Good evening @everyone 👋

This week we’ve been laser focused on getting the account system live. We deployed all systems to mainnet, and started our live testing using live XE. You may have seen some of the invoice payment transactions already, but if not, here’s what they look like:

https://xe.network/transaction/12fea1fb0f3ac7d06c7ba88b85046a224db928978ad88e4b32770518e7a270fa

We’re planning to open up the system early next week. In the beginning, there will be Edge Servers available, with billing in XE. We’re then going to be following up over the coming months with:

• FIAT payments (funding your account via traditional credit/debit cards) • DNS (using our globally available DNS service) • CDN (using v2 — the network you guys contribute hosts to)

Once we’ve completed the above, we’ll then be introducing options to fund your account with other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, EDGE, xAsset, and more. The first step is to go live with billing in XE but we can’t wait to start pushing the other updates out after that!

Earlier in the week, Index v1.25.0 and Explorer v1.21.1 were both deployed to mainnet. These updates fixed the stake count on the Wallets page (which now exclude released stakes), and also added the ability to browse Gateways connected to a Stargate and Hosts connected to a Gateway, e.g. https://xe.network/node/xe_63cE613569a384df030F5a4D27C88df1C04cDCaA

Explorer v1.21.2 was deployed to mainnet along with Wallet v1.18.2 which included fixes for displaying the correct node status. This needed patching after we slowed down the heart rate of the network (every node has a heartbeat… the network is alive!) to reduce inter-node chatter.

A few weeks ago we proposed to create a Community Advocate role. Following discussions in the proposal thread, we felt there wasn’t enough of a demand to justify the time and effort it would take to set up and run a Community Advocate program, so we've decided not to go ahead with the Community Advocate role. Instead we’re going to look into more ways of encouraging regular members to boost their engagement in wider circles. Speaking of which…

We're looking for suggestions for ways of increasing engagement among the community. What things would you like to see here in the Discord, as well as out in the wider community (Twitter, Reddit, etc) that would increase your engagement in the project? Let us know.