The state of Gossamer February

[P1sar]

The state of Gossamer February

Highlights

This cycle focused on enhancing the GRANDPA protocol and implementing various state transition logics critical for the JAM state. Key achievements include the implementation of the 'polite GRANDPA' mechanism, which improves peer scoring in the protocol, and the completion of the validator statistics state transition, which aggregates essential metrics for validators. Additionally, several subsystems were designed and implemented, including the Availability Recovery subsystem. Overall, the team has made significant strides in refining the architecture and functionality of the system, paving the way for future enhancements and stability improvements.

Development

Polkadot Storage

Timothy began working on the integration of the GRANDPA package into the existing Gossamer codebase. He also completed the design of the Authority Discovery module.

Diego started integrating the refactored db.Backend into our codebase.

Polkadot Parachain Protocol Implementation

Eclesio worked on research and design for GridTracker, which monitors the flow of messages and statements between validators according to GridTopology. He also completed the design of the Provisioner subsystem, responsible for providing necessary data to all potential block authors.

Axay focused on adding async backing and elastic scaling functionality to the existing Candidate Backing subsystem.

Kiril completed the design of the Availability Recovery subsystem and implemented GridTopology, which represents the network topology used for availability and bitfield distribution.

Freddy completed the Availability Bitfield Signing subsystem during this cycle.

JAM Protocol Implementation

Jimmy completed work on Service STF, service state serialization, accumulation state serialization, and the Reporting State Transition logic.

Product

Apart from our main activity, we've been conducting feasibility research on implementing the JAM Service SDK in Go. During our investigation, we've encountered a significant challenge: there is currently no existing or reliable way to compile Go for the RISC-V ISA, specifically the rv64ema variant.