Blogs
March 16th, 2018
March 14th, 2018
March 9th, 2018

March 2nd, 2018

February 23rd, 2018
February 16th, 2018
https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/02/14/geth-1-8-iceberg¹/ And, here’s Vitalik Buterin’s endorsement:
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/963990604341366784 So what does this mean for testnet launch? Our team is hard at work on the above items and we expect to release testnet to our beta participants in roughly a week’s time. Launch Status As we continue to test and debug the Halo Platform, we march closer to full launch every day. While the release date is dependent upon the testnet results, we anticipate it won’t take long before we are ready go live. In the meantime, development work continues on the Exchange, DAppstore and Block & Chain Games. Speaking of games, below is a teaser image from one of the games we currently have in development. We are very excited to see this game come together and provide an epic adventure to our players. ^Devin Seto If you have questions, concerns, or comments please join our discord to discuss them: https://discord.gg/PmveA6A
Introducing Block & Chain Game Studios

2017 Year End Update
Masternode Ownership MNAdmin is a contract that oversees the creation, suspension, and cancellation of masternodes. It is essentially the arch node that is dictating everything. MNOwnership is for owners of masternodes that allows them to apply for, interact with, and cancel masternodes. Here are some fancy flow charts for you to see the flow of how shared masternodes and single masternodes will work: Co-Owned Masternodes Single Owner Masternode Aero Browser Our Aero Browser was built on top of MIST browser by ethereum. Unfortunately it doesn’t fit our tech stack for front-end as it uses Meteor and not Vue. It also was large and overly complex for what it did and what we needed it to do. The final arrow that put it in the grave was a recent vulnerability that simply could not be fixed in MIST until the Electron team updated electron. Who knows when that will be, (As of writing this article, it’s several weeks later and no update to Electron). So this is our official announcement that Aero Browser was taken to the streets and flogged. It has been sacked from the project list as well, but as you will see in the next section, we have built a browser that will be even better! Feather Client What rose up out of the ashes of Aero Browser is the Feather client. Feather is a light client built using Muon (brave browser fork of electron), vuejs (used as the front end), and halo DAPPS. DAPPs are decentralized applications and utilize web3 to interact with the node. To get you enticed here is a nice screenshot of the settings page as it stands right now. If you have a keen eye you would notice that “Hey! That says Featherlite and not Feather Client!”. You’d be right. See there are two flavors of Feather wrapped up in one. What you see here is Featherlite. What’s the difference? Simple. Featherlite runs off a hosted RPC connection, and Feather runs off a local light synced node. So with Featherlite you are not required to have any blockchain blocks downloaded to your machine. You don’t have to run a node, and you can get up and running immediately. With Feather you will have the option to download the node software, install it, and run it. There will be no difference in the use and interaction of the Feather Client from between Feather / Featherlite. The difference is in the internals and some people like to run a local node vs talking to a remote hosted node. Even if you use Featherlite and use the hosted RPC node you would not be sending your keys anywhere. All your secrets and passwords are stored locally. Below is a flowchart of the startup and operation of Feather as it stands now and is planned to be built as. A few things about this diagram that you should notice. The first is that, before we even launch the main part of the program, we are going to see if there is an urgent announcement. Something would be classified as urgent if it affects the security of the Feather Client in any way shape or form to the extent that it should not be used. After getting the remote data and checking it, if there is an urgent message then Feather is prevented from fully starting up and will display a link to the announcement message. Most likely that announcement would be posted to medium. Second, you’ll notice the node software is not downloaded unless you decided to use a local node. This prevents Featherlite from even using the space on your local device to store a useless software which you won’t use. Third, there is the option to “change network”. Since everything runs via metamask, as long as there is a metamask version for the blockchain we want to add, we can just drop it in. If there isn’t, then we probably are already working on a new version of metamask to talk to these other blockchains using the same system and protocol. Ex. LTC and BTC. Insert winky face here. We have a simple plan to host the RPC network for metamask to consume and that is outline below: Simply put we are going to load balance custom built C++ nodes that are built for retrieving data and returning it via RPC. Transaction signing and other parts that require heavy load or private data will not be done on the C++ nodes but rather on the local machine. See metamask’s provider engine for more details on that: https://github.com/MetaMask/provider-engine Web3 For Developers There is just a little bit of information about web3 that we wanted to talk about in this post. Since we are forked from ethereum, and we want to maintain the ecosystem we love and support that has been built for developers by ethereum, we are keeping the ethereum denominations and naming conventions for coin and web3 internals. This means that in Smart Contracts and Web3 calls you will be sending and receiving “ether” and “wei”. However we are going to mask that backend processing wherever the end user would see the denomination. So for example in a wallet UI, the user will see that they have 12 halo. But internally it will be dealing with 12 ether. This is to limit the confusion of the differentiating chains for the end user. However, as developers we deal with confusion like this all the time and it’s more practical for us to maintain the same ecosystem as ethereum does. In addition to this, we will be adding some special functions to web3 itself. These functions will allow for developers to utilize our new transaction types (instant, private, and safe send). The availability of these functions in web3 may not be ready on go live, but will be shortly after that if not. Conclusion 2017 was fast, crazy, and amazing. Let us turn our eyes to 2018 and what it has in store for the Halo Platform community. If you have questions or comments please reach out to us on discord, you can find us there at all times of the day. Discord: https://discord.gg/PmveA6A We have an initial wiki started and are constantly adding new content to it. Please see the wiki for some more information. https://wiki.haloplatform.tech/FAQ#halo-platform ^Shannon Duncan