Hello everyone and welcome to another Developer Update from the Gridcoin team. I'd like to remind everyone that these posts will be created every two weeks unless a wallet update is pending that week. We have a few new pull requests submitted by our developers since the last update as well as some news about CBR testing on testnet.
@ifoggz. "This PR removes the ability to have to use 0123 0124 in stake amount." This change may seem quite strange, so let me first explain the reason we have to fix this. In our current system, the way the wallet identifies whether you staked Proof of Research or Proof of Stake is by looking at the last 4 digits of the stake amount. Every POR stake always ends with 0124 in the amount. This functions as a sort of "magic number" so the wallet can easily identify the type of stake without doing complex calculations.The reason this needs to be changed, aside from being weird code and looking strange, is that it causes problems when paired with the upcoming changes to allow "stake splitting" as I talked about two weeks ago. Note that this change will be a part of v10, or CBR (also known as Betsy Bird).
Since the "forkpocalypse" back in February, testnet has been unable to sync from 0, necessitating the use of a snapshot. This has been a constant source of aggravation for new testnet users. Now thanks to PR 1268, a joint effort by @Quezacoatl1 and 
To wrap it up, we had a flurry of bug fixes to help SouthXchange get up and running with our wallet as easily as possible.
PR 1266 by
PR 1271 by 
getrawtransaction to accept either a boolean value (true, false) or a number (1 for true, 0 for false) to indicate verbose output. This change makes our RPC output more in line with Bitcoin's.
PR 1272 by
Testnet previously hard forked at block 629,409 on August 1st to begin CBR testing. Since that time, apart from a few hiccups at the start, CBR has been running quite smoothly. To address some of the other changes in v10 (it's not all CBR!) we will be preparing for a second hard fork on testnet in the next couple weeks. We are still awaiting some final changes to the v10 "package" of PRs to be completed, and then we will start our test builds and initiate hard fork round 2.
As always, if you'd like to help us out on testnet join us on Slack or Rocket Chat in the #testnet channel. If you need an invite to either of these platforms feel free to comment below and I'll get you set up.
That's all for this round of the developer update. Tune in for the next post in two weeks (September 10th).
