Welcome to Streamr Core Developer’s Update for June. Before diving into our internal updates, I wanted to highlight two exciting occurrences that happened last month. One of the early Streamr community projects — a web browser plugin that allows users to share their browsing and search engine data — launched a private beta to let users try out their application. I have been really impressed with their privacy setting functionality, which has been built from the ground up to give users maximum control. Currently, they offer the plugin for both Firefox and Chrome platforms. Over 40 users signed up to provide their feedback. It was great to see interest from people both within and outside of the crypto community.
The second exciting occurrence is regarding a new Community Fund project proposal, started by our longtime community member Gang Liu. It was in response to this recent news about Facebook’s study app. If they are planning to harness even more data for their proprietary usage, then let’s aim to build a more open version to give any small/medium startup the opportunity to access the same quality data. This is what we mean by creating new “Data Commons” with our upcoming Community Products.
Coming back to Streamr’s internal dev update, the team has been focusing on the following tasks:
- Add the last features to Streamr Core and fix the few remaining bugs
- Work on the “Corea” milestone release for Streamr Network (around Q4)
- Finalise the specs and implementation for Community Products
For the Core app, we have gathered valuable feedback from our recent private beta testing. The aim is to complete the remaining tasks by Q3 and to roll out the stable official version by September, with a new landing page too. Our developers are also working on a new revamped technical documentation section, with the goal of offering a much better onboarding experience for all developers interested in testing our stack. Just a reminder that the current Core version is still in Beta.
On the Network front, we have been conducting some end-to-end tests for Broker node, to verify that the software works as expected from a black-box perspective. We have recently completed the end-to-end symmetric encryption implementation for the Network and we are now moving on to the key exchange mechanism. Important notes for the upcoming Corea release: at this milestone the Network will leverage the new p2p protocol we have developed, but it won’t be decentralized yet, as stated in our Network roadmap published last year
In the Corea network, all nodes will still be run by us, as the necessary encryption and incentive mechanisms are not yet in place.
However, interested community members will have the opportunity to run a network node for a public testnet we are planning to launch in conjunction. Regarding the earlier-than-planned rollout of encryption with the Corea milestone, the first version will only offer a symmetric key exchange. Encryption is necessary in the p2p network to guarantee data confidentiality, in addition to anti-tempering. There are still many components that need to be ironed out, such as key exchange mechanism, key revocation mechanism and integration with our Editor. The key exchange (and later revocation) will make our encryption usable with minimum user intervention and potentially place Streamr ahead of other p2p projects on the encryption side.
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:
Network
- Continuing work on MQTT adpater
- Metrics scripts for node and the tracker
- Started working on mock API for broker
- Storage node configuration
- Update broker to use the new network API
- Created and ran end-to-end testing
- Finished end-to-end symmetric encryption and started working on the key exchange mechanism
Ethereum
- Writing tests for Community Products
- Working on admin cut feature for paid streams
API & Clients
- v31 of protocol deployed to production
- Latest version of java client to Maven Central (1.1.0)
- v31 JS client integration of our protocol in the p2p network
Core App (Engine, Editor, Marketplace)
- Worked on stream list paging layout
- Debugging Ethereum login and web3 fixes
- Stream-specific inactivity period tracking
- Fixed module search styling, tweaked marketplace product search, continuing on map zoom level and centre persisting
- Continuing working on landing page
- Designing new Developer Docs and creating new content for it
DevOps
- Cassandra monitoring up and running
- Artifact versioning for E&E
- Data-api metrics
