Polkadot has become the home of over 3,000,000 accounts and 1,500 developers — metrics that could skyrocket even further as its consecutive rounds of parachain auctions proceed. More than a quarter of all the available slots have already been filled, and the next generations of projects which come on board are likely to generate even greater demand for cutting-edge, secure infrastructure. We are proud to announce our collaboration with a new infrastructure partner, Subsquid.

Decentralized Data Indexing Made Easy

An indexer opens up a myriad of possibilities for application builders as it allows users to search the blockchain’s time-series structure for specific data. The essential elements of the blockchain, including accounts, blocks, and transactions, must be indexed at a low level, and once they are identified and retrieved, they are then indexed for high-level blockchain queries.

With Subsquid, information from smart contracts and activity records are categorized for greater accessibility — a chore for developers who have to manually execute through the creation of custom search functions.

Subsquid seeks to alleviate platforms from this burden through its offerings. Subsquid is a state-of-the-art indexing protocol that has pioneered a novel parallelized data indexing mechanism that provides a more affordable and secure alternative. Their multi-level architecture consists of the Archives and Squids APIs, with the former being used to perpetually sort data into sets while the latter acts as a pointer to locate a specific piece of blockchain state history.

Subsquid CEO Dmitry Zhelezov stressed the importance of the project for the development of the project: “Subsquid’s mission is to make on-chain data easily accessible for developers. Having a reliable node infrastructure is crucial to this mission, and thus we are really happy to partner with Pinknode and offer our users the possibility to use private and reliable gRPC endpoints in their Squids.”

Pinknode will be supporting Subsquid with its robust infrastructure and working closely on the possibility of innovating new middleware-related products.

In order to celebrate our new partnership, the Pinknode team has graciously agreed to provide all Subsquid users free access to their upgraded plan, increasing the number and rate of requests. Currently, this promotion is as follows:

• 500K to 1M request per team
• 15 requests per second > 50 requests per second

“The overlap between the information analytics revolution and blockchain is growing exponentially, and as a project which occupies this niche, Subsquid is poised to become a trailblazer in decentralized database management. Being a fellow infrastructure provider with strong synergies, we believe concur with their assertion that, ‘a dApp is only as good as its data’”

• Eric Poh, Co-Founder of Pinknode

About Subsquid

Subsquid is an on-chain indexing and querying solution that enables Web3 builders to gain access to on-chain data on their own terms. Featuring multilayer architecture and decentralized governance, this is the most developer-friendly and resource-efficient way to build, test, and deploy customized APIs for blockchain-facing applications.

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-focused infrastructure provider that empowers developers through its node-as-a-service solutions that remove an entire layer of inefficiencies and accelerate development. Pinknode prides itself on supporting every single Substrate chain with unparalleled reliability and scalability.

Fuelling the Evolution of Data Indexing with Subsquid was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Decentralized data storage is becoming an increasingly alternative that prioritizes user autonomy, and multiple projects taking up the gauntlet by innovating a plethora of ways to make data processing as secure as possible. One such platform offering an exceptionally comprehensive solution is Pinknode’s latest collaborator Phala, the first Substrate-based confidential cloud computing and smart contract network on Polkadot.

Bringing Secure Computation to Polkadot

After clinching the thirteenth parachain slot, Phala is focusing on fine-tuning their decentralized computational services which enable trustless data storage. Thanks to their trusted environment execution (also known as TEE or Secure Enclaves), classified information can be run in an isolated environment where results are only generated on command while making it possible for anybody to supply them with permissionless servers. Another of their long-term goals is to offer ecosystem-wide incognito identity management and shielding, alongside identity protection for individuals and businesses.

To facilitate these goals, they have recently introduced support for Fat Contract capabilities, which nullifies the current limits of managing smart contract code to support expansive applications and enable low-latency, immediate processing. With over 20,000 nodes working on their trustless storage system, code execution can be separated from consensus to increase the computational power of these workers in a linear manner.

Providing Trustless Storage in the Metaverse

The potency of this service makes it a prime candidate for supporting metaverse-centric projects, which have great potential but may be memory-intensive due to the nature of modeling three dimensional graphics. Since their acceptance into the Blender Developer Fund at the start of 2022, Phala plans to deploy their nodes as hosts for Blender’s three-dimensional artwork rendering services through a distributed identity-masking technology called Secure Enclaves. They will simultaneously be provided with information-churning power for their artistic workstations. This decentralized infrastructure has also been utilized by Bit.country, another NFT-based virtual reality platform, and by RMRK for tokenized media “art legos” on Kusama.

Aiding Scalability on Phala

As their computational services expand and mature, our partner is going to require highly scalable, robust infrastructure to undergird the considerable number of transactions they regularly plow through. Pinknode will be satisfying this need by spinning a cluster of nodes to provide its partner with high-volume remote procedure call (RPC) endpoints for developers, in addition to mining nodes for further fortification.

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-specialized Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to build on the most promising Web 3.0 ecosystem. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerates their product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

Maximizing Scalability on Phala Network was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pinknode 1.0 is our first official release of a fully functioning blockchain API & node service product that’s built for the innovators of the Polkadot ecosystem.

