Fluence Project Update, July 2019

While the two-thirds of summer are gone, Fluence team is gearing up for the blockchain week in Berlin, see the full list of events below!

The SQLite fork is available for deployment at the Fluence Dashboard. Now the Fluence stack consists of two production-ready SQL/NoSQL databases, which makes the migration from the centralized world much easier.

Content and Community

The Decentralised Web Hackathon in June was a huge success — gathering more than 70+ hackers from several countries. We’re happy to see that the Fluence-based projects get more sophisticated and how they approach decentralization in various meaningful ways. Check out the winners and how it happened in the recap:

Hackathon Recap: Projects, Winners, Tech Talks And More

The cool thing is that after the hackathon several teams continued their work on the projects, we expect to see the updated versions deployed on Fluence soon. The SmartDec team wrote a piece sharing their experience, worth reading too:

Trustless Off-chain ZK-proof Verification or How We Won Decentralized Web Hackathon

Finally, we have interviewed the three winning teams and posted a piece for the Russian developer community with advice on how to win a hackathon.

Among the other things:

• Fluence CTO Dmitry hosted a deep dive session during the IPFS Camp in Barcelona and discussed known approaches to the decentralized data processing using untrusted hardware.
• Evgeny spent a week at the DWeb Camp organized by the Internet Archive. The DWeb community brings another perspective to the decentralized application landscape, different from what we’re used to seeing in the blockchain ecosystem. Many teams work on offline-first, p2p products, and networks that are intended to solve issues around data sovereignty, privacy, and infrastructure robustness. It’s exciting to see how Fluence aligns with these concepts and to explore new use cases outside of the blockchain space.
• Mike’s talk on how WebAssembly is used by the Fluence platform to provide fast, deterministic and verifiable computations that he gave at the “Wasm on blockchain” is now available YouTube:

Not to Miss: Fluence During the Berlin Blockchain Week

First of all, Fluence is sponsoring the GitCoin “Grow Ethereum” hackathon. Two Fluence Bounties worth $1000 each are available for the hackers:

1. Build a DApp on Fluence. The goal is to enable developers to use Fluence for the backend part and create fully decentralised apps.
2. Build a REPL application on Fluence. This one is for the hardcore developers. The tool will enable DApp developers with serverless capabilities on top of the Fluence platform.

The “Grow Ethereum” hackathon has already started, the winners will be announced in mid-August, so there’s still plenty of time to join the competition!

A busy schedule for the rest of the month:

• [August 19] “Enabling Decentralised UIs, Backends, and Databases” workshop, Fluence together with Arweave at the MetaCartel DemoDay.
• [August 19] Mike Voronov will give a talk on why and how we’re using Rust at the Rust meetup. The talk will highlight some of the Fluence virtual machine internals and Rust features used in Fluence Rust SDK, that allow us to make the development process more straightforward.
• [August 20] Panel discussion on the state of the decentralized storage with Evgeny at the Web3 Summit’s main stage.
• [August 20] Fluence hackathon during the Web3 Summit.
• [August 22] “Token Economics: Sustainable Business Models” meetup where Evgeny will share the results of his research and some details on the Fluence token-economics proposal.
• [August 23] Decentralized Storage Summit by 1kx. Come see us at the Decentralised Database Panel (starts at 15:30) or at the Fluence workshop.

Engineering Highlights

SQLite added to the ​Fluence database collection! Thanks to its design, SQLite could be easily embedded into an application. Combined with the Fluence multi-module approach that means any Fluence-based application can use SQLite as one of its modules (the rest of the app could be written in a different programming language), giving developers even more flexibility.

Progress being made with the Fluence core features — the transaction history offloading, to be specific. Now all the application state transitions processed by the speed layer are offloaded to the decentralized storage (such as IPFS). This is an important prerequisite for data availability: these transactions will be used by the security layer (batch verifiers) in order to validate the correctness of all the operations asynchronously.

See further development plans on the roadmap.

More about Fluence in our official groups:

• Discord: Fluence Network
• Twitter: @fluence_one
• Reddit: /r/Fluence
• Telegram: FluenceOne
• Github: Fluence Labs

Also: important Devnet links.