Weekly Update: W/C 16th August, 2021

Hi everyone 👋

I’m providing the core team update this week as Joseph is away.

First things first I’d like to remind you all that the distribution claim period for $XE ends on the 4th of September. Here’s a how-to guide:

https://wiki.edge.network/support/claiming-xe

We’re in the midst of moving all of our core dev channels out of Slack to Discord. As we move towards the launch of community governance this seems like a logical step, bringing the day to day dev closer to the community. In time the plan is to open a bunch of these channels up as well.

Joseph mentioned that founding Nodes are going to be retired in the near future. A point of clarity on this front is that the retirement relates to the software of the nodes rather than the hardware. If you want to reinstall the device with on-chain staking when it goes live, you will be able to do so. While we see the older Pi’s as low powered now, they still have a role to play, providing storage capacity for example.

Today XE Index v1.3 was released, bringing endpoints for specific blocks, adding confirmations to the individual transaction endpoint, and introducing the since parameter for blocks and transactions, allowing you to filter your results by a timestamp.

And, making the data that the index and blockchain APIs provide more accessible, it is my pleasure to present to you tonight the XE Explorer:

https://xe.network

This first version of the blockchain explorer allows you to browse the blocks and transactions made on the XE blockchain, and in time we’ll also be adding the ability to inspect wallets and stakes, and later on, governance transactions too.

Viewing blocks shows data associated with the block, including transactions.

Viewing transactions allows you to view all data relating to the transaction, including the raw data straight from the API.

Over the next week, we’ll be releasing a number of follow up tweaks and improvements too.

The core team have also been exploring potential upgrades to our container management infrastructure, which while it’s been running well over the last few years, does require some manual maintenance from time to time. The team have also been looking into improvements to the way that devices manage logs, with a view to improving the way that logs are produced and reported to the network.

While development of the native Android and iOS wallet functionality has been ongoing, this week Joseph & I sat down and worked through the UX for the wallet. The wallet app will support multiple XE & Ethereum wallets, allow the sending and receiving of XE, EDGE, and ETH, along with exchange functionality powered by the bridge.

The blockchain has been stable and running fine over the last week, with the blocktime remaining stable around the one minute mark, and all blockchain nodes operating nominally.

The latest episode of our little podcast, Conversations on the Edge, has just been released:

The bridge remains on track for opening at the end of the month. I’ve been leading some additional testing and can confirm that it’s working nicely.

We’re still on the hunt for new core team members, both backend and frontend. Hit me up if you’re interested or know anyone that might fit the bill. There’s a referral fee in it for any successful hires.

If you missed last weeks update, you can read it on our site here: https://ed.ge/update/2021/08/09

And that’s it for now – have a great weekend, and see you next week.