Decentralized application (dApp) creators across the Polkadot ecosystem can now alleviate the burden of maintaining resource-intense personal nodes by accessing our highly scalable and reliable infrastructure. Public signup is now available and you can register for an account 🚩here.

🚩For developers or power users, we’d like to get to know you better! Take a minute to fill out this short form — https://forms.gle/TWL6RvvBwU8Az9S49

Recap of Pinknode 👋

The growth of this ecosystem was made possible through the support and involvement displayed by the Pinknodian community, which has been evinced through instances such as the 33,000 subscriptions received during the initial DEX offering and the subsequent need to raise the quantity of winning slots from 500 to 600 in May last year. We are also grateful for the enthusiastic reception of the now-closed beta version of the minimum viable product — since its release in July last year, our endpoints have received over 400 million requests. We have also cemented sixteen mutually-beneficial partnerships with multiple parachains victors and candidates: with more to come in time.

Going forward into 2022, we will continue to prioritize accountability to everyone who has supported us. It is in this same spirit that the development team has worked tirelessly to fine-tune several new features which are going to facilitate smoother user experiences and more robust scalability.

The New and Improved Pinknode Portal 💻

So what is this all about?

TL;DR — With the feedback that we have curated and experience running dozen of networks over the past months, we’re introducing a complete user interface overhaul and infrastructural upgrades.

*NEW — Project & Team Management Functions

You can now create multiple Projects under the same Team, this function was introduced to better help users segregate their functions and workflow. Service plans will be parked under Team, and Projects will share the rate limit. Users can also create and belong to multiple Teams.

Next, we have a new team management feature integrated — this permits users to assign or adopt the roles of owner, administrator, or member within the scope of a project. By delineating responsibilities and allowing each member to adopt a role, their collaboration is expedited and workflow is clear to team members, this is especially crucial for engineers working on multiple projects that necessitate segregating their workload.

Outside of the technical development process, this feature could expedite the management of payment/invoices and permit managers to toggle between several assignments without compromising the outcomes of any of them.

NEW — Project Usage Analytics & Live Block Explorer

In today’s world of big data and analytics, the phrase, “you can only manage what you measure” is only going to become truer as more and more industries embrace digitalization and software continues to evolve rapidly. This is why we have introduced a usage tracker that will be an instrumental tool for improving the visibility of their products. Tracking all the requests made on an hourly or daily basis enables engineers to analyze their aggregated data from a span of weeks or months and draw upon them to lean into their most popular features.

Users can also track the Top 10 Requests made on their custom endpoints by Method or by Bandwidth. Examining the information from the top ten types of requests made to your endpoints could enable engineers to optimize your software, thereby preventing their codebases from bloating.

Instead of scrutinizing your logs to debug failed requests, users can now utilize Pinknode’s Live Request Viewer for a more detailed view of all your recent requests. Search through historical requests and responses sent through your endpoints up to 14 days ago! This is critical for error tracking and debugging purposes. Filters will be implemented shortly.

Infrastructural Upgrades

Our second milestone for Pinknode 1.0 is the infrastructural upgrades. We have duplicated our node network to AWS to leverage multiple of their system components like AWS S3, Application Load Balancers, and EKS. This ensures that we have the capabilities to maintain a secure and reliable infrastructure that is highly available across multiple regions.

Perhaps the most salient upgrade we did was the construction of our proprietary API Gateway to manage our RESTful API and WebSockets connections, which allows us to:

• maintain a separate caching layer that contains the customized logic for different parachain logs
• accurately log all API requests into a database
• handle numerous WSS connections
• perform latency routing
• limit the load on processing, computation, and storage leading to time and cost savings
• perform other custom configurations

This custom-built proxy service also powers real-time data feeds in form of Pinknode’s Live Explorer.

With these enhancements and a technology suite that consists of multiple independent software components that interface with each other, we employed a microservice architecture so future works and upgrades can run independently.

You can now enjoy the benefits of a highly available blockchain API service and gain access to the networks of Polkadot, Kusama, and Rococo with one click of a button by registering for an account here. We’ll be introducing and integrating new networks shortly.

Thanking Pinknodians for Their Support

With the last major lap of the projected timeline approaching, preparations are being made for the wide-scale onboarding of users and deployment of blockchain nodes. Eventually, dozens or even hundreds of projects will come onboard Pinknode 1.0 in order to tap into the full potential of this flourishing multi-chain system- bringing this platform closer to becoming the de facto infrastructure of Polkadot.

🚩For developers or power users, we’d like to get to know you better! Take a minute to fill out this short form — https://forms.gle/pankBeum8chZpp337

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-only Infrastructure-as-a-Service project with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to build on the most promising Web 3.0 meta protocol, Polkadot. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerate product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

Pinknode 1.0 is now LIVE — a sleek UI for managing your infra was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pinknode’s continuous involvement in collaborative endeavours with existing partners is an integral aspect of our commitment to advance the expansion and adoption of their projects and the Polkadot ecosystem. We are proud to announce that Pinknode has successfully enrolled into the Shiden Builders Program and has been whitelisted into their dApp Staking Program!

What is Shiden Network?

