IoTeX Project Update #9 — September 24-November 10, 2018
Greetings everyone! We are back with our project update #9 for 9/24/18–11/10/18 period. In the last month and a half, our team has continued to work hard in preparation for the final code release of the Testnet & Mainnet Preview. At the same time, we have shared plenty of achievements with you on our business development progress, academic paper publishing, events, smart home PoC solutions, etc. and received great recognition by our community and industry leaders. Now we are happy to announce that our Mainnet Preview will be released at 17:00 PST on 11/15/2018 and it will bring in more innovations to kick off the mainnet building through out next year.
Technical Updates
Technical Development
- Launch of Mainnet preview is right on track, e.g., subchain management has been implemented, security and reliability of Roll-DPoS has been improved and developer SDK and its doc are close to being done.
- IoTeX Network Explorer has been fully open sourced on GitHub! Working with iotex-core, this repo allows everyone to connect the existing node/port to a self-built Explorer and monitor blockchain activities at the front end!
- Since launching our Testnet Beta “Epik” release, we have been using Kubernetes to deploy and optimize our Testnet infrastructure. We wanted to share our experience and guide you on how to run your own containerized applications and environments on Kubernetes.
Partnerships/Business Development
IoTeX joined the Trusted IoT Alliance
We are proud to become a part of the Trusted IoT Alliance, a consortium of blockchain technology companies and enterprises (e.g., Bosch, Cisco, Gemalto) focused on leveraging blockchain infrastructure to secure and scale IoT ecosystems. The alliance is currently developing several industrial proofs of concept, to which IoTeX will contribute technical and academic expertise and resources.
IoTeX & NKN: Expanding the Reach and Impact of Blockchain Technology
Over the past couple months, IoTeX and NKN have worked together on a smart home/sharing economy use case, which provides a decentralized alternative to traditional short-term home rental solutions. As both of our projects drive towards our respective Mainnet launches early next year, we hope to optimize coordination across various layers of the blockchain tech stack. We will work together on R&D, along with other partners across the various infrastructure pillars with the goal of driving holistic decentralized use cases. Furthermore, we will continue to iterate on our smart home proof of concept, and also explore additional use cases together.
New Blog series — Blockchain & IoT
#1. We often hear about the autonomous machine-to-machine ecosystems that will one day run on blockchain, but what can we look forward to in the near future?
#2. Why blockchain will ultimately activate IoT’s full potential by enabling interoperability across IoT devices, companies, and industries?
IoTeX teaches a course for University of Nicosia
IoTeX was invited to teach a distance learning course “Blockchain Technology and Applications”, as a part of Master of Science program offered by University of Nicosia, the largest university in Cyprus, Europe. Our co-founder Raullen Chai and staff blockchain engineer Zhijie Shen have shared their knowledge of blockchains and IoT to students from all around the world. Check out the full video to learn!
Two Academic Papers published
Our latest academic paper Scalable Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance with Short-Lived Signature Schemes has been accepted and published in CASCON 2018! CASCON is a premier industrial and academic conference for advanced studies in computer science and software engineering sponsored by the IBM Canada Laboratory. This paper describes that IoTeX proposed an efficient short-lived signature based PBFT variant to improve the scalability of PBFT significantly.
The second academic paper titled “Roll-DPoS: A Randomized Delegated Proof of Stake Scheme for Scalable Blockchain-Based Internet of Things Systems” has been accepted and published in the proceedings of The 1st Workshop on Distributed Ledger of Things (DLoT 2018), which is co-located with EAI Mobiquitous 2018. This short paper describes the core components of the IoTeX’s in-house consensus algorithm Roll-DPoS. Our Head of Cryptography, Dr. Xinxin Fan, also joined the technical panel and discussed the hot topic “Blockchain Meets Internet of Things: Opportunities and Challenges” during the workshop.
Community Updates
IoTeX Test-The-Net Bounty Program
At the end of August, we have released the Testnet Beta Release: Epik, which focused on bringing usability and tangibility to the IoTeX Testnet. We have involved our community into testing it’s features and improving the overall code release, by holding Test-The-Net campaign. To show our appreciation for your support, we had selected 50 winners that received bonus points for their efforts!
