Weekly Update: W/C 13th December, 2021

Good evening everyone 👋

Joseph is locked in meetings on a new and exciting network engagement, so I’m going to be providing this week’s update. It’s going to be a great one!

As you may have seen in Discord, we’ve been very busy with Stargate, Gateway, and Host development lately, with non-stop updates being deployed to test.network throughout the week and late into the night.

While we’ve been able to manually update network nodes during the development period, before we’re able to open up onboarding on mainnet, the network needs to be capable of automatically delivering updates.

I’m happy to tell you that the network now has this capability, and with that, onboarding of devices onto the mainnet is now open 💥

I know lots of you have been waiting for this, so to you I say thanks for your patience. For those of you who are new, I say welcome aboard!

Adding devices to the network is quite simple, but there are a few steps you’ll need to follow. We’ve written a handy guide for that, which you can see below, but if you need further help, pop into the onboarding channel in Discord. Here’s the guide:

https://wiki.edge.network/contributing-to-the-network/setting-up-a-host

Each device will require a stake, with Hosts requiring a stake of 2,500 XE. To read more about staking, take a look at https://wiki.edge.network/contributing-to-the-network/an-introduction-to-staking, or feel free to raise a question in the staking channel in Discord.

For those who are new or folks who would like a refresher, there are three node types: Stargates, Gateways, and Hosts. To learn more about how the network is structured, have a read of https://wiki.edge.network/contributing-to-the-network/network-nodes.

For those of you who have legacy stakes that need transferring over, we’ve been busy preparing for this and are now ready to start this process. To begin, you’ll need to fill in a form providing us with details of your existing stakes. We’ll then verify these and migrate them to the XE wallet you provide. You can find the form here:

https://ed.ge/stake-migration-request

You may notice the version number of the network node software is slightly different to usual. These version numbers make up a major, minor, and patch as usual, but also contain the build number. The network mainnet is currently running the following versions:

Stargate v2.0.0-61 which acts as the authoritative layer of the network, managing Gateway connections and coordinating Gateways and Hosts through their respective Gateways.

Gateway v2.0.0-43 which acts as the gateway into the network. These nodes connect to Stargates, and receive connections from Hosts. They route job requests from internet consumers through to Hosts, and route the responses back to the consumers.

Host v2.0.0-35 which acts as the worker for the network. These nodes are what make up the bulk of the network, and do the heavy lifting. Receiving jobs from Gateways, whether this is asset storage, manipulation, retrieval, or processing.

Auto Update v1.0.0 which is a small update utility that network nodes use when it’s time to do the switcheroo and swap from the old software version to the new one. It’s really cool, and a new addition to the line up.

Watching CLI interact with the chain on your device in real time is kinda awesome:

Also this week:

Index v1.10.0 was deployed. This introduced the ability to filter blocks by whether or not they’re empty, which will be utilised in an upcoming Explorer release.

Explorer v1.11.0 was deployed. This update allowed pending transactions to be linked to, showing their status, as well as fixing a number of smaller user interface issues, allowing stakes to be searched for, and swapping the panels at the top of the index page.

CLI v1.5.0 released tonight for mainnet, though testnet has seen a whole bunch of deployments this week as we’ve been busy getting it ready. There’s still work to be done on the user experience but functionally, with CLI you can create and restore wallets, manage transactions, create and manage stakes, and of course, onboard and manage your network devices. To get the latest version of CLI run edge update, or if you don’t have it, download it directly from: https://files.edge.network/cli/mainnet

The latest episode of our little podcast dropped. You can listen to it here:

And the latest issue of our weekly newsletter has just been delivered. If you’re not subscribed, sign up! https://edge.press

The latest issue can be found here: https://ed.ge/digest/issue-25

We’ve had some great interviews for new roles in the team and expect to have new hires in place in January. Even so, if you’re looking for a challenge and like what we’re building, why not drop us an application. More information: https://wiki.edge.network/supporting-the-network/careers

Finally, if you missed last weeks update you can read it on site now: https://ed.ge/update/2021/12/06

And that’s it! Happy staking 🍺