Althea Development Update #84: Operator tools, Peggy developments, and EIP-55 support

A new relay is born, our networks grew 34% between March and April

We've been extraordinarily busy working on COVID rapid response and the Peggy Ethereum to Cosmos bridge.

Operator tools

We've been building operator focus tools to help Althea scale. The latest versions of the Althea firmware are tightly integrated with our new management dashboard.

Once an operator is configured the router reports status infromation to an easily disgestible administrator dashboard. The dashboard even proactively detects and notifies operators of problems with links and user expeirence.

The connection status for a test user

As our networks continue to grow rapidly we're working to help operators manage significantly more customers than before and deal with entierly new load patters.

The majority of traffic in our networks has shifted from night time Netflix to daytime Zoom calls. Netflix is TCP with large packets where as Zoom is UDP traffic made up of many small packets for voice and video.

Combine this change in load profile with dramatically more users and better tooling is the only way to keep track of who's having problems when and where.

Info about routers and their status. Operators are notified of problems automatically

Peggy

The Peggy Ethereum <-> Cosmos bridge is the key unfninished compoent for the Althea blockchain. We are working with Cosmos stake holders to produce a robust and ready to deploy design.

The existing Peggy codebase is quite advanced feature wise. But it's missing production ready Ethereum contracts to hande the Ethereum side of the bridge.

The real challenge with producing a 'production ready' bridge is successfully mirroring the Cosmos zone validator state without consuming too much gas.

We've made significant progress implementing our highly optimized bridge design over the last few weeks. We've made enough progress to confirm that our optimizations are working as expected. Validator set updates and transaction bactches both cost under 50c which is fairly impressive considering that we're just using an optimized design and have yet to do any optimization of the implementation.

We talked at a recent Cosmos governance working group meeting about our plan for Peggy in more detail and we look forward to demonstrating working validator updates from the Cosmos Zone soon.

EIP-55 Support

We've updated our Ethereum transaction library Clarity with support for the EIP-55 address encoding standard as the default. This has been an oversight in our implementation for some time and it's good to finally get it out of the way.

Clarity is the only cross-compile friendly Ethereum transaction generation library that is portable to all 32 bit platforms. Including CPU targets like PowerPC, RISCV, and MIPS.