Announcing Alexandria

by joystream

What is Alexandria?

While Constantinople and its recent upgrade offered significant tangible changes for testnet participants, the Alexandria release will be much more focused on technical enhancements which support the future development of the platform.

Alexandria's main technical goals are:

  • Cleaning up the membership module: Tackling technical debt in the membership module and making it possible to transition to using memberships as the only core actor identifier in the system in future releases.
  • Start using Substrate v2.0.0 RC4: We are transitioning to a new version of Substrate in order to stay up to date with a broad range of enhancements, and to limit how far behind we allow our growing codebase to become.
  • Enhancing our network testing: Further maturing our network testing infrastructure to get one step closer to true end-to-end builds that secure an increasingly shorter development cycle.

Unfortunately, these changes will require starting on a new chain, but we will migrate as much of the state as is practical over to the new one.

Migration

The following parts of the state will be migrated:

  • Memberships
  • Channels
  • Media Content
  • Proposal History
  • Forum Posts
  • Most Balances *
  • Also, the Fiat Pool will be not be changed, so the value of your tokens will not be (negatively) affected

Consequently, all participants participating in roles at the end of Constantinople will be "kicked" and will need to re-apply for roles etc.

* IMPORTANT: Balances will only be migrated over if the key is attached to a membership or is active in a role which does not require membership (i.e. validation). Staked balances in roles such as Council Members (and their voters), Curators and Storage Providers and their role accounts will also be taken into account and added to the starting balance of their associated member accounts, as well as any staked amount in active open proposals.

If you have any funds not connected to your membership or being used/staked in a role, you should transfer these immediately into your membership account. If you do not have a membership, you can create one here.

Further Changes

The changes on the community side are not as significant, but some participant-requested enhancements will be included:

When?

We are aiming to release Alexandria in approximately two weeks, targeting the 21st of September* ~09:00 UTC. The "snapshot" of the current state, ie. at the point at which all data is migrated, will happen approximately 24 hours in advance. The exact blockheight will be announced in a future blog post, but if you have any tokens that would be lost in this scenario, it's advisable to transfer them sooner rather than later.

If you would like to take a closer look at how we're progressing with development of Alexandria, please take a look at our GitHub projects.

Also, if you haven't already joined, we recommend checking out our Telegram group, where you can ask questions and discuss the project with the rest of our community.

*Launch date was originally scheduled to be 15th September.

Disclaimer

All forward looking statements, estimates and commitments found in this blog post should be understood to be highly uncertain, not binding and for which no guarantees of accuracy or reliability can be provided. To the fullest extent permitted by law, in no event shall Joystream, Jsgenesis or our affiliates, or any of our directors, employees, contractors, service providers or agents have any liability whatsoever to any person for any direct or indirect loss, liability, cost, claim, expense or damage of any kind, whether in contract or in tort, including negligence, or otherwise, arising out of or related to the use of all or part of this post, or any links to third party websites.