Month in Review: June 2019

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June has been another very busy month for us as we have been preparing for a major update to mainnet, working flat out on our rebrand and finalising our roadmaps for the next 12-18 months.

Year to date commits? 3,483 (+357 in June) 💥

DADI is being rebranded to Edge – a move designed to help growth in the network by focusing on core network services. The team is working to launch Edge in the coming weeks: a new site, an update to the explorer, a rename of our ticker to $EDGE, and a clear focus on network-level services.

We will be sharing the brand itself this week.

Aside from the news of our rebrand, highlights this month include our attendance of the PPA awards, our attendance of the Cannes Lions, preparations for the coming mainnnet update, and sustained ROI for network contributors.

We turn six years old on the 08th of July! Quite a milestone.

🔗Business update

We have around 47 active deals in our new business pipeline with a combined value of over 6.2 million USD.

We met with eight new prospects in May. These ranged from security specialists to startups, publishers to healthcare businesses.

We attended and presented at the PPA awards:

It was a really positive evening for us – 20+ new conversations have been opened up on the back of the event.

We finished defining the content of the series of workflow Workshops that we’re running with the PPA, plus we’ve also confirmed a set of new product development sessions in September. These are designed to aid with customer engagement and new business.

We were also in Cannes for the Cannes Lions, where we picked up a number of promising leads.

Joseph met with David Wilde to plan an approach for local government. They also discussed the detail of his ongoing engagement with the project, covering speaking arrangements, articles and an approach for central government.

🔗IP protection

We met with our patent lawyers for an update – there has been a lot of progress made, and we expect to have completed the process in the next few months.

This will be an important milestone for us as it means that we will be in a position to fully open source the network codebase.

Pursuing patents for the core architecture and components of the platform is important because it provides protection for the entire community by putting a level of barrier in place to competition, which should help to establish the Edge network as the protocol for edge computing.

We also submitted fourteen trademark applications related to Edge.

🔗Roadmap updates

We released a preview of our roadmap update, covering some of the key updates to the Edge network for the next 12-18 months.You can access the preview here: https://dadi.cloud/en/updates/network/roadmap-updates/

The full version will be released with our new website.

🔗In the news

🔗The future of our web services

We have made huge strides in the definition of what will become a stand alone SaaS proposition for our web services. We are breaking out the web services in the network and will be offering them under a new brand and on a new domain. The reason for this is to allow us to focus the network on network-level services, better supporting its go to market. This approach also means that we don’t lose the momentum and investment made in the web services to date, and will present a stand alone entry point to use of the network (use of the web services under their new brand will deliver revenue directly back to the network).

This will be announced formally when the full branding work for the proposition has been completed. We expect this to be in July.

🔗Earnings

Earnings in June returned an annualised 56% against the Founding Node proof of stake and we expect the uptrend to continue as more traffic moves in to the network.

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

We have gone a long way to enhancing and validating pricing for core services. These will be published on our new site in July, and include the addition of DNS as a service. As we continue to grow network use focus will increasingly move to the optimisation of the economics of the platform, particularly the balance between price and demand, earnings and network growth.

Our goal is to establish a self contained ecosystem that ensures network capacity alongside competitive market pricing for customers of the network.

🔗Hiring

Moses Skoda joined us as an engineer. He will be working closely with Eduardo on the future of our web services.

We are still looking for an experienced technology sales director. If this sounds like the right job for you, please get in touch.

🔗Network status

Our mainnet continues to grow, with significant additional traffic pushed in to the network in June.

The mainnet maintained 100% uptime for the month, with the switching of devices in and out of production in rapid succession tested and shown to have no impact on performance, proving the architecture for Hosts. This means that we expect to be in a position to lower and potentially even remove the minimum uptime requirement for Hosts in future.

🔗Key stats

Stat	Value	Description
Uptime	100%	The mainnet achieved 100% uptime in May
Nodes online	356	Node capacity remained steady. Additional Founding Nodes are planned for release in July/August
Network reach	54 countries	There are Hosts online in 54 countries
Stargates	21	All non-earning and under the control of the core team
Gateways	18	All non-earning and under the control of the core team
Hosts	317	All earning and operated by the community
Compute units	1,268	Edge one units: low-level compute capacity for web-based processing (websites, APIs etc.)
Edge storage	9.49 TB	Long term object storage
Edge cache	844.70 GB	Short term caching

🔗Development report

The network engineering team were flat out throughout June:

They completed most of the final components of network-sync, the service the network uses to persist device data now that the network manifest is ephemeral. This includes recording the duration of device sessions and metadata, which is important for payout calculations in the next phase of development.

They have also been closing out final changes to Vault ACL, finishing the month with an ACL onboard script that’ll be used to automate the founding node migration away from the current ACL implementation.

API’s test suite has been extended even further. All of the 15,000+ database operations generated from the ~1,000 unit tests are now stored as a snapshot and replayed against each data connector module. you can see the new testing module at https://github.com/dadi/test-tools and an example of it in action at https://travis-ci.org/dadi/api-mongodb/jobs/551251808

Our code quality tools have been improved with consistent linting and code formatting (https://github.com/dadi/code-standards) now applied to Publish and API.

The team have built and released automated deployment for Gateways on test.network and have also introduced the first full build of Vault, a vital new component for the next iteration of network ACL. Account registration for ACL was also progressed. This is the last core component required before we start the much anticipated mainnet release.

A bunch of work has been done to simplify the way that ACL is passed between Agent and Host, which makes the self onboarding process faster, more lightweight and more secure.

We have been hard at work defining and building out the Edge DNS layer, and completed the addition of support for AAAA, CNAME and TXT records.

We completed and successfully deployed auto SSL generation and distribution to the network, so SSL is enabled by default and is now free for all network customers. You can read about this here: https://dadi.cloud/en/knowledge/network/edge-ssl/

🔗API update

API version 5 was released! Release notes as follows: https://github.com/dadi/api/releases/tag/v5.0.0 And documentation can be found here: https://github.com/dadi/api/releases/tag/v5.0.0

🔗Publish update

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.

A network ready build of Publish is also in testing.

🔗Highlighted customer stories

🔗Ecohustler

Ecohustler went viral. One of their articles (https://ecohustler.com/article/one-corporation-to-pollute-them-all/) was picked up by just about every social platform you can imagine.

At peak the site was receiving 1k+ concurrent connections. That’s an increase in traffic of 16,566%. Pretty significant!

Uptime during the stampede? 100%

🔗The Foundation

Our charitable foundation attended Rightscon in Tunis, where they met with other organisations and charities to discuss how technology can be leveraged to properly support human rights around the world.

They are continuing to develop 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 is active across all of our community channels, and we operate on the basis of as full a level of transparency as possible. You can always reach out to us. If you don’t get a reply to a question 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-june-07th-2019/

Our next AMA will take place on Friday the 12th of July.

The session kicks off at 2pm UTC on Telegram, Reddit and Discord: get you questions in now.

🔗Weekly updates

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