Weekly Update: W/C 19th September, 2022

Good evening everyone 👋

The team have been hard at work again this week, putting the finishing touches on the client-facing CDN management panels (see below), including an easy to use configuration tool that will make setting up content delivery deployments a breeze. We’ve also been working behind-the-scenes on the interfacing of the account system and Stargates, where the real magic happens as changes propagate through the network, first to Stargates, then to their Gateways, and from there to their Hosts.

Sneak peak! 👀

But that’s not all… we’ve also been working on the mechanisms by which Stargates report content delivery usage metrics to the account system, so that you can see how your content is being delivered. This data will enable you to gain insights and make optimisation decisions, see the impact of caching rules, and more.

Additionally it will power billing for content delivery, which will be a simple pay-as-you-go model with two flat rates: one for requests, and one for outbound traffic. There will be no charges for inbound traffic from origins. We’ll talk through this in more detail soon.

Meanwhile, in the background, XE continues along, all systems nominal. The block time remains just over a minute. This week there have been roughly 500 transactions processed across the network, and 9,500 blocks mined.

The connections between the geographically and topologically spaced XE nodes have been so calm, so very calm, that the chart I wanted to show you is… empty. There hasn’t been a single network socket event in the last 7 days. Not a single disconnection, reconnection, timeout, nothing. In the event of a network outage or adverse network conditions (such as a network-split), the XE protocol ensures that all nodes communicate with each other and synchronise, returning to a shared, common state.

Index continues to serve, among others, the Wallets, the Explorer, and the account system, peaking at around 10 requests per second. Stargates no longer use Index for stake checks, but maintain their own local, optimised copies of the XE stake ledger.

In total, Index maintains records of all 646,000+ blocks and all 16,000+ transactions, along with various index metadata and composed blockchain data too. Everything is nominal.

CDN continues to deliver content with the help of 228+ Hosts with a cached content delivery ratio of 84.6%. This figure fluctuates however, sometimes reaching as high as 98%, and as we introduce more traffic to the network, the figure will stabilise, fluctuating less.

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.

And that’s about it for this week. 📈🍷

Enjoy your weekends folks!