Good evening everyone 👋

This week we saw the number of connected Hosts surpass 150. We also completed another batch of stake migrations, with most legacy stakes having now been migrated over to XE. This brings the total amount staked to 2,725,000 XE which constitutes 5.3% of supply.

Last week we let you know that we’ve held off manually processing January payouts so that we could put in place the automated earnings oracle.

That’s now up and running on mainnet 🔥, with node earnings being calculated every 5 minutes. We’ll be monitoring this over the next week to ensure that everything is correct and plan to enable payouts on 1st March. Pending payouts for Jan & Feb will then be quickly processed with automated payouts happening daily from then on 🎉

If you can’t wait to see what this looks like, head over to https://test.network/transactions to take a look at what hourly node earnings will look like. We’re also working on showing the actual data behind each payout in the explorer. Stay tuned for more on that in the coming weeks 📈

This week also saw the release of version 1.6.0 of the XE blockchain nodes to mainnet. This update, along with CLI v1.6.0, introduced a new requirement for onboarding devices. Transactions to assign devices to stakes now require signed messages from device wallets, improving the fidelity of stake device data on the blockchain. If you have an older version of CLI, you’ll need to update before you can onboard new devices.

This is easy, just run edge update.

Index v1.16.0 was released to mainnet today, introducing sorting functionality and introducing it to the stakes endpoint, while also making a small change to the gas rates endpoint. Sorting will be rolled out to other endpoints and implemented in the explorer over the next few weeks.

Wallet v1.13.1 was also released to mainnet today. This update included a number of fixes and improvements around the staking interfaces. It also introduced a new HashLink component to make transaction and stake hashes look and work better. Finally, it includes a patch to the withdrawal functionality which relates to the gas rates endpoint change mentioned above.

The team has been busy working on the new Edge account portal, and we’re looking to open this up soon. This account portal will let customers manage their various Edge services, with the first service available being Edge Servers (beta).