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.

These last couple weeks have been a little slower in terms of development mainly due to many of our developers being busy with summer vacations. Despite the reduced activity, we want the community to know we are still working on improvements to the wallet. Here is a sample of some of the new features being worked on:

• #1194 by @ravonn introduces a much faster method of packing and unpacking our superblock data that wallets parse every 10 blocks (the tally period). From ravon's initial testing, he has compiled this chart below showing the speed increases:

Tested by measuring the time before and after running the pack/unpack in the unit tests. Times are in microseconds.

@ravonn also notes:

63 milliseconds might not sound like that big of a deal, but we tally and unpack every 10 blocks so in a 500 block batch that's 3.15 seconds saved on the i5 and 5.7 seconds on the Core2.

• #1179 by @thecharlatan fixes a regression bug found on testnet #1177 which caused spaces to show as underscores in the poll UI. Check the issue for some funny screenshots of testnet voting.

• #1185 by @ifoggz fixes another regression found on testnet, this one related to beacon key backups. This fix ensures that if the advertisebeacon command fails for any reason, the new (invalid) beacon keys are not written to the config file. Instead if the beacon cannot be advertised the config file will retain the old beacon keys.

• #1192 by @ifoggz fixes an error with the output of the RPC command GetBalance. This issue should further address some of the issues exchanges have reported to occur on their daemon wallets.

Testnet is finalizing tests on the current Milestone and will be moving to full-scale CBR testing in 1-2 weeks if all goes smoothly. If you are interested in helping us on testnet just reach out to me on Slack, Reddit, Rocket Chat, or Discord!

Thanks for reading this edition of the Developer Update. Expect to see another update two weeks from today (7/16), unless there is a wallet update released between now and then. If you have any comments or questions for the Gridcoin development team feel free to ask in the comments below. If I am not able to answer your question directly, I can certainly forward it to someone who can!