https://youtu.be/isiew_nBl00

A screen capture video showing multiple successful RTA transactions running back-to-back on RTA testnet.

In the past (before the RTA & communication protocol overhaul) we saw failures in getting high rate of successful transaction completions.

This video shows that those problems have been largely addressed.

Updated instructions to join RTA testnet https://github.com/graft-project/graft-ng/wiki/Supernode-Install-&-Usage-Instruction

Finished with the checkpointing cherry-pick merges. On to integration testing!

Update from Dan

I thought long and hard about this and it makes me sick to my stomach to say it, but I’m afraid I don’t see any way out of current predicament where Graft is going to continue being starved out of the development and operating funds (not to mention of further value to GRFT holders) as any new sales of GRFT will go directly to Lyra as they indiscriminately sell the “swap" funds.

Over the past 3 years I have tried hard to do right by Graft community and supporters, pouring energy and personal resources into delivering on the original vision. I can not however single-handedly fund Graft’s ongoing development and operations.

I know quite a few of you genuinely and passionately supported Graft’s original vision and technology selection and wanted it to succeed. I did as well and sided with the community, continuing to work on the original PoW+PoS approach, making good progress never the less and getting very close to the goal.

I wish things would have turned out differently, but I think it’s better to face the situation now while you still have some options available.

Unless there’s a drastic change in funding situation (which I don’t anticipate), we will have to freeze Graft development and active operations. We will try to to keep couple of the seed nodes operational to support grft transfers for some time.

This was a very difficult decision for me. Thanks for your support and understanding.

Update:

Ilya has agreed to continue working on the project for now, through this situation, to get the release candidate RTA testnet out of the door on the reduced comp / volunteer basis.

Multiple community members have also stepped up offering to help carry on the project.

While still not out of the woods and will need to decide on moving forward strategy, we will continue the course for now.

State of technology

Wanted to make sure that everyone is aware of the state of GRAFT technology at this point for the sake of full disclosure.

While we’re close to producing a likely viable RTA with double-spend protection and checkpointing, there’s some fairly significant technical debt there that remains to be addressed as the project continues forward:

1) Current implementation doesn’t use communication tunneling that was originally intended to cut down on the communication chatter so that minimum number of nodes participate in the approval communication. An improved communication architecture would need to be implemented based on ZMQ or some other approach.

2) There will still be delays with locked balances when paying with current version of RTA, at least until we switch to locking outputs vs locking balances

3) Remote wallets are currently used on the proxy Supernodes, which is less than ideal. We will need to switch to another architecture such as OpenMonero for wallet implementation

4) Exchange broker layer implementation has been out of scope and will need to be developed, which is a significant effort.

* Note: I describe the issues to the best level of understanding, but I’m not an active dev

A RandomX implementation testnet.

Code:
https://github.com/graft-project/GraftNetwork/tree/feature/RandomX

Binaries:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xDUhErPz9teScUgpSJeR3GqFlrt882gk/view?usp=sharing

Update on RandomX:

3 different implementations of RandomX were tested:
- RandomX
- RandomXL (loki)
- RandomXG (Graft tweak)

RandomX works with pool and xmrig "out of the box"
RandomXL is missing a pool, it has an xmrig implementation, but not an official one
RandomXG was tested and has both xmrig and pool commits:
https://github.com/graft-project/xmrig/commit/f8f90861f41944548075be5750df748053b776d2

https://github.com/graft-project/node-cryptonight-hashing/commit/347ce8a284877ae8e69371885d1ea860446511ec

Ilya is thinking that Graft tweak is the way to go, but since we're not miners and this is a controversial topic that people in the community are passionate about with pretty diverse opinions, it would be best if someone from the community who's an experienced miner would step up to lead this decision and roll out effort.

Hi all. Looks like there are issues with graft.network domain (configuration or expiration). Looking into it.

Public testnet pool server running - 207.148.153.14:81 download miner from graft.rocks. windows and ubuntu builds only xmrig for testing only.

Published release binaries (for mainnet), hardfork planned at 2021-08-18 @ 12:00:00 GMT+00
https://github.com/graft-project/GraftNetwork/releases/tag/v1.10.0

Hello. It's becoming obvious that we need to make a decision on how to move forward.

I've being paying for the seed nodes, a wallet node, and a web server over the past 3 years out of my own pocket while there was some development happening on the project, but at this point given that there's no active development, I wonder if it makes sense to continue.

I'm not in a position to be active in the project - too burned out, have gone through a severe depression and the experience of losing both of my parents over the past couple of years took a big toll.

I'd like to put it up for a vote.

For what it's worth, contrary to what some believe, we did try to run an honest project. We underestimated the complexity - tried to pivot, but unsuccessfully. And then you know what happened. Crypto space was and still is a very young dynamic space, with lots of experimentation. Few projects will succeed - many will fail.

I still have all the Graft I was ever granted and then some that I've purchased off the market, so financially I share the pain with all of you who still hold your GRFT.

If someone wants to take over, please contact me directly.

Respectfuly,
Dan

By a way of an update, I wanted to let the community know that Chris has generously agreed to take over most of the infrastructure for the Graft network. We'll be transitioning over the upcoming weeks. Big thanks to him as I am unable to keep funding the infrastructure personally after several years of doing so.

I also wanted to offer some thoughts on how the project can move forward.

Contrary to the opinion that "the problem has been solved", I don't think it has been. If it had, we would all have an option of paying at the register with crypto. The only viable options that existed were stored value cards attached to exchange operators - those relied on Visa/MC rails provided by the banks issuing the cards. The banks are pulling away from that however, as evidenced by BitPay recently loosing their card issuer's backing. So IMHO the problem still exists.

The question is whether Graft can solve it. I do believe that the original Monero based tech stack has limitations that can not be fully overcome to provide a complete solution.

I was of the opinion that if Lyra proves itself, we should consider switching to it as the tech stack. I think what we saw from Lyra while it was being developed as a separate project is that it has proven to work, even to the point of building what could be used as an exchange broker.

If the community is looking to push forward with the original mission, I would suggest considering approaching the Lyra devs with the proposal to relaunch it under the Graft brand, focusing on the payment use case. I think that proposal might get traction in light of Lyra shutting down recently, if it's backed up by a community good will towards the transition.

I'm not sure what the path to commercialization might look like as payment terminal providers seem to have lost their appetite for doing anything with crypto; they have also rolled back their developer ecosystem programs, so it would need to be a parallel (smart phone based?) terminal implementation most likely.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on the topic. However, I can't claim huge expertise here, just my product management sense.

Dan

P.S. I'm probably going to catch a lot of flak on the subject, given how the community has previously reacted to Lyra, but thought it was my responsibility to at least highlight that option. I have little to gain from it, other than potentially see some movement in the project.

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitpay-ceases-prepaid-mastercard-program-promises-enhanced-card-service-in-the-future/

Hello. The infrastructure transfer has not happened and is unlikely to happen at this point. The only other option available to us is for the individual community members to host their own seed servers (this is probably better anyways as it further decentralizes the network). From what I understand, the servers just need to run graftnoded process and have a public IP. 2 cores with 4GB RAM should be sufficient.
Please work with Miguel if you're interested in running a seed server, providing him the IP. Once we have a list of 3-5 nodes, we can coordinate the network update before the end of the month.

Community seed nodes release is ready. Please upgrade as the current seed nodes will go down in December.

https://github.com/graft-project/GraftNetwork/releases/tag/v1.11.0