Good evening everyone 👋

To those of you that have joined the community in the last week, welcome!

Around 3,500 XE has been paid out to Host nodes over the last week, with the automated earnings oracle processing payouts daily. The team has been monitoring this - as I’m sure you have too! - and it’s running perfectly.

There have been a few questions about expanding the Stargate & Gateway layers: we’re working towards this. We’ll be adding several new points of presence to the network’s Gateway layer soon, and later on, more Stargates too.

This week...

Earnings v0.5.2 was deployed to mainnet. This version added hourly/daily snapshot aggregators and APIs, along with fixes and improvements around the payments API.

Stargate v2.4.0-150 was deployed to mainnet. This release introduced geolocation to sessions, along with some improvements to the sessions API endpoints. It also included a number of improvements to network authentication and service integration management.

Currently, geolocation is only partially activated while we run tests, but we'll be looking at enabling this for all network nodes next week inline with some super exciting updates to Explorer 👀

Gateway v2.3.0-91 was deployed to mainnet. This release focused mostly on the service layer: CDN, Storage, etc, and the way that requests are routed to Hosts, along with service integrations.

This version also includes a number of fixes, and supports the geolocation work mentioned above. As we run tests on the service layer, you may notice your Hosts being more active!

Host v2.2.0-51 was deployed to mainnet. This release focused on CDN image manipulation functionality, as CDN is no longer a separate service but internal to the Host application. This reduces the complexity of how Hosts operate, while also reducing the latency of requests.

All of the above network updates also included regular security patches.

Finally, Index v1.18.4 was deployed to mainnet. This deployment introduced session synchronisation and device availability calculations. We'll be testing this over the next few days and should enable these endpoints soon.

We’re almost ready to open up the iOS mobile wallet for open beta. We’re just working through the last of the optimisations, ensuring that the app only uses the least amount of data possible while still remaining responsive and fast. We expect this to be complete by early next week and will announce instructions on how to join the open beta as soon as it’s ready.