Weekly Update: W/C 18th January, 2021

Hi everyone 👋

The split out of Console and Services completed and is now live.

This streamlines the sign up process for services by focusing the individual areas. Console is all about contributing to the network and services is all about service consumption.

You can see the new services area of the platform here:

https://services.edge.network

We’ve also added a “Getting Started” section to the documentation. This hand holds you through the setup and deployment process.

You can see it here:

https://edge.network/en/content-delivery/documentation/

Getting an Edge content delivery deployment live takes a matter of minutes. And working with it in your app, website or game is straight forward.

We’ll be publishing a further article on this next week.

The team are continuing to work through updates to the site to better support service use, bringing greater clarity and focused messaging to the foreground. This is all about driving adoption, the key focus for this year (alongside the delivery of new services). Expect to see many more changes in the coming weeks and months.

We continued to migrate some more packages out of the private utilities package and into new open source repositories.

This now includes databank:

https://github.com/edge/databank

Databank is a simple object storage frontend for your data backend.

A major milestone was hit this week with the completion and testnet deployment of certman. Certman is a network native package that offers a globally accessible SSL certificate cache, handling the persistence of ACME credentials and full certificates, as well as an in-memory store for intermediate tokens and RSA’s.

It’s hard to overstate how much of an achievement this is in a decentralised context. It’s been a long time in the making.

Previously a certificate that was generated by Gateway had to be passed to Stargate, then to API and then out to all other Stargate’s before being globally distributed.

Certman cuts out all of these steps. It’s lightweight, incredibly responsive, and makes the network fully compatible with LetsEncrypt’s recent change to the validation process, which now uses a tri-location check on each domain.

Work on the contracts relating to node staking progressed well, with testnet contracts in place and tested. The updates include integration with Metamask.

We are moving to fully autonomous staking for Hosts.

Changes to node performance monitoring and how the network deals with bad actors was moved forward as part of this work. In future stakes will be penalised on a progressive basis where a node is found to be either persistently failing or to have been intentionally interfered with (peer review in the network is used for this process). Any stake amount forfeited will be burned.

Full details on this will be released soon.

And that’s it for this week.

Enjoy your weekends.