stake grinding.
Cold Staking Entered Testing Phase
The all-new Cold Staking is being put through its paces in a separate testnet that is being under maintenance by the core developers. From the reports we understand that it is going smoothly along with some block explorer proofs. This change will bring a wider field of functionality for staking PIVX and also an increase in the security without the need to have coins on an online wallet.
4.0 UI Changes
The new UI update will be included in the next major wallet release, which took around 7 months of work. The new UI merger is designed and coded on top of the QT framework, making it unique just for PIVX. The amount of dedication and work included is over 400 files changed, 373 commits involved and over 50 thousand lines of code added.
PoS Time v2 Protocol Update
One of the core developers, random-zebra, has been working on a better PoS protocol that is meant for use for PIVX. This includes difficulty algorithm changes and removal of the legacy Proof of Work code engagement in the network. This will bring more consistent block times, increased network security, a reduction in energy consumption, easier entry point in regard to hardware requirements, and fairer block distribution. Further information will be released in the future by the developers, once the update is ready.
GitHub Activity and Highlights
In this section, we would like to showcase the activity of PIVX and the team on GitHub. This way, you can see for yourself just how dedicated they are. A group of 7 developers have pushed 217 commits to master and 358 commits to all branches. Over 563 files have been changed, and 60,391 additions and 24,582 deletions have been made. Such high amounts of work mean that PIVX alone had more unique commits for the last 3 months than Ethereum, Monero, Decred, Waves, DASH, Zcash and Zcoin.
In total there are 29 pull requests that were merged, 12 new pull requests proposed, 9 issues closed, and 2 issues created. Below we would like to list the most notable ones:
- PR#936 – [zPiv] PublicCoinSpend v4 – Coin Randomness Schnorr Signature – submitted by core developer random.zebra is being reviewed. (Targeted for v4.0 release). This will allow spending of legacy zPIV v1 back to PIV.
- PR#954 – [GUI] [Model] New Wallet UI – submitted by core developer furszy has been merged. (Targeted for v4.0 release). This will be a brand-new UI/UX wallet, that is designed with the collaboration of Krubit UI and UX designers. It will be written from scratch in QT by the core dev furszy and the front-end developers of Krubit.
- PR #955 – [Core][Script][Wallet][RPC][Tests] Cold Staking – submitted by core developer random.zebra is being reviewed / worked on. (Targeted for v4.0 release). This is a new customized staking feature, that will allow a mutually agreed full-node hot wallet to stake coins from a delegated address to stake from. Stakers will have better security, while still requiring a full node online wallet.
- PR #956 – [Core][Qt] Add HD Wallet support – submitted by community developer akshaynexus is being reviewed / worked on. (Targeted for v4.0 release)
- PR #968 – [Staking] Add Multi-Split functionality to stake output splitting – has been submitted by community developer CaveSpectre11 and is being reviewed / worked on. (Targeted for v4.0 release). This change will make staking inputs split into 2 or more, based on the stake split threshold, instead of just splitting into half no matter what.
- PR #1002 – [WIP][PoS] Time Protocol v2 – submitted by core developer random.zebra is being reviewed / worked on. (Targeted for v4.0 release). This will be the major step forward for the network in improving the current PoS protocol. In the future, more predictable and consistent block times will be a standard.
- PR #1033 – [WIP][GUI][Model][Wallet] Cold staking UI. – submitted by core developer furszy is being reviewed/worked on. This will provide the necessary interface elements and backend connections for Cold Staking and its functionality, which will be included in update 4.0.
Final Thoughts
The PIVX development team have been “busy bees” this year. The project is really standing out among its competitors with very high activity, no matter in what state the cryptocurrency market is. The new updates along with the Cold Staking will be a steppingstone for PIVX in their long-term development plans and in general the future of the network.