TrueBlocks — 1st Quarter 2023

Introduction

8 min readApr 21, 2023

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I am pleased to produce this third of four quarterly reports fulfilling part of our Fall 2022 Ethereum Foundation Grant. I’m sorry it’s late. We‘ve been feverishly working on a few last-minute releases. We’ve made significant progress during the quarter, including making several new connections in the community and deepening our already-existing relationships. We report on our progress below.

Milestones

As I’ve done in the past, I’ll begin by reviewing our agreed-to milestones. Here is a screenshot of the milestones for this quarter:

We didn’t get to v1.0.0. I’m saying the following tongue-in-cheek: My father used to tell me that I should always overpromise and underperform. That always sounded wrong, but it seems to have sunk in…

One of the reasons we missed these particular milestones is that we did some traveling this quarter. Both of us (Dawid Szlachta and I) attended EthDenver in February. Dawid had the chance to mentor for the hackathon. This was great, as it allowed us to meet new people. Since then, we’ve had multiple conversations about our work with both big and small players in the space.

We completely rewrote our documentation website. This took longer than anticipated, but it was important to ensure that the documentation was keeping up with the code base. Because of this, we fell behind on porting the code to GoLang, although we did complete a lot of porting.

Here’s a table detailing the status of each tool. You can see which tools were ported during the quarter.

As you can see, all but three tools are either fully or partially ported. chifra state and chifra token (nearly identical) and chifra export remain. The most difficult part of the remaining work will be chifra export, but we’re lucky in that many of the other tools touch on aspects of features needed by chifra export. For example, chifra export uses traces, but so does chifra traces, which is already ported.

Some of our time this quarter was spent writing grants and exploring other funding opportunities, as our Ethereum Foundation grant extends only to September 2023. If the reader knows of anyone (including themselves) who might like to support our work, please connect with us.

We did reasonably well in the recent Optimism Retro Public Goods Funding round, so our finances are mostly stable. Of course, every little bit helps — especially for an open-source project focused as heavily as we are on the public good.

Results from Round 2 of Optimism Retro PGF

In addition to the yet-to-be-completed milestones above, here are our milestones for the end of June. We have high hopes that we will reach these goals, if not by June, then by September, the end of our grant period (we didn’t get our first payment until late September 2022).

To complete this article, we present first a list of our releases and then some other non-technical aspects of our work.

Major Releases

We made four major releases to master this quarter. The easiest way to explain them is to show screenshots. For those interested, please pay attention to the title of each release, which explains the main purpose of the release, and the list of contributors, which we are proud to say is growing.

As an aside — our releases are named alphabetically by county name after the counties in the State of Pennsylvania, USA. Our home region.

The first release was called v0.55.0-beta — Cumberland — ManyPorts.

This release included porting of the chifra receipts and chifra traces tools, among others. It also includes updates and improvements to the help files, as well as extending certain internal structures in preparation for future work. The release also included a major upgrade to the code that works with ABI files and the articulation of logs, transactions, and traces. This is a major part of the puzzle that we need for porting chifra export.

https://github.com/TrueBlocks/trueblocks-core/releases/tag/v0.55.0-beta

The v0.60.0-beta — Dauphin — MorePorts release included many additional internal updates to support future work, including completing the articulation code. (Thanks, Dawid!)

This release also improved our auto-code generation tools to generate much of the data-model-related code — and at the same time — the documentation of the data models. We also improved an edge case for the accounting reconciliations to avoid mispricing “ghost airdrops.” The release also prepares for a significant upgrade to the very important chifra names tool, which also helps in the porting ofchifra export.

https://github.com/TrueBlocks/trueblocks-core/releases/tag/v0.60.0-beta

The v0.62.0-beta — Delaware — Portlandia V3 was a major release and included the final or partial porting of many tools, including chifra traces, chifra transactions, chifra blocks, chifra slurp, chifra status, chifra config, chifra monitors, and chifra daemon.

