Weekly Update: W/C 07th November, 2022

Joseph:

Good evening everyone 👋

Adam:

Evening all!

Joseph:

Before we get into the week’s deliveries and updates, I want to take a moment to talk about project governance for Edge.

As we’ve spoken about before - in fact as part of the very first project white paper - Edge is on a path towards becoming a fully decentralised organisation.

The infrastructure of the Web shouldn’t be in the hands of any single individual or organisation. It should be open and available to all to participate in and to benefit from. We are in a world where the vast majority of web services are run for the benefit of just a handful of organisations. And those organisations do not have your best interests at heart. Not only do you pay for their services, but in a very real sense, you are the product too: the data that flows in and out of their cloud platforms is monitored and monetised.

Edge aims to change this relationship… to give access to the wealth generation event that cloud services represent to everyone.

Later this year we will be launching project governance. Governance for Edge will exist as an on chain mechanism within XE. You will be able to connect an XE wallet; to create a governance stake; to raise proposals for the project; to view, comment and vote on existing proposals; and to access an archive of previous proposals.

The portal is a new platform built by the Edge core team. It will be fully open source and available for others to use and build on. It will be accompanied by documentation about how governance works for Edge, along with a guiding set of principles for anyone else to take and use.

We have taken this approach because we believe there is a need for a simple, clean and efficient set of governance interfaces. While there are platforms that exist elsewhere, they are generally over engineered and present barriers to participation.

Governance in the Edge Network is designed to be:

1. Participatory. Community participation is key to the success of the network. Governance must be informed and organised.
2. Consensus Oriented. There will be multiple points of view for each aspect of the network. The governance mechanism is designed to facilitate healthy and open debate.
3. Accountable. Proposals that are raised through the governance mechanism must be followed up on by the core team.
4. Transparent. Information must be freely available and directly accessible to those who will be affected by the proposals raised through governance.
5. Responsive. Proposals should be responded to within a reasonable timeframe.
6. Effective and Efficient. The governance mechanism should produce results that balance the needs of stakeholders while making the best use of the resources at hand.
7. Equitable and Inclusive. There should be no barriers to community involvement in governance.

The core team must abide by these guiding principles in relation to project governance, and publish proposals for any change to the network that materially impacts:

1. The tokenomics of the network
2. The involvement of the community in network governance
3. The ability of the community to contribute capacity to the network
4. The operation of the network as a services layer for Web3
5. Live or planned services on top of the network

Furthermore, no movement in the $XE held within the growth fund may be made without a proposal being raised and passed by the community.

While governance is open for anyone to participate in, there will be a membership layer as part of the DAO in time. You can think of this as the operational layer of the project. At the moment day-to-day operations are handled by the management team at the not for profit organisation. These operations will be moved to the DAO. The intention is that the membership layer acts as the steering committee/board for the project, reviewing and passing proposals, handling partnerships, listings and other organisational functions. Membership will be on an application basis, and its functions are likely to be accessed via the ownership of an NFT.

This side of things is still being worked out, and I’ll share more as the model evolves. Future changes will also be put to a governance vote.

Adam:

Exciting stuff!

Development of the governance portal and integration with XE is well underway and I look forward to our weekly updates over the next few weeks where we’ll be discussing the progress of the project with you, and maybe even a few sneak peaks!

Aside from the work on governance, this week we’ve been busy delivering updates to all corners of the network. The Community Wiki was updated on Monday with the very latest on projects, governance information, and commercial support.

Now we know that the explorer has been a little bit slow of late. The service that provides all the data for the explorer, Index, had reached the point where it was no longer performant for the amount of traffic it was receiving. We always knew this would be the case, and so the time had come to rebuild the Index API. Yesterday, Index v2.0.0 was released, and boy, is it fast!

If you pop on over to the explorer you’ll see just how quick it is. There are still a few more optimisations that we have planned for the future, but you should now be able to sort, search, and dig your way through blocks, transactions, stakes, and nodes, with minimal waiting time.

Index v2.0.1 followed shortly after containing a few minor fixes, and v2.0.2 and v2.0.3 were deployed today, again, with a few minor fixes.

Stargate v2.13.0 was deployed to mainnet, improving distributed networking, and making it ready for a multi-Stargate network. There is still work to be done but this is a step in the right direction. The minor update also introduced the ability for Index (and other apps) to connect to multiple Stargate and retrieve data such as session data & work snapshots.

Finally, Account v1.13.0 and Account API v1.9.0 were deployed to mainnet, adding VNC support for Edge Servers. This includes limited but working mobile support. We’ve done our best to make it accessible on mobile devices but if you have any issues, let us know.

VNC inside of the account interface

As a reminder, in your Edge account interface you’ll find a unique referral link, which you can share with your friends, colleagues, and social channels. You will receive 10% commission on the usage of anyone who signs up using your referral code for the lifetime of their engagement. This can easily add up to a highly significant amount

And that’s all for this week. Enjoy your weekends 🍻