Code:
Name: LRP - Luke
Term: 3 Cycles
Cycle Amnt: 20,000
Total Amnt: 60,000
Author: Luke, JSKitty
Receiver: Luke
Address: DNkAdmxHiGvYvMV3Cvtb4FFYhJMUTc8oR2
Created: 11-06-2024
Status: Active
Vote Hash: 624e886a45f536385633c0bb93ae578c1054bf8cbbe800aab8d149d4d84e993bRole and Introduction
Progress Report
PIVCards: Full conversion to an exclusive SHIELD service, higher volume capacity, additional card-delivery fixes.
These last three months, Luke has been planning and designing the payment backend of PIVCards' all-SHIELD conversion, moving the entire payment route (from Order Address to Refund Address) to a stage that fully supports SHIELD, even to the point of becoming exclusively SHIELD'ed!
This was decided upon by the team as part of Labs' initiative to improve SHIELD's utility without the need to step "out-of-bounds", i.e: deshielding in order to buy an item or do an exchange, which almost all services enforce. Labs encourages users to remain in the Shield 'Anonymity Pool' for both their own privacy, and to improve the privacy of PIVX's chain footprint as a whole; privacy comes in numbers.
This marks the second Labs project to become SHIELD-exclusive, second to PIVX Rewards, a SHIELD-only Community Portal and Faucet.
Additionally; Luke has done a ton of work on improving how PIVCards handles accounting and regional-proxying for purchases, the TL
R of this means that PIVCards can soon handle a vastly larger volume of orders, at larger sizes! This system has entered review and finalisation stages, and will be deployed on PIVCards in the coming week or two.Luke also fixed a few regression cases in which certain cards failed to deliver, such as Discord cards and a few other templated cards.
PIVX Poker: moar docs, and a large task split-up
PIVX Poker continued receiving new documentation, as well as having various tasks created on the Poker GitHub Repo for external devs to "take" easily, small digestable tasks make it easier to outsource development and lessen the burden of transferring work dev-to-dev!
Labs Node Checker: bootstrapping, automatic PIVX config-loading, and more fixes
The Labs Node Checker received some love as well, enabling the ability to quickly Bootstrap nodes, improving the setup time by automatically detecting existing PIVX.conf files, and otherwise receiving a bunch of bugfixes for improved stability.
Rusty-Blox: a newly provisioned explorer server!
Although not part of his original proposal, Luke is experimenting with self-hosting @Liquid369's Rusty-Blox PIVX Explorer on his own server hardware, this will come in handy for letting Labs test out APIs, more quickly test new fixes and additions to the explorer, and potentially even become part of Labs' internal infrastructure, powering MyPIVXWallet and several other Labs backends.
Proposal Plans
These plans are now ordered by priority, with the top-most items receiving the most attention and lower-most being "spare-time" ventures.
Plans may also change or expand during the proposal's timeframe, all work in which will be documented by PIVX Labs and reported on accordingly.
The Great Migration!
This is effectively a Labs-wide database migration - for the past 2 years Labs has been operating on a very quickly-built, "good enough" DB system implemented by JSKitty as a temporary solution for on-site storage, and it's worked well, but with the growth of PIVX Labs' services and the usage they receive, it's showing a couple cracks of inefficiency, and this has become Luke's job: a full migration of all PIVX Labs services to MongoDB.
This will first be applied to PIVCards, then PIVX Rewards, then Labs Oracle, in priority of project importance.
This is entirely a backend-only revamp and migration, users will not notice a single thing (besides from minor downtime when the migration is underway), however, this futureproofing is required to ensure all our services run squeaky-clean and without disturbance. The current database implementation is prone to corruption in sudden issues (for ex: a sudden server shutdown, power-loss, etc) which could quite heavily damage our services, it's better to prevent such a case, than wait for it to bite us on the ass.
PIVCards: Cashback!
After The Great Migration, Luke's primary task is to hop back to PIVCards and begin the previously-delayed Shield Cashback system.
This system is still in R&D stages, so there's no proof-of-concept to display, however: users of PIVCards in the near future may be presented with the occasional Cashback in SHIELD... more news to come on this in future announcements and Quality Control tests.
Labs Oracle: Historical price data and additional free APIs
Luke will be implementing historical-price data points in to the Labs Oracle, allowing us to offer chart data (for the Oracle frontend, for MPW, and for various other services and community usecases in which free access to PIVX historicals becomes frictionless).
Luke will work alongside a new trialing Labs developer, Medea, to implement the frontend to Oracle and finally launch v1.0 to the public.
Labs NodeChecker: Building the foundations of a multi-purpose, one-click-deploy (Master)Node system
Luke will continue building upon the Labs NodeChecker, which is coming on to receive a few new improvements and ideas envisioned beyond the original purpose of the system... rather than purely being a node-maintenance system, Luke is going to continue expanding it's setup capabilities in order to be used for lucrative ideas, for example:
Eventually, the system could be setup on a fresh VPS in a single command (
./install.sh), request to deploy a Masternode, and have your server provisioned instantly to be used as a Masternode.This system is capable of running off an API, which MPW could utilise as part of a "one-click-solution" to deploy Masternodes via MPW in just minutes, with only your own hardware and/or servers.
PIVX Poker: In-house Captcha solutions and Tournament Hosting
Luke will be building an in-house POWCaptcha system, similar to PIVX Rewards, to harden the service against botting and malicious actors - additionally, although more of a marketing task - Labs-hosted Tournaments will be planned for the coming days to bring in new users and give the community a fun way to join together in Game Nights!
Fun stuff: additional, low-priority free-time tasks
These tasks are around the realm of improving smaller Labs projects, such as performing reviews for MyPIVXWallet when additional reviews are needed - building upon some of Labs' Rust (WASM) projects - experimenting with hosting Liquid's Rusty-Blox explorer, and provisioning various infra-services for PIVX Labs that could be utilised by MyPIVXWallet or PIVCards.
Last edited: