Cypher Open Beta Launch

Published in

Tangram

5 min readJun 30, 2021

Some of Tangram’s functionality will roll out as of today for testing to all community members. Although transactions bugs are still being ironed out, opening up the testing process to the community will help with identifying bugs across the functionality on Cypher Testnet and get you started.

For this Open Beta rollout, the Cypher functionality that will be available is limited to — downloading, installing, and running both Cypher’s node and wallet. This will enable you to start familiarising yourself with the node functionalities and running a node, creating a wallet, using wallet commands, etc.

Note:

You will not be able to send or receive transactions yet.
This is still a Testnet; some bugs are known, and more are expected.
The purpose of your participation is to help us identify bugs, problems, design oversights, improvements, and so forth.
Enable you to get familiar with downloading and installing Cypher node and/or Bamboo wallet.

If you follow Cypher’s Github, this has always been available and open source, however, not publicly announced.

Getting Started

You will likely run your node on a cloud server running Linux. You may choose whatever VPS provider that you prefer, and whatever operating system you are comfortable with, as Cypher and Bamboo support Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Firstly you will need to download and install Cypher node and/or Bamboo wallet. For most of you, just select “x64”. Raspberry Pi 1 and 2 are ARM, and RPI versions 3 and 4 are ARM64.

The installer currently only supports systemd, as it is the most widely supported. If you are looking for other init systems, we are open to pull requests.

Cypher node

Running Cypher node will mean that you will be accountable for not only your own stake but validating transactions, propagating and securing the network amongst other things.

Bamboo wallet

Bamboo is the wallet software to interact with Cypher and Tangram. It is a console program and provides you many features expected to manage your account such as creating a wallet and sending transactions amongst other things, see a list of wallet functionalities below.

Fast Install Instructions for Cypher node (Linux and macOS)

You can find the installation instructions HERE.

Fast Install Instructions for Cypher node (Windows)

Find the archive for your OS and architecture from cypher-cypnode_<latest_version.msi> and download, from Cypher Github latest release page

Once you have successfully installed the Cypher node, you can start your node. How this is done depends on your archive, OS, and method of installation. You can find those respectively at one of the links above.

Once your node is running you may:

See some information about your node and the network by going here: http://localhost:7000/swagger/index.html

Ensure that your IP:PORT is reachable from the internet.

If everything works, then you can try out the following on Swagger:

Block

GET /chain/height (displays the height of the chain)

Membership

GET /member/members (display the members of the network, ie. node names, public key, version the node is running and it's status (alive and failed/offline)

GET /member/count (gets the number of members within the network)

For each of the above, you can click on the chosen function, for example,

“Get” /chain/height

“Try it out” and then

“Execute” in Swagger.

Fast Install Instructions for Bamboo wallet (Linux and macOS)

You can find the installation instructions HERE.

Fast Install Instructions for Bamboo wallet (Windows)

Find cypher-bamboo_<latest_version.msi> and download, from Bamboo Github latest release page

N.B: For now please launch the wallet with admin privileges. This will be subsequently patched with an update.

Bamboo wallet

Wallet commands include:

Bamboo wallet commands

Having trouble?

If you’re having any issues drop by either Tangram’s Discord channel (#cypher-technical-chat and #bamboo-technical-chat) and/or our Telegram channel.

Feel free to use these links:
Tangram’s Discord Channel — https://discord.gg/eZJfaGG
Telegram — https://t.me/Tangrams

Fixes, Updates, and Enhancements

Once we fix, test, and update additional functionalities within the Closed Beta testing, improvements and further functionalities will be periodically rolled out to the Open Beta, such as enabling transactions and staking.

For example, we have currently identified one trivial enhancement required in the wallet code — this is currently being worked on. Once complete, Closed Beta transaction testing will resume, and once we are confident the functionality is ready, we’ll push an update for all to build to the latest release and at that point, testnet tokens (in this case CYP) will be distributed to all participating community members to start sending and receiving. Until then, transfers of CYP tokens between users will not be possible.

What are the current issues which need resolving?

Known wallet issues at this moment:

“Bookkeeping” of transactions.
Locally locked commitments are to be enhanced with business logic;
Rolling back of transactions and;
Transaction states (pending, confirmed, etc).

What are we working/focusing on at the moment?

Stéphan and sp4rtan will continue to work on cyp2px (Tangram’s version of libp2p) as highlighted here. In general, the basics are working to replace Serf (current cluster membership and gossip protocol), however, that work can only continue when more of the wallet bugs are squished.

Meanwhile, sp4rtan is also working on a dashboard that integrates into the node and connects with the node’s mechanisms. This will be helpful for debugging and testing, and later can be extended to a ‘Command and Control System’ (C²S) for your Cypher/Tangram node.

Soon™️

Once fully functioning, the Cypher network is expected to act as the experimental proving ground for the future technology planned for the actual Tangram network, which is tentatively expected to launch later this year.

Thinking of contributing to Tangram’s Cypher Testnet?

You can find the Cypher codebase here: https://github.com/cypher-network/

Connect with any of the core team members and/or community managers, OR simply create an issue/pull request!