Weekly Update: W/C 01st March, 2021

Hi everyone 👋

This is the one hundredth of these weekly updates. Quite the history! It’s been a good discipline to have, and I’ve really enjoyed doing them, so thank you to whoever it was in the community that first suggested them. And here’s to the next 100 🍻

It’s been an exciting week here, with big strides made in development as we move towards the reissue of Edge. The team has the best momentum it’s had in some time – you can feel the energy and the focus.

I have Adam with me this evening, who’s going to give you further insight into the approach for the implementation of $EDGE.

Adam:

Evening all!

A number of you have spoken about the issue of gas fees in the Ethereum network and we’ve seen mention of potentially using ZK-Rollups and the like for staking and network transactions.

We’ve made use of an internal blockchain for tracking jobs for a while now, and it’s worked really well, but given our vision for the future and the prohibitive cost of using the Ethereum network for staking and governance, we’re evolving our native chain and are introducing wallet functionality, as well as providing a bridge between the Edge Chain and the Ethereum network (where $EDGE will be a tradable ERC-20 token).

This approach abstracts away the contract costs that come with running on the Ethereum network, and gives us the opportunity to introduce certain features to the Edge blockchain that will provide an additional level of traceability and transparency in the network.

Those of you who have been with us for a while will know that we’ve spoken about the use of the internal chain and our vision for it for quite a while, and this marks the next step in realising that vision, as we push forward to further decentralise more of the network.

We’ll be speaking more about this in the coming weeks, but the blockchain runs in the Stargate layer of the network, has a single distributed ledger made up of blocks that hold not only wallet to wallet transactions, but also network contribution and value attribution in the case of staked devices that are contributing to the operation of the network.

We’re also going to be releasing a blockchain explorer, allowing anyone to see how much work the network has performed on a block-by-block basis, and follow the distribution of earnings to the contributing network nodes.

This is super exciting, and I can’t wait to share more about this over the coming weeks.

Joseph:

Thank you Adam!

In other news, the team continued work on staking & integration, completing a whole raft of functionality including stake, unstake, cancelunstake, withdraw, burn, and update events, linking that up successfully with network API.

As well as the huge effort focused on $EDGE, the team also rolled through updates to core certificates in the network, covering Stargate functionality, Vault, Jenkins, Registries and Auth.

The team also prepared updates for Monday morning’s mainnet update, which will include releases for agent & cli, completing the transition to the new naming convention discussed in last week’s update.

And they started work on a deep store for long tail device activity (deeper metrics that live off chain).

We attended a handful of new business meetings virtually. And Edit kicked off a new engagement, implementing tools in the platform in support of a blockchain related start up. Work continued on the three subscription-based platforms currently being supported by the Edit team.

And finally: we’re in the early stages of developing a research programme with a leading university relating to the environmental impact of cloud computing and the benefits that Edge brings to the table. This is a major area of focus for us, as the emission savings vs. the traditional cloud are considerable.

Being able to fully quantify this in an accredited way will enable the unlocking of the value of the carbon saving. This is significant when looked at through the lens of both businesses benefit from network use and future revenue potential through the sale of released offset.

And that’s it for this week.

Enjoy your weekends.