What's cooking in the pipeline

The core developers have worked really hard the last three weeks improving the stability and robustness of the network. Things are a lot better but we won't know how much better until we run another big stress test, which will likely be in the next 5-7 days.

In the meantime, here are the big ticket items that various contributors are working on:

• Pruned mode for base nodes. In pruned mode, you won't have to do a full sync from the Genesis block, but can do a verifiable sync -- i.e. has essentially the same security guarantees as a full sync -- from a point much closer to the chain tip.
• On Aurora, the wallet backup and recovery feature is in development.
• The block explorer code is starting to shape up. Hopefully a first release of this will be ready in a few weeks.
• The smart contract platform is starting to take shape. a Very fuzzy and protozoic shape, but you start to make out the outlines of something interesting.

tl;dr the Tari community has been so busy that this was a recent conversation with a core dev:

dev: "Man. I haven't left my house in 8 weeks."
me: "I know. COVID-19 lockdowns suck!"
dev: "What's COVID-19?"