Good evening all 👋

Hopefully you’ve all been using suncream in this heatwave (30º C+ here in the UK 🔥), but we don’t need to worry about that, we’ve been indoors, in the shade, working hard to get the account system ready to go live. We’re currently on course to have it live in just over two weeks. Everything is working well and we’re in the throes of putting the finishing touches in place.

Gateways have been staked and prepared for expansion, which is now expected to happen on Monday. Once the additional Gateways go live, we should notice Hosts connecting to their local Gateway, though the internet can be a bit weird at times so if you see some strange connections, just let us know.

Stargates are in the process of being staked for the DNS layer, ahead of expansion of full Stargate nodes later this year. So far, this brings us to 514 stakes, totalling 5,070,000 XE (9.9% of supply). In fact, we’re so close to 10% (only 30,000 XE) that we’ve decided to run a little ✨ community competition ✨!

Over the next week, if we hit 5,100,000 XE staked (10% of supply!) then the person that stakes the most over this period will receive 2,500 XE from the growth fund. In the event of a tie, the prize fund will be shared. The competition will end at 20:00 UTC next Friday.

This week saw an increased number of deployments.

Explorer saw three deployments: v1.20.4, v1.20.5, and v1.20.6, which introduced bug fixes for pending transactions, certain transaction values, and a tweak to the overview page. Thanks to everyone for the bug reports.

Stargate saw a number of deployments too, with v2.10.1-222, v2.10.2-223, and v2.10.5-228, along with Gateway v2.9.4-146 and Host v2.4.6-82. These updates addressed a number of issues, including but not limited to, performance enhancements, monitoring improvements, session management, network chatter, and inter-node communication.

For the update to Hosts which went out on Wednesday, we spaced updates 500 ms apart, which meant two Hosts per second started to update. This led to a quick yet smooth update propagation, as can be seen in these two charts: