1
00:00:01,199 --> 00:00:05,680
Ok, so what is the Antioch network? 

2
00:00:05,680 --> 00:00:20,800
Now, about a week ago or so…I think it’s two weeks ago now. The time flies. We were trying to make a small not very invasive upgrade to the Babylone network

3
00:00:20,800 --> 00:00:25,840
which had been humming along for about, well, I want to say, three months or so. 

4
00:00:25,840 --> 00:00:29,670
Mainly to tweak a little bit of tokenomics parameters.

5
00:00:29,679 --> 00:00:38,160
We wanted to increase the number of simultaneous proposals there could be. Just a few minor things like that to improve the effectiveness of the testnet. 

6
00:00:38,160 --> 00:00:55,360
And it wasn’t expected to be a big deal but what happened was not that long after the upgrade happened, so just for context, for people that may not know,

7
00:00:55,360 --> 00:01:08,080
the blockchain system or variety that the Joystream platform is built on allows you to upgrade the rules of the chain itself in flight using a special kind of transaction. 

8
00:01:08,080 --> 00:01:12,150
And that’s great for lots of reasons that we’ll probably cover in the future. 

9
00:01:12,159 --> 00:01:23,200
And we tried to use this on-chain upgradability feature at this time, at that time, and that was supposed to be fine but what happened was in a matter of a few, 

10
00:01:23,200 --> 00:01:34,240
I want to say 20 blocks or so after the upgrade, there was a split in the network which ended up partitioning the validators into two separate polls.

11
00:01:34,240 --> 00:01:40,400
One group thought that the new runtime was in play, and one group thought that the old runtime was in play. 

12
00:01:40,400 --> 00:01:42,479
That is obviously very undesirable. 

13
00:01:42,479 --> 00:01:50,150
The whole point of your consensus system is to have agreement upon what the history and, therefore, the state of your blockchain is. 

14
00:01:50,159 --> 00:01:53,600
So that’s obviously a serious problem. 

15
00:01:53,600 --> 00:01:59,840
And, you know, we’ve gone through a lot of effort trying to get to the bottom of what happened.

16
00:01:59,840 --> 00:02:09,520
Trying to figure out the root cause of live failures and distributed systems is notoriously difficult, in particular if you haven’t actually

17
00:02:09,520 --> 00:02:15,360
prepared yourself for trying to debug those sorts of failures to begin with which we hadn’t.

18
00:02:15,360 --> 00:02:25,200
And so, we’ve gone through lots of different iterations of or, I should say, possible hypothesis for what the cause could be.

19
00:02:25,200 --> 00:02:34,800
The best hypothesis that we have at the current time is that there is a specific bug in the version of substrate. 

20
00:02:34,800 --> 00:02:42,640
So, taking a step back here as well in case you don’t know, the joystick blockchain is built on the substrate blockchain framework 

21
00:02:42,640 --> 00:02:47,680
which is the framework that the Polkadot blockchain is built on. 

22
00:02:47,680 --> 00:02:56,480
And, in general, the framework that’s used to build pair chains which are blockchains that connect to Polkadot which Joystream itself may or may not end up doing. 

23
00:02:56,480 --> 00:03:02,720
It’s a great framework because it means you don’t have to focus on peer-to-peer networking or consensus

24
00:03:02,720 --> 00:03:08,950
or any of these very low-level things similarly as if you were deploying on Ethereum, let’s say. 

25
00:03:08,959 --> 00:03:14,950
And it really allows you to focus on building exactly the business logic that’s specific to your blockchain. 

26
00:03:14,959 --> 00:03:20,310
So just mentioning where does this substrate thing come from. 

27
00:03:20,319 --> 00:03:30,950
So, we are using the substrate, we are using a specific version of substrate, it isn’t particularly new, and the best hypothesis we could really come up with,

28
00:03:30,959 --> 00:03:36,310
for which there is limited evidence I should say, was that there was a specific kind of bug in the version of substrate

29
00:03:36,319 --> 00:03:43,120
that we are relying on, and that’s the best candidate for what’s causing the failure. 

30
00:03:43,120 --> 00:03:52,950
So, what we’ve been working on for the past two weeks or so has been to obviously figure that out, and then to migrate to a newer version of substrate. 

31
00:03:52,959 --> 00:03:55,590
So, that’s what we have done.

32
00:03:55,599 --> 00:04:00,950
We used to be on version two release candidate four, now we are on 201. 

33
00:04:00,959 --> 00:04:10,480
And we are going to be launching a new chain, namely the Antioch network, that’s probably going to be in two or three days from now

34
00:04:10,480 --> 00:04:15,510
so that actually wrong on the slides because I just made them a few or a while back.

35
00:04:15,519 --> 00:04:28,080
And that would be based on a new version of substrate which has benefits of its own, I should say, but we are mainly doing it to hopefully resolve this problem.  

36
00:04:28,080 --> 00:04:34,960
Of course, we would then get the runtime that we were trying to get initially with these improvements of the parameters for the proposal system

37
00:04:34,960 --> 00:04:41,750
so on, there has also been some other changes to the way the council work. 

38
00:04:41,759 --> 00:04:46,960
I think we expanded from…Actually I don’t remember now, to be honest. 

39
00:04:46,960 --> 00:04:50,000
There are so many things going on but it is a bigger council.

40
00:04:50,000 --> 00:04:51,120
The council period is not shorter.

41
00:04:51,120 --> 00:04:56,160
So there are a few things that have happened that have independent benefits but the main issue here in Antioch

42
00:04:56,160 --> 00:05:06,080
is really to get back to the core, use case that Babylon already had with these small improvements. 

43
00:05:06,080 --> 00:05:09,120
And then we are trying to get to Sumer as soon as possible. 

44
00:05:09,120 --> 00:05:11,120
So, that’s the story on Antioch. 

45
00:05:11,120 --> 00:05:21,440
It’s a big, you know, inconvenient departure from the focus that we had but we had to do it, and now Sumer is hopefully next within a short while. 

46
00:05:21,440 --> 00:05:24,320
So that’s it on Antioch. 

47
00:05:24,320 --> 00:05:26,960
Join me again for Sumer.