Astar Network (previously known as Plasm) is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum, WebAssembly, and layer 2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that supports multiple blockchains and virtual machines. Shiden Network is a canary network of Astar Network and an active parachain on Kusama.

How does dApp Staking work?

As an alternative to nominations on validator/collator nodes, Shiden’s team introduced an innovative dApp staking platform that allows native token holders to nominate projects within their ecosystem and earn half of the allocated block rewards for their stakes. The other half of the allocated block rewards will be issued to dApp developers building in the Shiden ecosystem as an incentive to drive their product forward! #Build2Earn

This financial incentive was coined as ‘basic income’ by the originators and their goal is to reduce the reliance on grants, fundraising, token issuance etc. to fund development. With this novel dApp staking capability and its network effects, Shiden token holders and the community will be the key catalyst that will drive the ecosystem forward.

What is Pinknode’s goal?

First, we are sticking close to our core mission; which is to empower the innovators that are building for the future of Web 3.0. With the exposure of our highly essential and high-quality RPC API endpoints to other builders in the Shiden ecosystem, Pinknode will accelerate their time to market and product life cycle. Our enhanced analytics dashboard and team management functions will help developers uncover critical insights into usage metrics and patterns while managing and scaling their projects seamlessly.

Pinknode will also be initiating further infrastructural upgrades for all our parachain partner’s networks, which involves the set up of two more clusters in Europe and North America in addition to its current Asia-based clusters. Developers can look forward to the improved latency and scalability through our global coverage that is going to facilitate connections through the HTTP and WSS endpoints on our portal.

Additionally, in a bid to expand our product offerings, Pinknode will be working on ‘Proprietary Node Deployment’ which is capable of spinning nodes maintained by us or off uploaded images. This is expected to be delivered by Q1 2022.

How to Nominate Our Application on Shiden’s Platform:

During the Shiden’s dApp Staking early phase, there will be some limitations::

• Each dApp can have a max of 512 nominators.
• The minimum amount to stake is 50 SDN.
• A claim needs to be done within 15 days, or the unclaimed rewards go to the treasury. A claim can be made by the contract owner or any staker of the project. One claim will claim for everyone!
• Currently, there is no slash nor bonding period during this phase.

Step-by-Step Guide for Stakers:

1. Get your hands on some Shiden tokens $SDN! You can buy them on Kraken, Kucoin, Gate, or Crypto.com. The full list of markets can be found here.
2. Next, you’ll need to transfer your newly acquired $SDN tokens to a Metamask wallet (read here) or create an account with Polkadot.js extension (instructional video). Make sure you select the right network!
3. Head over to Astar dApp Hub (Store) and connect to your wallet. Connect to the ‘Shiden Network (Kusama)’ instead of the Shibuya testnet.

4. Look for Pinknode’s card on the dApps STore and click on the “Stake” button. Key in your desired amount of SDN. (Minimum stake amount: 50 SDN)

5. At the end of ERA, press “Claim” to receive your bounty. Alternatively, you will also receive the rewards if the dApp owner or anyone stakers claim.

The option to “Unstake” your assets is also available

If you have any questions regarding this process, please feel free to reach our on our Telegram Channel or Shiden’s discord.

Join in the dApp Staking craze and support our development today.

About Astar Network/Shiden Network

Astar Network (previously known as Plasm) is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum, WebAssembly, and layer 2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines. Shiden Network is a sister network of Astar Network and a dApp hub on Kusama.

Please click the following links for further more information about the Standard Protocol: Website | Twitter | Discord | Telegram

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-only Infrastructure-as-a-Service project with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to create on the most promising Web 3.0 meta protocol. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerate product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

Pinknode is now listed on Shiden’s dApp Staking Platform! was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are proud to announce our partnership with ParaState, a decentralized open-source smart contract platform that seeks to expand the developer community by supporting over 20 programming languages to create Ethereum-compatible smart contracts, and facilitate interoperability between Ethereum and Substrate based chains through their cutting edge smart contract virtual machine.

Making Ethereum Code Scalable Again

Successful parachain owners and other cross-chain protocols utilize the Substrate Developer Hub’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Pallet into their own chains to enable basic compatibility with Ethereum. However, ParaState’s EWASM Virtual Machine (Pallet SSVM) not only enhances this but also negates the need for any significant changes to pre-existing imported Ethereum codebases at both the bytecode and source code levels. Furthermore, programming language features can be customised to coder preferences thanks to the open-source compiler toolchain of its VM.

With support for over 20 languages, a plethora of projects will benefit from Layer 1 security without sacrificing composability, therefore fostering unhindered flows of digital capital for DeFi solutions. Although it is still on the cusp of its mainnet launch, its standalone-blockchain Plato testnet lets builders deploy their creations on this highly transparent platform for rigorous, expedient stress-testing before product launches.

“The need for scalable alternatives is becoming ever more urgent for the DeFi sector as a whole, and ParaState is providing a crucial service by onboarding previously Ethereum-based dApps onto Polkadot. Its hackathon is drawing crowds of bright, ambitious innovators to its platform and Pinknode’s API endpoints will allow them to focus on what they do best.

