Thread by @radu_chis

.@ElrondNetwork It's the end of another week and this is the weekly tech update. Elrond #BUIDLs 🛠️
See below ⬇️⬇️

1. Preparations for the Battle of Nodes (improvements, bugfixes, benchmarks, tests)

2. Initial implementation of a System VM and smart contract for validator staking, that will allow nodes to join the network real-time, through a fast protocol built-in mechanism

3. VS Code extensions can handle WASM smart contracts written in C and Rust. Work in progress to enable debugging of such code in the IDE

4. First flood attack on our testnet v1.0.19 made us tweak the libp2p's parameters and craft additional anti-flooding capabilities

5. Fixed the arm64 build so we can now run validators on raspberry pi4

6. Refactoring of shard processor in order to remove duplicate code and group all arguments in a single structure

7. Snapshot of the trie for saving the current state of the trie in a separate database.

8. Compaction of miniblocks to allow us to add more transactions in a block and decrease the data that needs to be propagated to metachain. Throttled mini blocks creation to a defined maximum value, to avoid bottlenecks with blocks with a too higher number of miniblocks

9. Added a local cache of meta blocks, used for processing current shard block, to avoid situation when a full pool of meta blocks (happening especially when a node is bootstrapping), would generate situation when needed meta blocks are in fact evicted from pool

10. Validator's uptime statistic improvements for the Battle of Nodes

11. Added more data in Elastic Search related to consensus group, will be visible in the testnet explorer

12. Economics rewards metrics for termui. Soon an estimation of how many ERDs you can earn

13. Fixed bug that caused in some situations the block to be rejected due to missing reward transactions

14. Fixed a bug after merging with the economics part which didn't allow the node to start

15. Further bugfixes and improvements