Weekly Update: W/C 05th September, 2022

Good evening @everyone 👋

This week Edge DNS became available in the account system. Edge DNS is powered by the Stargate layer, made up of 26 nodes located around the world providing low latency, high resiliency domain name resolution.

Adding domains (also known as zones) to Edge DNS is easy, and follows all the same conventions as other DNS providers.

We’ll be writing a guide on how to use DNS for beginners soon.

Edge DNS is competitively priced, with each zone costing $1 per 30 days, billed daily, unless you have any other Edge services in which case Edge DNS is completely free.

There are no usage charges, no matter how many queries Edge DNS answers. Try it out today by heading to: https://account.edge.network/

Alongside DNS, the team also delivered a number of updates to the account system, including the ability to display announcements in the account interface. There were some user interface fixes and improvements too, and some behind the scenes API improvements as well.

Over the past few weeks we’ve spoken about legacy stake migrations. This process has now come to a natural conclusion, with all requests having been processed. The final stake transfers will take place towards the end of this month, after which all stakes will then be present and accounted for on the XE mainnet. Thank you to everyone for your patience while we processed these.

The team are now busy working away on integrating CDN into the account system. We’ve already made some great progress with content delivery metrics being recorded through Gateways and Stargates, which will be consumed by the billing system. We think CDN should be generally available within 3-4 weeks, and we’ll keep everyone updated on our progress.

Thanks to community member @d736nsd64 for his help in improving the explorer metadata. With his help we’ve been able to go through a number of wallets used in an official capacity by Edge and add names and descriptions to them. The support of the community is hugely valuable to the project. If you want to pitch in, please just raise your hand – there’s no contribution too small.

Now for those of you who like stats and metrics, the XE blockchain mainnet has been running for 15 months now. In that time, there have been over 627,000 blocks, with over 15,000 transactions, an average of 33 per day. The XE nodes remain in constant communication with each other, but are designed to work independently and recover from any adverse network events. There have been a number of these over the last year or so, with XE always recovering gracefully, thanks to the simplicity of the XE protocol, which ensures that forks and supersessions are handled quickly and efficiently.

The XE nodes are separated geographically and topologically, ensuring that they are highly available at all times. The nodes form a mesh network, with messages passed among each other, coordinating and negotiating blocks & transactions, ensuring eventual consistency of the blockchain. Amazingly, there have been over 7,200,000,000 individual messages passed among the XE nodes since block 0.

Remember that your Edge Account includes a unique referral link. If you use this when sharing Edge with your friends, colleagues and social channels, you will receive 10% commission on their usage of the network for the lifetime of their engagement. This can easily add up to a highly significant amount.

This is the 179th of these updates if you can believe it! We enjoy writing them and it’s great to have an archive of how the network has developed over the years, including successes, failures and all of the little pivots that make up the day to day of a startup. As we move more and more services to a fully live footing, it would be good to hear if there’s anything further that you’d like to see included in the updates.

And that’s about it for this week, my friends!

Enjoy your weekends.