We believe that the multiplicity of stellar submissions their contestants have to offer can prove to the Polkadot ecosystem that importing dApps while keeping them connected to Layer 1 security is one of the best ways of attracting budding talents to this flourishing ecosystem”

-Eric Poh, Co-founder of Pinknode

ParaState is currently hosting a hackathon from 16th October to 15th December with US$100,000 in prize pool up for grabs by contestants who are able to push the creative limits of its middleware through competitive innovation.

Timeline

16th October 2021, 21:00 ET: Hackathon Start

November 2021: First Offline Workshop

15th December 2021, 21:00 ET: Hackathon Submission End Date

16th-25th December 2021: Submission Review

31st December 2021: Winner is Announced

Hackathon Rewards

The ParaState online Hackathon event reward pool is a total of 100,000 USD and consists of 3 parts:

A. Jury bonus pool: It will be decided and announced by the ParaState Foundation judges through the project code and demo review.

First prize: 1 winner with a prize of 30,000 USD

Second prize: 2 winners with a prize of 15,000 USD

Third prize: 4 winners with a prize of 5,000 USD

Honor prize: 10 winners with a prize of 1,000 USD

B. $5,000 quadratic voting bonus pool: The initial bonus pool will be allocated to the finalists based on the popularity of the project and the quadratic voting algorithm. If you are unfamiliar with quadratic voting, you may learn more here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

C. $5,000 Bounty reward: Receive bounty through HackerLink, and submit the solution through Pull Request on Github

Bonus (#100–300): ​Fix bugs for SewUp and XYZ projects

Sunshine Award ($50): Use SewUp to deploy any smart contract

Pinknode <> ParaState

As part of our long term goal to build a vibrant and diverse community of programmers on Polkadot, Pinknode is proud to partner with ParaState to provide hackathon participants with free RPC endpoints to remove the need for node deployment and focus on delivery. You can participate in the Hackathon with the following steps:

1. Sign up and learn more about ParaState’s Hackathon here
2. TOOL 1 — Access ‘SewUp’, a library that helps you sew up your Ethereum project with Rust, just like development in a common backend
3. TOOL 2 — Build with BUIDL (Browser-based IDE), a browser-based IDE that enables developers to create and deploy Decentralized Applications (DApps) on blockchains with ease.
4. TOOL 3 — Utilize Substrate SSVM Node, scalable smart contract execution environment that also supports EVM and EWASM
5. ParaState is fully compatible with Ethereum EVM and any Ethereum ecological tools — Take part in these workshops hosted by ParaState’s developer Team by senior Rust Engineers here and here ▶️
6. Claim STATE Tokens on ParaState Faucet — STATE token on ParaState’s testnet is used for gas fees and voting during this hackathon -, here’s a tutorial on how to claim it
7. ̶ ̶C̶o̶n̶f̶i̶g̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶t̶e̶s̶t̶n̶e̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶d̶e̶

✔️ Connect via Pinknode’s RPC endpoints:

Network Name

ParaState

Chain ID

123

RPC

https://parastate.rpc.pinknode.io/https

WebSocket

wss://parastate.rpc.pinknode.io/hackathon

The ParaState Hackathon is open to applications of any kind with no limitation on development tools. Applications must be implemented in Rust to qualify. Some ideas on what you can build:

• ERC20 contract (issue an ERC20 protocol token on the ParaState testnet)
• NFT contract
• Block explorer
• Decentralized exchange: an on-chain order book exchange, an exchange for automated market makers
• DEFI related
• Wallet
• And any other innovative applications

BUILD AWAY!

About ParaState

ParaState has officially launched the public testnet, Plato, running as a standalone Substrate blockchain right now. ParaState aims to bridge application and developer ecosystem between Polkadot and Ethereum, and other chains who want to provide Ethereum compatibilities as well.

Stay tuned with the latest ParaState updates:

Telegram | Twitter | Discord | Medium | Facebook |Announcements

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-only Infrastructure-as-a-Service project with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to create on the most promising Web 3.0 meta protocol. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerate product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

Bridging Polkadot with Ethereum Ecosystem with ParaState — Hackathon now LIVE! was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

With Polkadot’s recent achievements, successful Kusama parachain auctions, explosive growth in development activity, and pending highly anticipated Polkadot parachain auction, more developers will be looking for dependable infrastructure solutions to begin building on Polkadot. Amongst infrastructure components, nodes are at the core of it, performing critical functions of the network, such as validating transactions, storing records of the blockchain, or submitting votes on network governance.

Here at Pinknode, we refer to this as the superhighway network of blockchain infrastructure.

Public API Endpoints

The most common way for decentralized application (dApp) developers to access a node(transact and query data) on the Polkadot blockchain is through the use of Polkadot’s public API endpoints. Since its inception, Polkadot has provided public endpoints to aid testing and development. These API endpoints are free and readily available on Polkadot’s technical documentation. However, this dependency may change soon, when Polkadot’s parachains go live, and more dApps immigrate onto its protocol which could lead to a congested network and negatively impact the efficiency of Polkadot’s public API endpoints.

