Month in review: May 2019

This is the first of my monthly roundups, picking highlights from my weekly community updates and providing them in a single, easy to digest summary to keep you up to date with all things Edge.

We’ve been flat out so far in 2019, with a huge level of development and highly significant progress in terms of strategic positioning and planning for the evolution and expansion of our roadmaps.

Year to date commits? 3,126 💥

As a company we’re heading toward our sixth birthday: we’re 5 years, 10 months and 24 days old. We’re the granddaddy of the cryptosphere 😂

We are in the midst of a brand refresh – the fourth iteration, designed to better harness our market positioning and to support our growth for the long term. The team is working to a deadline of early-mid July for launch, along with an updated site focused on network-level services (on which you can find out more here: https://dadi.cloud/en/knowledge/network/network-level-services/).

The community will be brought across plans ahead of launch.

Network stats

Our mainnet continues to grow, both in terms of capacity and in terms of production load. The network is comprised of members of the Founding Node programme and a series of non-earning masternodes managed by the core team.

As we start to move beyond this in the coming months we expect to see significant growth in network capacity, which in turn will support increasing customer usage.

Earnings

Earnings in April returned 42% against the Founding Node proof of stake and May is expected to be even higher as more traffic has come onto the network, even when considering the number of nodes sharing in earnings will have grown.

Earning reports and payouts for May will happen in the first week of June.

We expect to have earnings and payouts fully automated and running daily by the end of July. Hopefully sooner.

We’ve been engaged with HMRC here in the UK about the VAT treatment of tokens within a decentralised context. We’re working to be able to give clarity in relation to the tax position of network transactions for contributors to the network. Whilst we have a pretty clear view on this front, it is important that we seek confirmation from the relevant authorities on the application of any recent guidance and existing regulatory regimes. Once we have this we’ll share the details of the position. In the fullness of time our intention is to be able to provide specific guidance on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis (as we’ve discussed here before).

Development report

The network engineering team have been preparing for a major upgrade to mainnet, bringing a little over a month’s worth of development work to live.

The my.dadi.cloud stack has been containerised for local development, which has enabled us to start working on integrating it with the new network changes, as well as to start work on an automated tested for the stack. This includes a network ready build of Publish, which is currently in testing.

A new service for network telemetry was completed, written in Go and deployed successfully to test.network. It will be moved to mainnet - edge.network - once testing completes. Testing has already raised a few issues which we are working hard to patch ahead of planned release to mainnet in the next fortnight. The update provides a greater level of data insight into activity on nodes, which is central to the next release of the network explorer.

The network data synchronisation layer has progressed nicely, and we are now able to detect devices coming online and going offline in any datacenter in the world. This is the next stage of the multi-DC work, the data from which will be stored under my.dadi.cloud. You can read about multi datacenter world here: https://dadi.cloud/en/knowledge/network/scaling-the-edge/

Progress towards the cracking of secure ACL for self-onboarding has been very strong, with a proof of concept revealed internally last week. Efforts to determine how best to integrate this in to the testnet are ongoing.

The team have also been working on integrating Vault into Consul ACL. This is a big update to the platform that will take a number of weeks to bear fruit.

An auto SSL certificate generation service was scoped, built and released: Gateways now create free SSL certificates using Lets Encrypt for all apps deployed to the network. This means that any domain that you configure against your apps in my.dadi.cloud will automatically run under SSL in the network. This is BOTH for the subdomains the network generates for you, and also for your own domains mapped in to the network. We’ll be writing about this in more detail soon.

A remote update system for Stargate was completed, which allows for configuration files to be updated automatically. The update included the addition of remote control of the BGP system, which is now deployed as a container in the application - enhancing security and hugely improving efficiency.

Finally the team completed a Consul replicate deployment - a big step in getting the network explorer to persist service data.

We moved a step closer to the release of API 5.0, which includes a tonne of changes.

We also completed development on a Golang wrapper for API. Documentation is being written and once done we will be releasing it as an Open Source package.

