Golem GitHub Digest #13: Progressing faster with the help of the Golem community

What’s in store for this Digest?

Since the previous GitHub Digest (#12) we’ve been working hard on the next release and we hope to share more details about that with the Golem community in this GitHub Digest.

What’s been highest on our mind is that we had some unexpected payment issues encountered by our community in the initial patch release to the Beta 1 (v0.6.3) which meant that we needed to dive in and determine the cause of the issue. We’re also looking towards prioritizing new features we need to focus on for future major releases.

In parallel, we’ve been supporting Golem SLATE and ChessOnGolem on their road to porting their applications to be able to run on mainnet.

So, what’s in the Golem GitHub?

There's been thorough investigation into payment issues and, while there's a hotfix, a more permanent fix would almost certainly require a version that's not backwards compatible with the current version. Release candidate 2 (rc2) contained a hotfix for some of the payment issues.  A number of release candidates have been created since the patch release (0.6.3) with Release Candidate 5 being the latest.

The next release contains an update to the Golem Service Bus (GSB) to v0.4.4. The GSB is a message bus allowing Yagna services to communicate with one another. It consists of two software components: router (ya-sb-router) and client crate (ya-service-bus). The latest update of the GSB contains a number of improvements that handle reconnecting after network outages, making Yagna overall less sensitive to network related issues. This probably has the most benefit to helping providers, helping them stay more consistent online over a long period of time.

A handy feature for requestors that wasn’t created so far is an easy CLI command for entering GLM from Ethereum to ZkSync (layer 2). Up until now, a requestor would need to take tokens between the two layers manually, using something like zkWallet or the zkSync API. Naturally it would be desirable for a requestor to just be able to do this through the Yagna CLI. A work-in-progress feature of a zksync driver deposit is the `enter` CLI command. Once ready, it will reduce the steps a requestor needs to take to fund their own zkSync wallet on mainnet, allowing them to focus on their Golem tasks that they want to run on the network.

Coming up

Coming up, we can expect a release to Yagna coming shortly, as a result of the work being done on the release candidates for 0.6.4. We can also expect the Hackathon sub mission deadline next week. We’ve come a long way since the first hackathon and we’re excited to have a look at what developers have come up with!

Digest wrap-up!

That’s everything we have for you in GitHub Digest #13. Don’t forget that the Golem GLM Rewards Program is still running! We recently announced the awardees of March and the end of March is not far off. To get involved in the program join our Discord chat, get involved on Reddit, tag us in interesting conversations on Twitter, or even throw some memes in Telegram. See you in the next GitHub Digest!