Run your own nodes

Alternatively, some projects and developers may opt to run and maintain their own nodes to achieve greater scalability and reliability. A peer-to-peer network connection is crucial for dApps, which can have lengthy initialization times which can take days to synchronize a node with Polkadot’s blockchain, sometimes causing the node to exceed the bandwidth and storage assigned to it. Additionally, storing the full Polkadot blockchain on an archive node can come with prohibitive costs, which will only increase with each new node you add. With the expansion and increasing complexity of infrastructure, teams may require specialized developer operations (DevOps) and site reliability engineers to handle its full-time maintenance.

Other issues

Even with the setup mentioned above, there is a multitude of concerns such as server location which affects response time, and provisioning of costly redundancies across multiple layers to handle spikes in the usage of the dApp.

When we take all of these weighty issues into consideration, it is evident why a whopping 130,000 developers are registered users of the largest third-party infrastructure provider on Ethereum.

What Makes Pinknode Different?

This is where Pinknode comes in with an easy, affordable yet superior alternative to running a personal node. As a subscription-based infrastructure service provider, Pinknode focuses on maintaining high availability through efficient redundancy planning and adopts a microservice architecture for quick continuous improvements and deployment.

Pinknode has nodes deployed around globally, enhanced by load balancing, and auto-scaling features built into its solution, allowing developers to instantly generate reliable and scalable custom API endpoints while providing developers with a personalized dashboard to track node usage analytics.

The burden of infrastructure maintenance is carried by Pinknode and the cost is shared amongst its users. When $PNODE tokens are purchased and staked for access to the API endpoints, they will only be burnt when their requests are made. This makes it a more flexible payment system than a monthly subscription-based service, where the costs of subscription tiers are fixed.

As Polkadot’s blockchain changes, so too will its infrastructural demands. While Polkadot’s public API endpoints and running personal nodes have thus far served Polkadot developers, Pinknode’s infrastructure solutions are the springboard that developers will use to take their projects to the next level.

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-only Infrastructure-as-a-Service project with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to create on the most promising Web 3.0 meta protocol. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerate product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

So… Why Pinknode? was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In seeking to further the evolution of DeFi, an increasing number of platforms are going “back to the future” by combining the best of DeFi and CeFi into one decentralized platform. This is why Pinknode’s latest collaborator, Polkadex, seeks to combine the DeFi-based benefits of automated market makers (AMMs) with a CeFi-inspired order book model. With its ambition to bring its unique hybrid decentralized exchange (DEX) to the Polkadot ecosystem, it will be submitting a parachain bid in time to come.

Getting the Best of Both Worlds

Drawing upon the modularity and customizability of the Substrate framework has allowed it to construct a slim, lightweight chain that simplifies user experience while raising throughput. While the threat of low liquidity badgers many DEXes, Polkadex remedies this by connecting AMMs straight to its trading engine and enabling them to function as on-chain market-making bots.

“With its ingenious hybrid of DeFi novelty and traditional order book efficiency, Polkadex has much to offer the ecosystem. We would like to congratulate Polkadex on the successful mainnet launch, but we are also aware that Polkadex has now turned its focus to preparing for its parachain bid. We are ecstatic to be part of their journey.”

-Eric Poh, Co-Founder of Pinknode

They can then be called upon when a trade is unmatched with the Polkadex order book and are responsible for providing a more optimal price for a trade to be executed, thereby eliminating slippage. For its initial iteration, limit and market order trades will be facilitated in a manner that generates zero-fee trades AMM orders, while market takers draw in a 0.2% fee. AMMs are allocated with half of all accrued fees, while the other half will be channeled into promoting network growth.

Maximizing Scalability while Reducing Latency on Polkadex

Since the launch of its mainnet on 29th September 2021, new users have started pouring in to partake of its nascent nomination and validation system, and with Pinknode acting as a validator on the Polkadex platform. Pinknode’s commitment as an infrastructural provider also includes supplying Polkadex with geographically distributed nodes that can seamlessly generate scalable API endpoints with a single click. Pinknode will continue to support Polkadex as it achieves more milestones and starts gearing up for its parachain bid.

“Pinknode’s vision to support a multi-chain future by providing easy-to-use, reliable, and scalable infrastructure services via unified APIs will be a great value add for the solo chain built on the substrate framework along with Kusama and Polkadot ecosystem.”

-Deepansh S, Co-founder of Polkadex

About Polkadex

Polkadex is a fully decentralized peer-to-peer orderbook-based cryptocurrency exchange for the DeFi ecosystem built on Substrate.

Follow Polkadex official accounts here:

Website| Twitter| TG Chat| TG Announcements| Medium| Youtube|Reddit | Discord|Linkedin

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-specialized Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to build on the most promising Web 3.0 ecosystem. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerates their product life cycles.

Scaling Polkadex Unique DEX Solution with Pinknode was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sigmadex, Pinknode’s most recent collaborator, is the first major cross-chain protocol that utilizes game theory to create a highly accountable and equitable multi-asset decentralised marketplace.

Using Game Theory to Maximise Liquidity

Game theory is a commonly used economics phrase referring to a framework for predicting the choices of competing actors within a strategic scenario, assuming that they are rational and will seek to maximise their benefits.

