Weekly Update: W/C 24th July, 2023

Good evening @everyone 👋

As you saw earlier, this week has seen some exciting changes to the account system. We’ve been working on improving the usability of the account system recently, and are excited to deliver these improvements.

Yesterday, several Edge Account updates were deployed to mainnet. These were Account v1.17.1, Account API v1.18.0, Mailer v2.1.0 & v2.1.1. With these updates, the account system now:

— Generates invoices on a monthly basis. This not only reduces the amount of transactions flowing through the blockchain, but also removes barriers between us and customers who traditionally expect monthly billing; — Allows customers to pay by credit card. Again, aimed at reducing barriers for new customers, you can now pay for your services on a monthly basis using a credit (or debit) card. All revenue remains on-chain, as all the system does is purchase the amount of XE required to settle your invoice; — Create an account and sign in with email. Anonymous accounts aren’t going anywhere, and all accounts still have a unique, secret account number associated with them, but users can now create accounts with emails and, if you have emails associated with your account, sign in with them too. This makes it even easier to create and manage your Edge account;

We’re really excited about these changes. Freedom of access and freedom of use remains central to the project and there are no plans to do away with anonymous accounts. Adding an email address to your account is optional, and you can fund your account by transferring XE directly from another wallet without using a payment card. The focus here is about lowering the barrier to access, and part of that means providing interfaces that work in a recognisable way.

As we start to ramp up sales this will become ever more important. When a potential customer is looking at Edge alongside existing, more traditional cloud platforms, it’s critical that we’re not putting any barriers in front of their decision.

But wait.. this isn’t all we have been busy with this week!

We have been working on multi-Stargate for a while now, putting in place all the changes required to decentralise the authoritative Stargate layer. While we have a number of Stargate machines running, only one has been performing network operations for Gateways and Hosts. This week we can happily say that we have now upgraded the testnet to multi-Stargate.

Currently we have 8 regions, each with a Gateway, and these have traditionally been managed and coordinated by a single Stargate. Now each region (on testnet) has its own Stargate. We’ll be rolling out multi-Stargate to mainnet in the coming weeks.

Take a look at the testnet nodes here: https://test.network/nodes

We also saw other releases this week:

— Account API v1.17.1 was deployed to mainnet. This patch fixed a bug with adding new two-factor authentication (2FA) devices;

— Stargate v2.18.1-308 was deployed to testnet, improving configuration management and reducing the amount of environment variables required for deployment;

— Earnings (unversioned) testnet deployments;

— Various updates behind-the-scenes account administration software.

Moving into next week, the main focus will shift back onto the website build. We’ll be continuing to build that out and get that ready, while also pushing on with moving multi-Stargate into mainnet. This will include some further testnet work testing multi-Stargate earnings.

Exciting stuff!

And that’s all for this week!

Enjoy your weekend 🍕🍻