Good evening all 👋

This week we expanded the Gateway layer and now have points of presence in 8 locations around the world, with more on the way. This has had a tremendous positive impact on the performance of the network, with average round trip latency times (RTT) for Host jobs reducing from 2.7 seconds to 200 ms. This measures the time it takes for a message to travel from a Stargate to a Host and back (Stargate -> Gateway -> Host -> Gateway -> Stargate). Hosts are now connecting to their local Gateway and customer traffic is now being handled by local Gateways too. This in turn has increased the performance of delivering content to consumers, with job processing being 10 times faster on average. A tremendous improvement and a great milestone for the network.

We’ve also maintained 235+ nodes on the network over the last week, and are getting ever closer to the 250 mark. If you have stakes but you haven’t onboarded nodes yet, it’s super easy, just follow the onboarding guide (and if you get stuck, ask a member of the community or core team):

https://wiki.edge.network/contributing-to-the-network/setting-up-a-host

For the last few weeks, we’ve been so busy working on getting the account system up and running and on expanding and optimising the network, that we completely forgot to tell you (though we noticed at the time) that XE had its first mainnet birthday. We’re not one to forget a birthday so, while we’re a few weeks late, let’s all wish our blockchain a belated happy first birthday!

https://xe.network/block/1

Now, last week, we ran a little competition to see if we could hit 10% of the supply being staked, with the highest contributor(s) receiving a prize of 2,500 XE. We had four wallets stake XE over this past week, with 13 Host stakes and 1 Gateway stake being created (57,500 XE) . While two of the wallets staked 6 Hosts each (great effort, xe_abbf2b…cad910 and xe_23f0C1…A85403), the winner is xe_6c511F…372859 with a total staked of 25,000 XE. Your prize will be on its way soon. ✨

Unfortunately, we’ve had some illness in the team this week, with one of our engineers out with COVID. This has led to a slight slowdown in relation to the account project, but work hasn’t stopped and we’ve been hard at work refining the user interface and are on track to open this up in the next couple of weeks. The team have also been working on distributed file storage with the network, as we look to really harness the power of the nodes out there. More on this soon.