CDN version 3.6.9 was released. This brings animated gif support to the platform. Release notes and source code: https://github.com/dadi/cdn/releases/tag/v3.6.0

We’re around 95% through a conversion of Publish to React. The approach here is designed to better align our interfaces to one of the webs most active communities. It also opens up a lot of new functionality for our interfaces.

Customer stories

Tiipr

We’ve been working with mobile startup Tiipr. They are developing a tipping application that guarantees that tips go to their intended recipient, and that makes payments to staff in real time. It’s a super smart and pretty revolutionary concept for the service industry. And the app itself is looking quite brilliant.

We are supporting them in development: the app is being built using our technology stack, and it will be running in the network using storage (including database use), caching and compute services.

A pre-launch site is live and running in the network. You can see it here: https://tiipr.com

Tiipr’s roadmap is pretty aggressive, and should see the first build of their consumer app live this summer. As soon as it is out there, we’ll let you know.

We’ve also been given permission to share details about the build and its performance within the network. We’ll be writing about this as we go.

Ecohustler

Ecohustler launched a new version of their site on our stack at https://ecohustler.com

The site went from concept to live in five weeks, providing a great example of what’s possible in the stack.

They are also going to be launching an app which will be API and Store, both running in the network. We expect to have the details of this fleshed out in early June.

PPA

The PPA’s site is being moved to our stack. This kicked off four weeks ago and is due to complete next week. The site is a port from SiteCore, with a design and functionality refresh included. This is another great example of how quickly you can move using our technology, and as with Tiipr and Ecohustler, it will be running in the network and we’ll be reporting back on performance over time.

(We also launched a voting site for the PPA Festival, also built on our tech: https://ppacoveroftheyear.co.uk/ – get your vote in now! [Closing date 07th June])

New business & outreach

We have around 40 active deals in our new business pipeline with a combined value of over 6 million USD.

We met with fifteen new prospects in May. These ranged from startups looking for technology to get their products online quickly, to established businesses in streaming media, to data companies looking for storage capacity for their AI training data.

The team took to the stage at the PPA festival in Tobacco Dock in East London, talking on a variety of themes including blockchain, AI and headless content management technology.

Paul spoke along with Eduardo as well as our advisor Rob Belgrave from Wirehive, and all of the sessions were very well received.

The Foundation

Our charitable foundation has been busy compiling research, and has also been working with the charity commission here in the UK to help them understand blockchain and its application to the charitable sector.

The Foundation team will be at Rightscon in Tunis in just over a week. If you're going to be there and fancy a chat, please hit them up for a meeting.

They are also developing a series of training sessions for human rights organisations. If you would like to volunteer to help them deliver the pilot series, please reach out to Jennifer - the CEO of the DADI Foundation - directly on: jennifer@dadi.foundation

They will need half a day of your time. You can be based anywhere in the world, and you’ll earn a warm sense of well-being knowing that you’re helping to make the world a better place 🙏

You can read more about the foundation here: https://dadi.foundation

Ask us anything

The core team remains active across all of our community channels (links below for reference), and we operate on the basis of as full a level of transparency as possible. So if you’ve got a question, please just ask. If you don’t get a reply right away, our community moderators will add it to their backlog for the next AMA session.

On which, you can read the transcript of our last AMA here: https://dadi.cloud/en/knowledge/network/ama-recap-may-03rd-2019/

Our next AMA will take place on Friday the 07th of June. I’ll be joined by Arthur, newly in post as our CTO. Join us at 2pm UTC.

Weekly updates

I write updates for our community covering all aspects of our work. You can access the updates for May here:

• https://dadi.cloud/en/updates/announcements/weekly-update-31st-may-2019/
• https://dadi.cloud/en/updates/announcements/weekly-update-24th-may-2019/
• https://dadi.cloud/en/updates/announcements/weekly-update-17th-may-2019/
• https://dadi.cloud/en/updates/announcements/weekly-update-10th-may-2019/
• https://dadi.cloud/en/updates/announcements/weekly-update-03rd-may-2019/