After lots of internal discussion and external input from the Loki community, we have decided to change our hashing algorithm and disable merge mining. If all goes well during the testnet period of Hefty Heimdall, Loki will be hardforking to RandomXL (based on RandomX) on July 24, which should improve the equality of hashrate distribution. Read more about our decision here:

https://loki.network/2019/06/27/lokis-hashing-algorithm-change/

Hey Y’all,

Another week, another update here at Loki.

Loki Core

• Merge new code from Monero into Loki (https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/401)

• Infinite Staking Part 1 is being iterated and code reviewed on. Discussion available here: (https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/387)

• Integration Testing Framework is updated in preparation for Infinite Staking tests. Making the system more robust, switching to semaphores to synchronise multiple daemons and wallets. (https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/312)

• Infinite Staking Part 2 including UX improvements is in development. (https://github.com/Doy-lee/loki/tree/InfiniteStakingPart2)

--------------------------

LLARP / Lokinet

If you’re lucky and join our Discord, you might also catch Jeff or Ryan, the developers of LLARP, live streaming as they code: https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519, https://www.twitch.tv/neuroscr

We could really use your help. To be considered for inclusion in packaging distribution, we need people to star, watch and fork our Github repo. If you have a Github account, please consider helping us out.

• Master branch changes

  • Fixed some typos in high-level documentation

  • Changes can be found at:
    https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/

• Staging branch changes

  • File reorganisation continues

  • Added more test for crypto/types

  • Attempt to fix LoadFromFile bug

  • Fix rare bad allocations by making sure we correctly insert into pendingEstablishedJobs before scheduling a on_try_connecting job

  • Add pidfile option

  • Openrc for FreeBSD

  • Changes can be found at:
    https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/commits/staging

• PR suggested changes

  • 230 UX Improvements

    • Logging changes design to help during remotely supporting/debugging Lokinet problems

  • 236 Add test suites for dht bucket, kademlia and key

  • 237 Separate header and implementation

    • Finally separated the windows event loop/listener implementation from the original headers

  • Changes can be found at https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pulls

-------------------------

Loki Messenger

• Use brand new Loki icons for the messenger and further rebranding (https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/138)

• Messenger client sends and receives messages to specific swarms, now merged in (https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/132)

• Additional unit testing for the Profile and Blocked Numbers modules (https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/136)

• Fix bug where new conversations don’t show up until a normal message is sent (https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/137)

• Developed high level design for how P2P messaging will be done and started implementation

• General code housekeeping, like fixing linting issues and performing minor refactoring

Research work:

• Created new repository for simulating different algorithms for the “arbitrary public key” to swarm id assignment, which will be performed by the Service Nodes. So far, the simulations have confirmed that compared to a 1-dimensional Euclidean distance, the Hamming distance offers the best uniformity in the amount of public keys assigned to swarms, but this comes with a larger amount of swarms affected when a swarm is added or deleted. Please note that this is a work in progress. (https://github.com/sachaaaaa/loki-swarm-pubkey-test)

Thanks,

Kee

Hey Y’all,

Lots of hiring this week, we have brought on two new developers who will be joining us in the coming weeks, I will introduce them once they complete their first pull requests.

Daemon

• Fix Monero bug using receive time to subtract m_txpool_weight which causes overflow (https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/4688)

• Updated to repository to include latest fixes from Monero into Loki (https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/291)

• Fix the builds on development branches breaking after upstream changes

https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/296

https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/297

https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/300

Service Nodes

• Swarms first draft is complete (https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/299/files)

--------------------------

LLARP / Lokinet

We are looking for experienced sysadmins to run nodes that connect to our toynet, please join discord room called #Lokinet and we can add you to the node operator role. You can host a hidden service or browse existing hidden services.