Tech AMA — September 28, 2018
We connected with our subreddit community for a bi-weekly tech-focused AMA. We appreciate your continuous curiosity and efforts! Thank you all for the thoughtful questions submitted, and congratulations to those who asked the most interesting & thoughtful questions that got chosen to receive bonus points.
AMA with Founders — October 12, 2018
Our founders were in our Official Telegram group answering your questions! Thank you to everyone who have participated in this session, we had a great time connecting with you!
Tech AMA & Livestream with Founders — October 26, 2018
We have hosted another AMA session with IoTeX’s founders, but this time it was a livestream, before and during which, you had a chance to ask us tech-related questions! Check out the full video here:
And we have also prepared a short written summary here:
General AMA — November 9th, 2018
Our next session is coming up and it will be hosted on Reddit:
IoTeX Ambassadors Program
As we are growing fast on tech and partnerships development, we would like to continue focusing on our long-term success and grow our community in more regions and countries. Based on this initiative, we have launched the IoTeX Brand Ambassadors Program! Join us to build a stronger ecosystem together.
Please note: PHASE 1 of our Brand Ambassadors Program will be closing on Friday, November 9th @ 10PM PDT. All of the selected candidates for this round, will be contacted by Monday, November 12th and we will advise you of the next steps. Check details and application form here:
Naming the Mainnet Preview Campaign
As our early supporters know, each of our code release was named after a permutation of the name of world-class cryptographer/Mathematician. There is no exception this time for our Mainnet Preview. The only difference is — it is our dear community, you, who will be choosing the name for us through our wallet and smart contract! Both parts of this campaign have already ended and right now we are evaluating the voting results before we announce the winners. Please check our forum for the latest updates.
Events & Conferences
October 3 — Career Fair @ Stanford University
We had a great time communicating with talents, as well as, enjoyed sharing thoughts with other projects at Stanford Blockchain Career Fair. We are actively looking for technical & marketing talents and if you think you are the one, we want to hear from you. Please see the current openings here ➡️ https://hire.withgoogle.com/public/jobs/iotexio
October 4–5 Global Blockchain Forum
Our co-founders, Raullen Chai & Jing Sun attended this conference as VIP speakers and shared thoughts on Decentralization and Ecosystem.
October 5–7 ETH San Francisco
October 25 — IoT in Action summit by Microsoft
October 27 — DoraHacks hackathon in Seoul
October 29 — IoTeX Meet-up & Networking in Toronto
October 29 — Cisco & EDB Blockchain Summit
IoTeX was invited to attend Cisco & EDB Blockchain Summit in Singapore, which is a high level private summit host by Cisco and attended by VP-level executives in broader supply chain industry leaders. Our co-founder Qevan represented IoTeX as a speaker in the session of Barriers to Adoption — A Trusted IOT Alliance Perspective.
October 29–31 CASCON Conference in Toronto
Our head of cryptography, Dr. Fan was invited to speak at CASCON conference and present our latest academic paper on PBFT.
Community Contributions
IoTeX Explained #1 — Blockchains-in-blockchain
This video was prepared by one of our Community Leaders, Simone, in which the structure of our blockchains-in-blockchain architecture is explained.
IoTeX Explained #2 — Roll-DPoS Consensus
Another video prepared by Simone, that explains in detail how our innovative consensus mechanism works.
IoTeX News
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IoTeX is the auto-scalable and privacy-centric blockchain infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoTeX’s global team is comprised of Ph.Ds in Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Machine Learning, top tier engineers, and experienced ecosystem builders. IoTeX is developing several in-house innovations to push the frontier of blockchain 3.0, including a blockchains-in-blockchain architecture for heterogeneous computing, lightning fast Roll-DPoS consensus mechanism, and lightweight privacy-preserving techniques. IoTeX is bringing autonomous device coordination to the masses by “connecting the physical world, block by block.”
Website: https://iotex.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iotex_io
Telegram Announcement Channel: https://t.me/iotexchannel
Telegram Group: https://t.me/IoTeXGroup
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Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IoTeX/
Join us: https://iotex.io/careers
