Good evening everyone 👋

I’m providing the core team update again this week as Joseph is away.

This is the final reminder ahead of the closing of the distribution period for $XE. It ends on the 4th of September. Here’s a how-to guide:

https://wiki.edge.network/support/claiming-xe

Final bridge testing ahead of opening has been completed. We are also writing up a how to guide, which will be added to the Community Wiki.

The opening of the bridge is looking likely to be on the 1st of September – mid next week.

We’re continuing to move our development channels away from Slack to Discord. This started a little over a week ago and has been going well. It’s making the team more present with the community and this is opening the potential for a positive feedback loop. Last week for example the colours of the new explorer were updated to provide a better contrast ratio on the back of community input. There were a whole bunch of other updates delivered to the new explorer too.

We have always planned to be developing in the open, and this supports that.

Since the release of the blockchain explorer this time last week, 9,597 blocks have been processed, with a steady average blocktime of 64 seconds, or roughly 56 blocks per hour.

If you’ve not checked it out yet, you can see it here:

https://xe.network

Today we released version 1.2.0 of the web wallet (https://wallet.xe.network), which introduces a whole bunch of improvements ahead of the Bridge opening next week. Transactions are now paginated, there have been numerous user interfaces fixes and tweaks for both mobile and desktop, and transactions now link directly through to the explorer.

Work on the mobile wallet app continued from the designs we showed you last week, with the screens now being designed in line with the look and feel of the web wallet and explorer.

Next up I’d like to talk a little bit about the evolution of our roadmaps. There’s been a blockchain-like storage solution within the network for some time, which among other things was used to store device contribution & earnings data. The original plan for this was to evolve the dag-based solution, maintaining it centrally to the network.