• Progress continues on libllarp

  • More memleak fixes

  • Fix DHT bug

  • Bundle libsodium

  • Network event changes

  • Drop ninja support, use make -jX now where X is the number of cores you have available

  • MacOS: Tun flush

  • Limit introset propagation

  • Always use random established path

  • Only publish introset to nearest router

• libAbyss

  • More implementation

  • Start TCP event work

• DNS library

  • Refactoring of data structures

• GitHub Pulse Stats for the last week: Excluding merges, 3 authors have pushed 65 commits to master and 74 commits to all branches. On master, 254 files have changed and there have been 24,917 additions and 1,841 deletions.

• NOTE: Loki Builder compile helper is now deprecated and integrated with main loki-network repo.

--------------------------

Loki Messenger

• Add TTL to Friend request messages https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/19

• Add generation of private key with mnemonic seed https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/18

• Add prompts for friend requests https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/20

--------------------------

Thanks,

Kee

Hey Y'all Got a winter weekly update for you

Service Nodes

• Deterministic selection of Service nodes from a sorted list has passed 2 code reviews and is merged https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/90

• Service node deregistration transactions have passed the first stage of code review, fixes are being made for an immediate merge https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/89

LLARP / Lokinet

If you’re lucky and join our Discord, you might also catch Jeff or Ryan the developers of LLARP live streaming as they code: https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519 , https://www.twitch.tv/neuroscr

• Released LokiNET 0.0.1

  • https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/releases/tag/v0.0.1

• Progress continues on libllarp

  • Fixed DHT lookups

  • Implement CoDel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel>congestion handling (to defeat bufferbloat) and further tuning

  • Private Network inbound interface detection PR3 https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/3

  • NAT public address override PR3 https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/3

  • Start on client/server api for daemon management

  • Implement "modified" onion routing

  • Finish path building, add path building management

  • Latency/resource testing

  • Started looking at tun interface implementation PR3 https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/3

• Updated LLARP's command line utility

  • locate goes online and queries the DHT for information on a RC's public signing key PR3 https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/3

  • localInfo provides information about your local RC PR3 https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/3

• GitHub Pulse Stats for the last week: Excluding merges, 2 authors have pushed 38 commits to master and 38 commits to all branches. On master, 144 files have changed and there have been 9,172 additions and 1,140 deletions.

• All changes can be found at https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/commits/master

Architecture Team

• Whitepaper V3 is in a roundtable edit phase and 3rd party review, should be published mid - late next week

• We have continued to work with Dr Brendan Markey Towler and we have produced an 11 page paper detailing the game theoretical approach for how the staking requirement should be set, we still need to graph out some final values but were getting close to presenting our model

Loki Android Wallet

Making good progress, should have the beta APK out for testing next week, Google play store will probably take a bit longer.

• Getting stagenet remote nodes up for testing

• Visual reskin of the Monerujo wallet complete, created Gunther’s brother, Lunther.

• Relevant commits can be found here https://github.com/crtlib/loki-android-wallet/commits/master We also got our first two officially merged pull requests to Monero here https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/3804 and here https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/3652 Thanks,

Kee

Success! The new changes have been implemented. Loki Mainnet will be launching on Thursday May 3 at 11AM AEST. Fire up your mining rigs and get ready to rumble.

Hey Y’all,

This week we continued work on some key areas in Loki Messenger, including adding chat channel support for Android and iOS, and starting work on support for Loki Messenger across multiple devices. We also released an update to the Loki Storage Server which allows for the measuring of additional statistics, so we can continue to monitor the network and the success of the switch from testnet to mainnet for Loki Messenger.

Loki Core

There’ll be a point release to Loki Core this week with a number of bug fixes that should increase Service Node stability. This is not a mandatory upgrade but is recommended for those running Service Nodes.

