blockstack
  • About Stacks
  • Developers
  • Apps
  • Community
No Result
View All Result
stacks
No Result
View All Result
Home Blockchain

Xenon: Stacks 2.0 Testnet Enters Final Phase

Diwaker Gupta by Diwaker Gupta
November 25, 2020
in Blockchain
Xenon: Stacks 2.0 Testnet Enters Final Phase

With the mainnet clearly in sight, I’m excited to share that we’ve now entered the final phase of the Stacks 2.0 testnet: Xenon. The key change from the previous phase (Krypton) is that the Xenon testnet is integrated with the primary Bitcoin testnet whereas in Krypton we were using a Bitcoin regtest. Latter was obviously a much more predictable environment fully under our control, so operating on the much more volatile and unpredictable Bitcoin testnet will be a great litmus test ahead of the mainnet launch. This is a key part of hardening the network and we’re thankful to all of you continuing to help us test and improve.

In addition to the Bitcoin testnet integration, Xenon will shortly add full support for microblock fork-handling and mining (PR in review as we speak!). We have also implemented most of the mechanism for upgrading from Stacks 1.0 to Stacks 2.0 as described in this forum post. A new Stacking library is also available as part of stacks.js. Finally, we expect to roll out the core functionality required to support BNS (Blockchain Naming System) onto Stacks 2.0 on Xenon in the coming weeks. Developer friendly APIs for interacting with BNS will be implemented in the stacks-blockchain-api and supported in stacks.js!

 

While Xenon is functionally similar to Krypton, integrating with Bitcoin testnet has several implications:

  • The previous regtest-BTC faucet (in the stacks-blockchain-api) is no longer needed and will not work for Xenon. You can use any publicly available testnet-BTC faucet to obtain testnet-BTC (tBTC) instead.
  • We no longer control the Bitcoin block-interval on the testnet. While the average is ~10min (similar to Bitcoin mainnet), it can vary a lot, and is higher than the 2min block interval on Krypton.
  • We no longer control the burnchain length (previously, we’d reset the Bitcoin regtest everytime there was a chain reset) — this means spinning up nodes can take some time as the node must download heads for all Bitcoin testnet blocks.
  • Unlike the Bitcoin regtest environment, anyone can run their own Bitcoin testnet nodes. We strongly encourage anyone interested in mining/developing on Stacks testnet consider running their own Bitcoin testnet node. This will help minimize the load on the PBC-operated bitcoind node and also help further test the Bitcoin integration.

You can see the testnet-BTC transactions for the Xenon miner node here.

Sample configuration to spin up a Xenon node:

[node]
rpc_bind = "0.0.0.0:20443"
p2p_bind = "0.0.0.0:20444"
bootstrap_node = "047435c194e9b01b3d7f7a2802d6684a3af68d05bbf4ec8f17021980d777691f1d5[email protected]xenon.blockstack.org"

[burnchain]
chain = "bitcoin"
mode = "xenon"
peer_host = "bitcoind.xenon.blockstack.org"
username = "blockstack"
password = "blockstacksystem"
rpc_port = 18332
peer_port = 18333

Known Issues

We wanted to have a publicly-accessible Xenon setup before folks headed into Thanksgiving weekend (especially for our US community). That said, we’re actively working on some known issues:

  • For now, if you want to mine on Xenon, you must run your own bitcoind testnet node. This is important for two reasons: first, PBC-operated bitcoind doesn’t know a priori all the Xenon miners, and thus can’t track UTXOs for them; more importantly, with Xenon we want to see how Stacks 2.0 behaves in the presence of Bitcoin forks, and multiple bitcoind nodes would help test for that. If you need help running bitcoind locally, ping us on Discord!

To minimize disruption with folks currently using Krypton, Xenon testnet is available at the following:

  • Xenon miner: http://xenon.blockstack.org:20443/v2/info
  • Xenon stacks-node-api: https://stacks-node-api.xenon.blockstack.org/extended/v1/tx
  • Xenon explorer: https://testnet-explorer.staging.blockstack.xyz/

If you’re an app developer, exchange, or other party hoping that is interested in Stacks 2.0 and/or upgrade paths, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the team via Discord. After reaching code completion around December 15th, the next period will be dedicated to supporting your needs and making sure you’re set to support the upgraded network.

