Weekly Update: W/C 15th February, 2021

Hi everyone 👋

It’s Friday again and we’re racing towards the end of the month 🏃‍♂️

TNC remain on track for unlock next week.

“Next week is the d-day for everyone” – Jason

For those concerned about this slipping again, as we’ve previously discussed, there is a rollout plan for $EDGE in place and the Edge token will be released regardless of what happens with the TNC unlock.

As my co-founder Chris said, “we are relaunching $EDGE soon with or without TNC. Our hope is that the merger will play out, that our current supporters are rewarded for their initial involvement in our project, and that we can give the tokenonmics of the platform the support it needs with TNC’s help. In that case we would reissue Edge in partnership with TNC. Supply will be controlled and distributed with the primary goal of building the network. This will include the involvement of existing holders.”

“But it’s not the end of the world if that doesn’t happen. If it doesn’t, we’ll reissue $EDGE with recut tokenomics, again with the main objective being to expand the network and its use. Might take us longer that way, but we’re still committed to doing that.”

The underlying utility of the token is to facilitate the creation of a secure edge network through the staking and rewarding of devices. This hasn’t changed, but the function of the token is also being expanded to include network governance.

Participation in governance will be available to all staked nodes, and it will also be possible to stake specifically to participate in governance (i.e. without running a node). Stakers will be able to create and vote upon proposals, with proposals requiring certain majorities in order to be passed. Stargates will be given a collective right to veto or to propose amendments to proposals.

A governance framework will be published, outlining all aspects of the development and running of the network that should be run through the governance function.

We are also creating a growth fund, an allocation of tokens whose us will be directed through the governance function. This is designed to be used for and by initiatives that help to drive the network forward, such as marketing ideas, the development of products that run on network services, exchange listings or rewards.

The plan is for the release of the new token to happen in the near future: in March or April. Most of the work involved, such as contract authoring, Console updates etc., has already been completed, and full details will be released soon.

Plans for the evolution of Edit.com moved ahead significantly, with interface changes developed that will provide a site builder to enable the grid based design of mobile-first websites based on a wide series of templates. This will dovetail with the editorial interfaces that are already in place, enabling the on-demand creation of sites of any shape and size.

The roadmap for Edit includes the use of semi-dynamic frontend apps, something that we’ve been doing as standard for the last year in preparation for these developments.

This will enable Edit to publish sites directly into the Edge network, meaning that we will have an on demand platform for the creation of fully decentralised sites, hosted entirely in the Edge network.

“Edit on the Edge” anyone?

It’s a pretty exciting set of developments that should bring a lot of use to network services.

Work continues on the implementation of the governance model and on-chain staking. Integration of the staking contract & the network is progressing well.

We have an update to edge-cli ready to go live next week which contains the hooks in support of the updates.

This update also moves edge-cli away from arch specific images - e.g. agent-amd64, agent-arm - to a docker manifest which automatically pulls the correct version based on the system arch. This has prompted a few changes to CLI to handle some issues relating to the way CLI chooses the correct image on a cold start.

Scheduled maintenance was performed on the network image registry which continues to maintain a 100% uptime. The first version of the load balanced queue was deployed onto test.network this week. This is a large overhaul of the queueing system that analyses devices based on their current and past performance and assigns requests based on this impact score.

A few small fixes are required on the back of this week’s testing after we expect to ship it for production. All being well it will move on to mainnet at the end of next week.

And that’s it for this week.

Enjoy your weekends.