Good evening @everyone 👋

Last week we delayed the launch of the account system while we worked with a trusted partner to bring online new capacity in the London zone of the Edge Network. We’re excited to share that this capacity is now online and we’ve been integrating this into the Edge Servers system this week. We’ll be running some additional tests over the weekend and, all being well, expect to open up the account system next week. We’re stoked to get this out to you and hope you are too!

The team has been busily working away on the FIAT integration at the same time. Last week some of the team here in the UK took a couple of days away from their computers as the mercury inched above 40 ºC, but that hasn’t slowed them down, and the FIAT integration is coming along in leaps and bounds. We expect the core of this functionality to be complete by the end of next week, and to have it live soon after, following testing.

Fiat payments are hooked directly into the token economy, with payments triggering XE purchases automatically. Here’s the first of these on the XE testnet:

https://test.network/transaction/ab9392afe6123caa44b85fe90431a4330f6cfc4cd8b53c9677cacb5aa4ce8e9a

I’ve touched on the tokenomics of the accounts system in Discord previously, and will be writing this up in more detail soon. But in short, we expect the flow to looks something like this:

Fiat Purchase > XE Purchase > XE Burn

You’re probably wondering what’s next? We’re going to be doing some additional work on Stargate, Gateway and CDN; integrating CDN usage into the new XE billing system; and making CDN deployments available to you through the account portal.

We’re also going to be opening up our global DNS layer via the account portal. With this we’ll have Edge Servers, Edge CDN, and Edge DNS, all online and payable via XE (with the option to fund your account with FIAT).

Behind the scenes the team has been working on our infrastructure setup, relocating a number of core services onto Edge Servers. Eat your dog food is a core tenet of good software development practice… and I’m happy to report that Edge Servers are working fabulously.

It’s been a busy week, with everyone heads down focused on delivering the accounts system.