More reliable Peer management

Pull Request(PR) #5142 brings more reliability to sending and receiving transactions and syncing blocks. It also adds more intelligent tracking of offline peers by marking only the address as offline and not the whole peer.

Nextnet

Hot on the heels of the Stagenet release a few weeks ago, we have an official Nextnet build, along with its seed peers and genesis block. Every eight weeks, the code running on Nextnet is deployed to Stagenet (and Mainnet when it is released). Nextnet allows us to test and fix upcoming features, but is a little more stable than testnet and compiling directly from the development branch.

DAN improvements

On the Digital Assets Network layer, a few PRs relating to confidential assets have been merged. There are many dimensions to confidential assets, which we’ll go into more detail in a future blogpost. At the moment the DAN supports some basic operations such as importing base layer tXTR that was burnt on the base layer and depositing it as Pederson commitment into a Vault.

There are also a few PRs relating to indexing components, accounts, resources and NFTs on the DAN. Having a highly scalable sharded network means that no single node has all the data in the network. As a user of the network, you’ll only be interested in a few resources or accounts. To facilitate this, you can run a Tari indexer which tracks related substates of data across different shards and keeps a local cache that can be queried easily.