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Ok, so what is the Antioch network? 

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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

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which had been humming along for about, well, I want to say, three months or so. 

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Mainly to tweak a little bit of tokenomics parameters.

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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. 

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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,

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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. 

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And that’s great for lots of reasons that we’ll probably cover in the future. 

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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, 

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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.

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One group thought that the new runtime was in play, and one group thought that the old runtime was in play. 

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That is obviously very undesirable. 

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The whole point of your consensus system is to have agreement upon what the history and, therefore, the state of your blockchain is. 

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So that’s obviously a serious problem. 

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And, you know, we’ve gone through a lot of effort trying to get to the bottom of what happened.

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Trying to figure out the root cause of live failures and distributed systems is notoriously difficult, in particular if you haven’t actually

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prepared yourself for trying to debug those sorts of failures to begin with which we hadn’t.

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And so, we’ve gone through lots of different iterations of or, I should say, possible hypothesis for what the cause could be.

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The best hypothesis that we have at the current time is that there is a specific bug in the version of substrate. 

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So, taking a step back here as well in case you don’t know, the joystick blockchain is built on the substrate blockchain framework 

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which is the framework that the Polkadot blockchain is built on. 

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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. 

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It’s a great framework because it means you don’t have to focus on peer-to-peer networking or consensus

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or any of these very low-level things similarly as if you were deploying on Ethereum, let’s say. 

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And it really allows you to focus on building exactly the business logic that’s specific to your blockchain. 

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So just mentioning where does this substrate thing come from. 

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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,

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for which there is limited evidence I should say, was that there was a specific kind of bug in the version of substrate

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that we are relying on, and that’s the best candidate for what’s causing the failure. 

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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. 

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So, that’s what we have done.

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We used to be on version two release candidate four, now we are on 201. 

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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

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so that actually wrong on the slides because I just made them a few or a while back.

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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.  

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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

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so on, there has also been some other changes to the way the council work. 

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I think we expanded from…Actually I don’t remember now, to be honest. 

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There are so many things going on but it is a bigger council.

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The council period is not shorter.

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So there are a few things that have happened that have independent benefits but the main issue here in Antioch

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is really to get back to the core, use case that Babylon already had with these small improvements. 

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And then we are trying to get to Sumer as soon as possible. 

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So, that’s the story on Antioch. 

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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. 

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So that’s it on Antioch. 

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Join me again for Sumer. 