Don’t forget that there are up to $2,000 bounties available for helping to identify bugs or for creating important Stacks 2.0 tooling. For miners, be sure not to miss the upcoming ‘Mine to 1 Million STX’ challenge that Daemon Technologies is hosting, along with the Stacks Foundation.

Stay tuned for significant news in the coming weeks and thank you for your support. If you haven’t yet, you can follow rich weekly technical updates on the forum or receive those updates via email.

Register for Stacks 2.0 related events and launch festivities at stacks2.com.

Previous Post

Ankr To Support Seamless Stacking on Stacks 2.0

Next Post

Meet Stacks Pakistan, the first official Stacks Chapter

Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker joined Blockstack after Dropbox, where he spent 4 years in a variety of leadership roles across Engineering. Most recently, he led engineering for Intelligence at Dropbox — a group of 30+ engineers, PMs and designers — encompassing Search Infrastructure, Search Quality, Machine Learning, ML Platform and new product initiatives. During his tenure at Dropbox, Diwaker oversaw major infrastructure initiatives and product launches, including a new search engine for Dropbox.

Related Posts

Blockchain

Stacks 2.0 Is Feature Complete

by Diwaker Gupta
December 15, 2020
0

Stacks 2.0 is now feature complete. Since being introduced in February, the PBC team, the Stacks Foundation, and community contributors across the world have been busy bringing this ambitious, ‘master’ blockchain design...

Read more
Blockchain

Stacks 2.0 To Reach Feature Completion By December 15th, Launch Date Set for January 14th

by Diwaker Gupta
November 19, 2020
0

The energy around Stacks 2.0 is obvious. Momentum across the ecosystem has continued to grow in recent weeks with all kinds of new partnerships, new efforts from independent entities, and community activities....

Read more
Blockchain

Staked Will Support BTC Earnings via Stacking Upon Stacks 2.0 Launch

by Mitchell Cuevas
November 17, 2020
0

  The Stacks ecosystem continues to grow ahead of the Stacks 2.0 launch; today we’re happy to share that Staked will be a Stacks 2.0 launch partner as the chain...

Read more
Blockchain

The Stacks Blockchain API Now Supports Coinbase’s Rosetta Standard

by Alex Graebe
November 10, 2020
0

A few months ago, Coinbase and other industry players came together to release Rosetta - an open industry standard to make blockchain integrations more streamlined and faster. The Stacks ecosystem was one...

Read more

A better internet, built on Bitcoin

Learn About Stacks

Developers

Documentation

Github

Testnet

Papers

Community

Events

Discord

Blog

Forum

Shop

Kakao Talk (한국)

Ecosystem

Discover apps

Stacks Token

Stacks Wallet

Stacks Explorer

Chrome extension

Firefox extension

About

Blockstack PBC

Careers

Roadmap

Patent pledge

Terms & Privacy

Stay up to date

GitHub

Twitter

Discord

Newsletter

This blog will no longer receive new posts and will be available only as an archive. Hiro PBC plans to have a developer-focused blog at hiro.so. Readers looking for Stacks related news and announcements can go to the Stacks ecosystem blog at blog.stacks.co to find updates about the project from various entities and individuals across the decentralized ecosystem.

Hiro PBC (formerly Blockstack PBC) is not registered, licensed, or supervised as a broker-dealer or investment adviser by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), or any other financial regulatory authority or licensed to provide any financial advice or services.

Close
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Home 2
  • Home 3
  • Home 4
  • Home 5
  • Sample Page

Get Started

---
  • Tutorials
  • Install browser
  • Live apps

Technology

---
  • Tutorials
  • Documentation
  • Github
  • White Papers

Community

---
  • Forum
  • Slack
  • Meetup
  • Blog
  • YouTube
  • Videos
  • Signature Fund
  • Telegram (English)
  • Telegram (中文群)

Blockstack

---
  • About
  • What is Blockstack
  • FAQ
  • Roadmap
  • Careers
  • Press
  • Swag
  • Branding
  • Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Disclaimers

© 2022 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

This blog is now an archive. Find content from Hiro here and Stacks news and announcements here.