Good evening @everyone 👋

I’m thrilled to announce that the account system will go live on Monday (15th August) 💥

This week the issue with the hypervisor layer was patched and Edge Servers in the new London zone are now operational. You’ll be able to create accounts, fund them with XE (or purchase XE with a credit or debit card) and spin up Edge Servers from as small as 1 vCPU, 512 MiB memory, 10 GiB disk space, and 10 Mbps of bandwidth, all the way up to 16 vCPU, 16 GiB memory, 512 GiB disk space, and 100 Mbps of bandwidth.

We’ve also been busy working on integrating CDN into the account system. Mechanisms for capturing billable resource usage have been integrated into Stargate & Gateway, though not yet released to mainnet. The account system interfaces (deployment and management of CDN services) will be next, along with DNS too. We’re planning to open up Storage for a public beta later this year too.

On behalf of the team I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while we ironed out the issues and got the account system up and running. We’re excited to open it up on Monday!

The network continues to run smoothly, with the average number of nodes above 200 for the week. We’re planning on expanding the Stargate layer soon, and are working through the requirements for this at the moment. Since expanding the Gateway layer, we’ve seen Host round-trip latency reduce massively, and we expect this to improve even more as we add more Gateway nodes.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Host round-trip latency measures the time it takes a message to travel to a Host and back again (Stargate -> Gateway -> Host -> Gateway -> Stargate). It’s essentially a test of network transmission speed, a useful metric, though for end-user requests, the loop is much smaller and quicker. What should you read from this? The network is performing well.

In other news, work on the Mudas project has been pressing ahead. We can’t wait to share more with you but for now we’d like to leave you with this teaser. Who is this? And what’s going on? Soon you’ll be able to learn more about this Muda, his story, and get your hands on some of the best looking NFTs in the Web 3.0 space.