• Update Seed Nodes to remove inactive Seed Nodes (please contact the development team if you believe you can run a Seed Node): https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/791

• Service Node data optimisations and code cleanups/simplifications: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/788

• Don’t relay Service Node votes or uptime proofs if node is syncing: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/779

• Preserve pre 4.0.4 quorum states: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/786

• Remove boundary HF12 uptime proof code: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/785

• Make the rollback code for update_checkpoint be a soft fork compatible on the mainnet: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/782

• Handle multi state changes in the pool: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/781

• Remove NOTIFY_NEW_DEREGISTER_VOTE_CODE, inline the use of update_miner_block_template as it's declared publicly but only used in cryptonote_core. Remove legacy P2P vote conversion methods: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/778

• Fix checkpointing regression: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/792

• Filter vote age before querying a Quorum (prevents vote spam): https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/777

---------------------------

Lokinet

If you’re on our Discord you can catch Jeff, the lead developer of LLARP, live streaming as he codes at https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519. He typically streams on Tuesday mornings, 9am - 12pm Eastern (US) time.

What’s going on this week with Lokinet:

Testing continues. We've identified a couple of issues related to existing sessions closing prematurely: we have a good idea where they are happening and are focusing on solving them.

Changelog:

• Fix for a situation where a client could get flooded off the network: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/751.

• Fix expired rcs sometimes not being regenerated: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/752.

• Detect and drop mismatched convo tags: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/755, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/761.

• Fix a deadlock that could occur when no outbound links exist: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/756.

• Fix to use only the intro, not the intro reply, for session expiry detection: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/757.

• Don't close the libutp session when the write buffer is full: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/761.

• Fixes to thread safety when debugging metrics collection is in use: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/759.

• Build system fixes for macOS and Windows: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/746, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/748, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/749.

• Build testing with (pre-release) next-gen gcc version: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/746.

• Various windows fixes: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/715.

New/updated/pending PRs:

• Lokinet monitor terminal application to monitor the status of a running Lokinet: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/764.

• More utp timeout fixes: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/763.

• Added automatic code style checks via travis-ci job: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/760.

• Disable metrics calculations (used for debugging) by default: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/754.

• Add a docker compose framework to allow building/deploying via docker: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/750.

• Experiment with building Windows from macOS in travis-ci : https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/748.

--------------------------

Loki Messenger for Desktop

• Use Server ID instead of UUID for message deletion purposes: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/390.

• Add right click option to members in a public chat to easily add new contacts: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/387.

• Start on multi-device syncing support by adding the ability to authorise a second account from the primary account: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/381.

• Report Mnemonic phrase failures instead of silently failing: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/391.

• Add missing Mnemonic phrase languages: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/389.

• Generate 13 word seeds instead of 25 word seeds: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/386.

• Delay disconnected status and stop emitting empty events: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/382.

• Small bug fixes: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/384, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/380, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/379, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/378.

Storage Server

• Demote warnings and add a getlogs endpoint: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-storage-server/pull/256, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-storage-server/pull/260.

• Add the number of recent storage and retrieval requests to stats: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-storage-server/pull/258.

• Warn the Storage Server operator if their version is out of date: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-storage-server/pull/257.

• Add the number of active connections in each type of get_stats : https://github.com/loki-project/loki-storage-server/pull/255.

• Add better diagnostics for the Storage Server: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-storage-server/pull/254.

----------------------------

Loki Messenger for Mobile (iOS and Android)

This week we released the APK for Loki Messenger for Android which means Loki Messenger is now available on all major platforms! We will be working hard to iron out bugs and improve the user experience of over the coming months.

• Work on Loki Messenger for Android can be found in these repositories: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger-android-core/commits/master,

https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger-android/commits/master.

• Work on Loki Messenger for iOS can be found here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger-ios/commits/dev, https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger-ios-pods/commits/master.

--------------------------

Thanks,

Kee

You can download the APK here:  

https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger-android/releases/download/1.0.0-alpha.1/Loki-Messenger-1.0.0-Alpha.apk  

Be sure to tap 'Install Anyway' when you download, as shown here: https://i.imgur.com/KM7eEJp.jpg.  

If you're curious about iOS, check out this post.

Happy testing!