SMFT
In July, devs committed not one but three patches to SMFT, keeping up to their work on improving the consensus protocol and its performance. With the first patch, they removed several memory leaks, enhanced the performance of the validation query and made some fixes for the verifier. The second one added improvements for block candidate broadcasts, among other things. The third improvement established a new rule for nodes to skip the validation of duplicated or non-actual block candidates, also carrying more optimizations to the node.
Blockchain Protocol Advancements
One major upgrade to the Everscale node in July 2024 made it impossible to delete frozen accounts missing on their storage fee payments.
The reasons for this were presented in a separate Github issue. All accounts (smart contracts) in Everscale pay the storage fee to keep data on their operations and all related information recorded in the blockchain. This fee is miniscule and is simply inappreciable for ordinary users that have at least a few EVER coins in their wallet.
Nonetheless, once a contract’s balance becomes insufficient to pay a storage fee, it gets frozen, but keeps collecting the negative balance incurred by fees. In case the “overdraft” reaches -1 EVER, this contract gets wiped out from the network along with its data. This feature allows Everscale to avoid the issue of unruled blockchain size growth.
The new measure is intended to prevent the immediate removal of smart contracts that may have accumulated significant debt in a short period, exceeding the standard overdraft limit of -1 EVER. If such an account were deleted, it could not be deployed again in some cases, resulting in the inability to collect a debt. Conversely, a frozen contract can be reinstated in the network.
When a more long-term solution for dealing with indebted accounts is found, this change might be reverted back to a deleting mechanism. According to technical experts, frozen accounts require very small data storage and will not affect the size of the Everscale blockchain.
