Constellation Update — Scalable Protocol Alliance Launch, Ambassador News, Engineering Updates, Upcoming Events & More

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Constellation Network

5 min readJan 18, 2019

Dear Constellation Community,

It’s hard to believe that the month is more than halfway through — it seems like just yesterday we were ringing in the New Year. We’ve had an exciting couple of weeks, with big news coming out yesterday about the launch of the Scalable Protocol Alliance. We also hosted our first official Ambassador webinar, and as always, our Engineering team has been hard at work reaching milestones, creating applications and more. Read to find out what else the Constellation team has been up to and what to look forward to in the near future!

SPA ANNOUNCEMENT

While 2018 saw Constellation join a pair of influential blockchain consortiums in MOBI and HyperLedger, we didn’t want to stop there. While these consortiums are focused on scaling blockchain tech to differing degrees, we felt that there was still a void to be filled in the space. We’re proud to announce the formation of the Scalable Protocol Alliance (SPA), which brings together leading blockchain protocols with the shared vision of building next-generation Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) focused on interoperability and cross protocol integrations. Each member of SPA wants to expedite the adoption of DLT and blockchain tech by working together to flesh out proof of concepts, shared application development, and combing developer and marketing resources. The inaugural members of SPA include Constellation, COTI, BXB, Bucket, MIDO, Wanchain, Black Edge Capital & ORBS, and the group officially launched on January 17th, 2019.

Check out Constellation’s Official Announcement and the SPA website for more details!

Ambassador News

In our inaugural Constellation Ambassador Monthly Webinar, our newly certified Ambassadors had the opportunity to introduce themselves and ask questions of our Ambassador leads, Benjamin Diggles and Sophie Feinberg. After introductions, Benjamin lead the group through our program goals and the roles and responsibilities of a Constellation Ambassador. The team reviewed the Ambassador on-boarding details as well as how to best work together to maximize the program for all involved. We discussed our focus markets and various pitch material, ending with a round table for questions and discussion. We’re excited for our next Ambassador Webinar where we’ll be discussing the Competitive Landscape and The Anatomy of a Deal.

Engineering Update

Monadic Validation Pipeline

Our ENG team had been striving to achieve this for a while now, and it’s also the title of their Scale by the Bay talk. This feature allows us to create a totally decoupled pipeline for processing info as it comes through a node. Every transaction then gets kicked off into its own pipeline separate from other data pipelines that are processing data — It is actually this mechanic that makes us horizontally scalable, so this is a big milestone.

This also makes it cleaner and trackable as to why something failed (incorrect messages, etc), as it can give descriptive feedback for someone whose reading error log, allowing them to track everything that happened.

Overall, this implementation is laying the groundwork for greater and greater features.

State Channel Prototype (MAM)

MAM stands for Masked Authenticated Messaging, which is a certain type of application we’re focused on implementing for proof of concepts that we’re building for enterprise clients.

We’ve created a Constellation application that uses Constellation for as a type of notary service. This allows us to use our protocol as an append only log, which can notarize info in a way that ensures this info won’t get dropped or lost.

We’ve implemented a closed solution to notarize info on our Constellation DAG, and although it’s still in its infancy, this will connect to our base layer, and applications that sit atop of it in the future. This is the first step for us to build applications with POCs on top of the Constellation protocol.

Metrics Monitoring:

The Grafana dashboard now has easily deployable docker image.A community member and node operator (whose handle is Digital Win) added a Grafana metrics dashboard, which allows us to visually understand how different parts of a node are being utilized — whether for backups, failures or overloads.

Running a Node

Our Testnet recently stabilized, we have completed documentation for node operators, and have started onboarding node operators in our Discord channel. Sign up to run node by registering via the form below:

Register to Run a Node

MOBI Grand Challenge

The first stage of the MOBI Grand Challenge has ended. The public will soon have a chance to review & vote on projects. The voting platform will be available on MOBI’s Grand Challenge website soon and will include videos from each team with a short summary of their project. The deadline to vote is January 28, 2019, and the winner will be announced at the MOBI Colloquium hosted by the BMW Group on February 15, 2019 in Munich, Germany.

Constellation is sponsoring with $DAG and a mentorship from our very own CTO, Wyatt Meldman-Floch.

Upcoming Events

MOBI Meetup, January 25th 2019, San Francisco, California — Members of our team will be attending MOBI’s Bay Area MeetUp to connect with other MOBI Community members and talk about the year ahead.

Developer Week, February 20–24th 2019, SF Bay Area, California — Wyatt and Ryle will be speaking at Developer Week, the World’s Largest Developer Expo & Conference. More info to come.

New Site

We’ll be unveiling our new site in the near future. Keep your eyes on our social channels for the big reveal!