Game theory is at the core of Sigmadex’s protocol, enhancing the design and optimization of their framework in governing liquidity management. For example, users are incentivized to maximize their staking durations to avoid harsh penalties and accrue profits from climbing interest rates. The bounty of staking rewards increases in tandem with the leniency of withdrawal penalties, amplifying the available liquidity supply and fortifying the ecosystem at large.

Additionally, Sigmadex seeks to combat the enduring issue of overcollateralization on decentralised exchanges (DEXes) through its Sigma Risk Index, an Algorithmic Collateralization Engine (ACE) that consumes a wide scope of market data and employs cutting-edge machine learning to dynamically evaluate the optimal collateralization for any given point of time.

“Pinknode’s commercial-grade API endpoints will allow Sigmadex to securely experiment with and deploy pioneering applications on Polkadot. We believe that its innovative implementations of game theory and machine learning are pioneering a new generation of more efficient multichain exchanges on Polkadot”

-Eric Poh, Co-Founder of Pinknode

Connecting Sigmadex to Networks Across Polkadot

To host the multichain transactions Sigmadex requires a considerable suite of API endpoints connecting it to a chosen array of Polkadot protocols. Sigmadex has thus found a natural ally in Pinknode, which will supply scalable API endpoints facilitating queries from a multiplicity of token standards.

This exceptionally scalable infrastructure will be the conduit through which Sigmadex tests and deploys the new applications and features throughout ongoing experimental development. Once a breakthrough in its new software trials has been implemented upon maturity, Pinknode will provide it with access to a mempool, and its high-performance infrastructure will continue to provide it with the low-latency network connections it needs. In time to come, Sigmadex will explore the possibility of participating in a parachain bid.

“Pinknode plays a valuable role in the cross-chain mechanisms that take place within the Sigmadex ecosystem. This novel solution allows cross-chain transactions to occur without any difficulty, contributing to the protocol’s overall efficiency”.

-Roland Haggins, Co-Founder of Sigmadex

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-specialized Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to build on the most promising Web 3.0 ecosystem. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable, and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerates their product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

About Sigmadex

Sigmadex is an open-source balanced decentralized economy using game theory, DeFi, and blockchain technology to create the ideal automated liquidity protocol. It eliminates the requirement for having to trust any intermediaries, prioritizes decentralization, and is governed by the community.

Assisting Sigmadex get ahead in the cross-chain game was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Greetings Pinknodians, we bring you updates of great importance today. The past 3 months have been nothing short of eventful and we thought you’d like a rundown of what happened while the market went quiet.

On 5th July 2021, Pinknode launched its beta v0.1 platform to the Polkadot ecosystem.

Pinknode - Infrastructure for Polkadot on Twitter: "Good weekend all!We're opening our private beta, submit this form if you're a developer or project building on DOT. We'll set you up with a custom API endpoint❤️https://t.co/aDFWdSHCjnSetting up collators and getting ready when Polkadot ecosystem takes off! 💪🏻#Polkadot pic.twitter.com/ZkOGaxQT5T / Twitter"

Good weekend all!We're opening our private beta, submit this form if you're a developer or project building on DOT. We'll set you up with a custom API endpoint❤️https://t.co/aDFWdSHCjnSetting up collators and getting ready when Polkadot ecosystem takes off! 💪🏻#Polkadot pic.twitter.com/ZkOGaxQT5T

The team went on overdrive mode ever since and achieved all milestones set. 😎

TL;DR 📑

In this 3 short months after catapulting ourselves into the world of blockchain infrastructure, the team has:

• launched a working product with actual users
• established partnership with 15 active teams developing on Polkadot
• partnered with several parachains and upcoming candidates to provide quality API endpoints to their users and participate in their network as a collator
• delivered more than 200m requests in less than 3 months with our MVP
• resolved several bottlenecks on our network
• built elastic infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for greater processing capabilities at low operating costs
• Successfully conducted multiple liquidity mining programs
• Ambassador program is in full swing with over 200 applicants

Partnerships & Ecosystem 🔗

We have experienced first hand the drive and professionalism of the teams building the future of Web 3.0. We feel extremely fortunate to be part of this Polkadot movement, where everyone is putting their best foot forward to collaborate for growth of the ecosystem.

Below is a list of our collaborators and a summary of each:

1. Polkafoundry — Parachain contender gunning to be a one-stop hub for DeFi and NFT dApps
2. Splyt Network — Enhanced decentralized e-commerce protocol with eNFT
3. PL^Gnet — Network to enable asset custodians to leverage any asset from any network in its synthetic form
4. StackOS — An open protocol that allows individuals to collectively offer a decentralized cloud where you can deploy any full-stack application, decentralized app, blockchain privatenets, and mainnet nodes.
5. NewsCrypto — An all-in-one crypto ecosystem covering everything from education to industry-leading proprietary trading indicators and tools.
6. Dfyn — A network of DEXes across multiple Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains, allowing Dfyn to plug into multiple liquidity sources across chains, including the cross-chain liquidity ecosystem being developed by Router Protocol.
7. Reef Finance — A DeFi operating system that gives users access to a wide variety of products spanning multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Polkadot, and Cosmos.
8. Kylin Network — A cross-chain platform powering the data economy on Polkadot, through its provision of a comprehensive data analytics suite and its decentralized oracle services.
9. UniFarm — A decentralized farming pool for crypto projects.
10. Polkabridge — A decentralized all-in-one financial applications platform that facilitates cross-chain AMMs, farming, lending, NFTs, and more.
11. Pontem Network — A canary network of Diem by connecting it to the Polkadot network
12. Astar Network — parachain-owning dApp hub of Polkadot which supports Ethereum, WebAssembly, dApp Staking, and Layer 2 solutions
13. Equilibrium —The first Polkadot-based interoperable DeFi money market that combines pooled lending, synthetic asset generation, and decentralized trading
14. Konomi Network — A full suite asset management solution for cross-chain crypto assets which enables users to manage their crypto holding positions, trade assets and earn a profit on decentralized money market products
15. Crust Network — A decentralized storage protocol that utilizes a unique combination of Guaranteed Proof of Stake and Meaningful Proof of Work to create a decentralized cloud storage market that prioritizes individual data sovereignty and privacy

