🧩 Core development updates: Bridges, Common, Sync, Testnet, and... 🧩 Dear all, Here’s what the Aleph Zero's core dev team has been up to recently: 🌉 Bridges: Fee mechanism within Solidity smart contracts done, Bridge and Governance contracts are now upgradeable. Relayers have been implemented to support automated bridging. The infrastructure setup in progress, front-end has started. 🪙 Common: the first planned rollout–the AMM–is just around the corner. AMM, LP smart contracts and PSP-22 test tokens have already been implemented; we’re incorporating improvements suggested in our internal review. We’re adding the flash borrow functionality in the swap method and improvements to the built-in price oracle. The frontend team is getting it across the line with the last fixes around LPs. 🔄 Sync: We have been working on rewriting it. Sync is a network-based mechanism for staying up to date with the blockchain. Now, its implementation is specific to AlephBFT, improving the performance and compatibility with our consensus. Block sending through new sync has been added in Aleph Node 12. 🧪 Testnet: 12.2 is still undergoing testing before being pushed to the Mainnet. To match the previous behavior, the seal_balance call in pallet_contracts has been changed to output the balance free to spend instead of just free balance. In particular calling env().balance() on a freshly-instantiated ink! contract returns 0 instead of the existential deposit. 🔒 Privacy: the ZK team is progressing with the research, choosing Halo2 (+Halo2-lib) proof system, bn256 cryptographic curve, and ink! 5 as the smart contract language. ink! 5, an improvement over current (4) version, will be released soon by our friends over at Parity Technologies. 🤝 Last but not least, the Foundation delegation program is in the works. It will come as a set of rules for community validators, based on which they’ll receive nominations from the AZF’s stake. Tech specification is now being created. 🐣 Like and share