Welcome to Streamr’s core dev team update for July 2019. You’re supposed to take a break in the summer months — not us. As we approach some crucial shipping deadlines, we have seen progress on multiple fronts including Network, Community Products and the Core app.
Before jumping into our internal progress, we would like to mention that one of our IoT partners, Elk, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign. Amazingly, they reached their funding goal in less than two days. They are building a development board for blockchain and the decentralized web. Check out this awesome video on punch bag payouts which details one of the many possible use cases when merging automated crypto payments and IoT. And if you’re a fan, like we are, give them your support 🙂
It combines the simplicity of Arduino along with native support for decentralized networks. With only a few lines of code you can build IoT that interfaces with Ethereum, IPFS, Whisper, and more!
Users will be able to stream data from the board easily to Streamr Marketplace via one of our SDKs, like the Javascript library, which allows authentication via Ethereum account.
Returning to our core dev monthly update, on the Network front we have finalised the deployment of the testnet. We are planning to mirror data from production servers and gather vital metrics to verify the current performance level. What comes next is running comprehensive stress testing with many node instances. By September we should be able to get some initial results from the testnet (which we hope to share) and continue further improvement from there. Expect a big reveal in October!
On the Community Products front, the initial version of the server has reached the MVP stage and is ready for internal testing. The admin fee feature has been completed too. This allows Community Product administrators to specify the percentage of overall product revenue they’d like to take as their fee. Of course, admins are at liberty to set their fee to zero. We have also started working on the Marketplace side to integrate new functionality and make it compatible with Community Products. In the coming months, we will also be releasing additional technical specs regarding Community Products, in order to allow existing and new community-driven projects to be built on top with greater ease.
Additionally, we are overhauling the current landing page to improve conversion rates on our website. The new technical documentation section is almost ready too, with expanded content and a new design, offering a much better flow and user experience to developers interested in building on top of our solutions.
Finally, we are incredibly close to launching the stable version of the Core app. The beta version of the Core app has been open to the public for a few months now and we want to thank everyone who participated in our beta testing trial or provided feedback along the way.
If you’re a dev interested in the Streamr stack or have some integration ideas, you can join our community-run dev forum here.
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s our regular list of updates:
Table of Contents
Network
- Mock REST API for testnet and added new metrics to network.
- Working on key exchange mechanism (still WIP): allows publishers and subscribers to exchange a symmetric key (used to encrypt and decrypt data) using asymmetric cryptography
- Created fork of cloud-broker to push real-time data to testnet
- Updating broker for new network version, also looking at testnet on AWS
- Metrics from Broker nodes, done and merged, started on experiments for testnet
- Setup mock API on Hetzner machine and Broker nodes reporting
- Added tracker reporting to Streamr
- Work on testnet optimisations: micro-batching on Cassandra
- Bridged the real-time data in production to the test network and implemented some metrics reporting of the amount of data pushed to the test network
Community Products
- Managed to get tests running on local environment. Next step is push it to Docker
- Implemented admin fee cut feature
- From truffle to regular mocha for code testing
- Looking now at persistence Community Products server
Core app (Engine, Editor, Marketplace)
- Doing design section of new page. Still some small responsive style fixes remaining
- Docs review and editing, data price graph on landing page
- Merged about us page, updates for top nav and mobile nav, updated partners section (more logos and structural changes) and timeline component
- Worked on components of the “learn” pages
- Fixed the editor bug logged by user Frederic
- Responsive views for tablets and mobile. Localisation support for the page
- Sharing a session between tabs to avoid login each time
- Fixed Editor bugs on autosave functionality
- New routes for new product editor
Labs
- Apache Flink integration
- Working on the airplane traffic streams
- Demo for Community Products
- Working with Kafka connect, starting Kafka streams