Network Upgrades & Adoption 🔧

1. We have delivered more than 200M relays on our public endpoints and early adopters
2. Increased our load limit per node to sustain more than 6000 requests per second
3. Built elastic infrastructure on GCP to greater processing capacity at low operating costs. GCP was chosen as it had the infrastructure configurations and features available for a production-ready system
4. Moved to Kubernetes to better address scale and stability
5. Whitelisted by several parachains to participate as collators

Token & Liquidity 🌌

1. Currently listed on Uniswap & token holders crossed the 2000 mark this month built on the momentum of organic growth
2. Private round tokens final disbursement was completed on Aug 14th, 2021
3. Volume on DEX maintained at a very healthy level of daily average $300,000
4. Attracted over $350,000 (~100% increase) liquidity through our LP Mining Programs
5. Issued 349,000 PNODE in liquidity rewards worth $58,000

❗ ️Attention: We are extending our liquidity mining program from 2nd September 2021 to 1st October 2021. The total mining rewards has been adjusted to 75,000 PNODE, which will be released by the block.

*Expected APY stands at approximately 45%.

Be reminded that you are allowed to withdraw your PNODE at any time you wish. However, you should bear in mind that gas fees might result in a net loss at the time of withdrawal.

(Recap) Step-by-Step Guide to Providing Liquidity 🌊

1. Go to Pinknode’s PNODE-ETH Pair pool on Uniswap here
2. Enter the number of $PNODE tokens you would like to add to the pool.
3. Click “Approve PNODE” to allow Uniswap to access $PNODE tokens in your wallet and accept the transaction via your Metamask window. Ensure that you are using a medium to high gas fee.
4. Potential network congestion may lead to your transaction taking longer to complete.
5. Upon confirmation, click “Supply” and use Metamask to accept the transaction. Again, please be sure to pay a medium to a high gas fee.
6. You will receive a Uni V2 LP token that represents their share of the liquidity pool
7. Once you receive your LP token, you need to go to the Pinknode page to deposit your LP tokens in order to receive LP mining rewards.

Marketing & Community Updates 🌏

1. Grown our Twitter to close to 18,000 followers and more than 10,000 community members on Telegram
2. Featured on CoinTelegraph, Decrypt, Yahoo Finance, and several other publishers for our monumental partnership with Pontem Network to bridge Facebook’s Diem.
3. Launched Ambassador program, received more than 200 applications in less than a week.
4. 1 million tokens issued as a marketing grant to support the program that will be run by the community.
5. Introduced a new program where we host a cross-AMA with our partners for the benefit of both communities to learn more about the Polkadot ecosystem.
6. Hosted 2 successful cross-AMAs with the founders and representatives of Pontem Network and Konomi Network

Goals for next quarter 🎯

1. FRONTEND IMPROVEMENTS
   - Pinknode v1.1 — we are going LIVE with full release with dashboard and website revamp
   - An enhanced dashboard will provide our users with analytics and management tools that drastically improve user experience
   - Users will be able to create accounts, generate their custom endpoints, and gain access to the networks in 3 steps
2. NETWORK UPGRADES
   - Support multi-region for lower latency and while maintaining optimal redundancy
   - Configure and optimize our K8s clusters to manage nodes more effectively
   - Design and implement CI/CD pipeline for maintenance and upgrades
   - Active R&D into one click deployment of dedicated nodes, token issuance on Polkadot, and node staking functionality
3. PARTNERS & USERS ONBOARDING
   - Spin up parachain full nodes and integrate with our system
   - Set up dedicated virtual machines to host collator nodes in a contained environment to maximize uptime and mitigate security risks
   - Roll out adoption plan for new users through multiple channels and programs
   - Onboard other parachain partners

We’re really pumped to take Pinknode to the next level! 👷💪

ONWARDS!

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-specialized Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to build on the most promising Web 3.0 ecosystem. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerates their product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

Pinknode’s Quarterly Brief — 1st September 2021 was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s up Pinknodians! We just hosted a cross-AMA session with our most recent partner Konomi Network on our community chat, catch up on what you missed out on below:

The below are the transcribed questions and answers for Konomi Network’s AMA.

Eliza, Pinknode:

Pinknodians have been very curious about Konomi Network, so lets begin! 👍 @irenezhao Tell us a little more about yourself and your role at Konomi.