This release also expanded and made more consistent many of the data models. For example, we now display transcationHash in most data output. (This was inconsistent earlier.) We also export date and timestamp in many places where we previously did not. This was a user-generated feature.

We also began work on the GoLang version of our binary cache (another feature needed to complete chifra export). This work included a much-improved interface for managing and cleaning the binary cache over the C++ version. Some of this work was unanticipated and is part of the reason we missed our milestones.

https://github.com/TrueBlocks/trueblocks-core/releases/tag/v0.62.2-beta

The final release this quarter was v0.62.0-beta — Elk — 1st Q 2023. This was a minor release meant to bring all of our five repos into sync. (The five repos are trueblocks-core, trueblocks-sdk, trueblocks-explorer, trueblocks-docker, and trueblocks-dappnode.) At this point, all of our repositories are at release number v0.62.0-beta.

Issues

During the quarter, we closed approximately 40 issues, opened 25–30 new issues, and merged around 25 PRs. We had a few new contributors and now have 33 contributors, 17 watchers, 168 forks, and 883 stars on GitHub. I’m sorry, I don’t have any sense of the growth of these numbers.

Community

We’ve had a good amount of activity in our community. This quarter, we had calls with many people, including Infura, Giveth, GitCoin, Open Data Initiative, Optimism, Bacalhau, TrueBit, etc.

Sometimes these conversations, while convivial, lead nowhere (other than building better friendships). Sometimes they lead to collaboration, such as our participation in two Open Data Initiative hackathons as a sponsor. This month we’re sponsoring a bounty for the hackathon to reward people who write essays about why decentralization is important. (We like this idea because it gives non-technical people a chance to participate in the hackathon.)

Possible topics for the essay contest might include:

What’s the worst outcome that comes out of crypto?
Why is decentralization important?
How can we avoid the seemingly inevitable slide down the hill to centralization?
Can decentralization and centralization live together amicably?
Is there such a thing as progressive decentralization?
What does a truly private worldwide computing system look like?
How does surveillance capitalism survive in a truly private computing ecosystem?
What’s the most amazing outcome that has come from crypto in thirty years?
Describe the most beautiful city run completely on a decentralized stack.

We’re always open to having calls with anyone to discuss your work, our work, or some combination of the two. Hit us up in our Discord.

Articles Written by Us

One of the milestones for each quarter is to produce this review of our progress, but we enjoy periodically writing about our work on our blog. Details of these writings are below.

Speaking Gigs and Invitations

We were invited to submit a grant proposal for one of the major decentralized exchanges, which we did, but we’ve yet to hear back.

We were also invited to attend a few conferences, two of which we were invited to speak. For scheduling reasons, we can only attend one: EthDam, which we are looking forward to in May. We plan to give a talk called “Indexing the Ethereum Mainnet for Near-Zero Cost.”

Articles and Tweets from Users

We continue to have many mentions on Twitter. A selection here

Dall-E-Dresses

The following was included in last quarter’s report, but we loved it so much we include it here again.

We had fun feeding petnames, unique three-word phrases deterministically generated from an Ethereum address using chifra names, into Dall-E, the text-to-image generator. Here are the results for trueblocks.eth as an AI-generated image from an address and the prompt “Sadly-sitting-anteater in Steam Punk Style:

Support Our Work

TrueBlocks is funded from personal funds and grants from The Ethereum Foundation (2018), Consensys (2019), Moloch DAO (2021), Filecoin/IPFS (2021), our GitCoin donors, The Ethereum Foundation (2022), and (recently) Optimism Retro PGF (2023).

If you like this article and wish to support our work, please donate to our GitCoin grant https://gitcoin.co/grants/184/trueblocks. Even small amounts have a big impact.

If you’d rather, feel free to send ETH or any other token to us directly at trueblocks.eth or 0xf503017d7baf7fbc0fff7492b751025c6a78179b.