Good evening everyone 👋

First up, the XE mobile app. As you know we originally planned for a beta release at the end of last year, but pushed this back to give us time to enhance the application and to ensure that it stands up to the quality expected from the project. We’re around two weeks out from the first public release for iOS and it’s looking great.

The focus of the app is all about lowering the barriers to use of the network. It helps to achieve this by allowing access to XE across a greater set of devices. And of course in time a network node will be bundled into the application as well, unlocking the ~60% spare capacity that exists in the average mobile phone.

Here's a screenshot to whet your appetite:

The mobile app’s source code will be released in full alongside the beta.

As we continue to move towards full open source development, we’re continuously refining the way that we manage our projects and repositories. You may have noticed the addition of contributor guidelines to some of our public repositories. We’re rolling out a simple set of guidelines to help you more easily work on the projects, so if you’re interested in writing code but unsure of what to do, that’s a great place to start.

In the same vein, we’re also planning to open source the explorer in the coming weeks, and look forward to sharing that with you all.

We’ve seen some great work in the community with contributions to the Wallet repository and even full extensions, such as:

https://github.com/w4zzz4/edge-network-tools

We’re really thrilled to see this level of input – exactly what the project needs to help accelerate development.

Next up: we originally required a minimum uptime of 20% for contributed Hosts, however with improvements to the network in v2 relating to session management, this requirement is no longer needed.

If nodes are offline, they won’t earn, but for those devices that may have intermittent connectivity or whose contributions may be linked to machine inactivity, being able to connect and disconnect from the network is essential, so we will be supporting this.

The team held a series of meetings with potential partners, ranging from Enterprises to other crypto projects. There’s a lot bubbling on this front. As soon as we can name names, we will!