Irene Zhao, Konomi Network CMO: Hi everyone, this is Irene. I’m the CMO of Konomi where I’m driving marketing, social media advertising and community effort for the Konomi.

As a sole proprietor, I built relationships with and represented over 100 corporate partners in their online advertising campaigns, including Huawei, Shopee, Grab, Lazada etc.

😊 you guys can follow me on Twitter :)

Eliza, Pinknode:

@irenezhao can you share with us what is Konomi Network about? What are its unique selling propositions?

Irene Zhao, Konomi Network CMO: The vision of Konomi at the beginning of its establishment was to enable financial applications on Ethereum to seamlessly connect to the Polkadot ecosystem, and to provide the users with a complete asset management experience — from liquidity protocols to lending market, as well as the management of ecosystem assets.

Compared with other lending programs, our main advantages include (1) a better liquidation model to ensure faster liquidation of user assets in case of black swan events (2) lower transaction fees and faster transaction speed (3) a good risk warning mechanism to reduce the amount of collateral for users

We are building the infrastructures like our oracle and lending protocols but we won’t be building everything thus we also welcome other projects to develop their dapps on us :)

Eliza, Pinknode:

Sounds fantastic! I’m curious, how does the risk warning mechanism work?

Irene Zhao, Konomi Network CMO: The risk warning mechanism has always been one of the important work for our team. At present, the risk warning mechanism of our platform has been completed. When the user’s collateral is approaching the liquidation threshold, the user can clearly see it through the UI. At this time, the user knows that he needs to add more collateral to avoid being liquidated. At the same time, for users who are willing to leave their contact information, we will send risk warnings to users through emails and other methods, reminding users that they need to add more collateral to avoid being liquidated.

Eliza, Pinknode:

Seems like you guys are very technically equipped! Can you share with us a little more about the team and how Konomi Network came about?

Irene Zhao, Konomi Network CMO: Konomi’s team members have extensive experience in technology startups

CEO Ariel Ho has been investing in the crypto field since 2017. She has seven years of experience in technology startups before joining Konomi. She founded High Mall Indoor Navigation, a technology solution provider serving Singapore’s largest supermarket chain NTUC Fairprice.

CTO Xingmo Liu has five years of experience in technology startups. He worked as a chief engineer in a medical startup, designing software products for multi-million dollar projects.

Konomi is developed by an experienced team. It is the only DeFi protocol that focuses on lending in the Polkadot ecology. The goal is to provide the underlying financial market support for other parachain assets so that the assets have better liquidity and financial properties.

Konomi project has also received support from the Web3 Foundation Grant as well And we are one of the 12 teams that got selected for Web3 Bootcamp 2.0 :)

Eliza, Pinknode:

Congrats! That’s an amazing achievement.

Irene Zhao, Konomi Network CMO: Konomi’s technical design mainly has five components. The first two components have been completed. They are the asset components including an AMM module which is similar to Uniswap’s asset exchange protocol that supports users to perform asset exchange, add and remove liquidity operations and a lending module that supports multiple assets.

The lending component will be launched by the end of this month. This is the key and unique aspect of Konomi, and it will support various types of lending pools. The user can mortgage assets in these pools to earn interest. If the users have enough collateral, they can borrow other assets in the pool while paying some interest as well.

Also, we are using our substrate off worker to develop our own oracle, the demo will be released by this month.

Eliza, Pinknode:

Yes! This is what we’ll be participating in, excited to test this out! 🤩

Ok last but not least @irenezhao , please share with the community what’s the use case of your native token $KONO and what role does it play within your ecosystem?

Irene Zhao, Konomi Network CMO:

1. Decentralised governance

The design and implementation of the protocol would be determined by token holders. For parameters like pool staking fees, transaction fee burn, liquidity mining ratio, are initially set by the protocol itself; token holders could update the numbers and the smart contract itself based on the voting process. In order to encourage users to participate in the process, there could be some profit set to reward the voting participants.

2. User incentives

As a decentralised product, getting liquidity is crucial for the user experience and platform adoption. Therefore, a large proportion of the Konomi tokens are reserved to encourage users to add liquidity to the platform and to use the products. By depositing assets to the protocol, users could automatically market make for the protocol.

3. Asset staking

Konomi token could be staked to participate in the base layer consensus and earn system rewards. It is also the staking currency to share platform revenue and ensure that the debt positions are safe.

About Konomi Network

Konomi is a full suite asset management solution for cross-chain crypto assets. Using Substrate as the development framework, the network aims to support more assets in the Polkadot ecosystem. Users could manage their crypto holding positions, trade assets and earn interest through decentralised money market products. Konomi also issues its native network token in order to kick start liquidity and decentralised governance.

Contact Konomi Network

• Telegram: https://t.me/konominetwork
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/KonomiNetwork
• Medium: https://konomi-network.medium.com/
• Official website: https://www.konomi.network

About Pinknode

Pinknode is a Polkadot-specialised Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to build on the most promising Web 3.0 ecosystem. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable, and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerates their product life cycles.

If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.

Pinknode’s Cross-AMA with Konomi Network was originally published in pinknode on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.