Fluence Project Update, August 2019
This month we’ve been super busy getting ready for the Berlin Blockchain Week and then being there. This blockchain week had been the most intense given so far: 5 Fluence events, 600+ signups, 2 panel talks, 2 more workshops at the Metacartel and the Decentralized Storage Summit, and a ton of networking.
We want to thank each and everyone who had helped to make these events happen and all who had shared the stage with us: Parity, Nervos, Near, Oasis Labs, Oscoin, the Web3 Foundation and 1kx for having us at the panels.
Shoutout to those who had made it till the end and shared coffee with us on a Saturday morning for the Founders’ Brunch at the Full Node.
As a sentiment worth sharing, it’s important to note that there’s so much going on in the decentralised space right now (compared to how it had been just a couple years ago). Great to see that so many talented people join the field, discussing not only the ideas but real problems and how we could solve them together.
Such events play a crucial role in keeping the community aware of what’s going on where and coordinating it. As a company and a team of like-minded people, we’re proud to be a part of it and support the decentralized community in any way we can.
Content and Community
GitCoin Bounty Winners
On August 29 submissions for the Fluence GitCoin bounties had been closed and we took our time to pick the winners.
The “Rich Decentralized Applications” bounty got a clear leader: Koos by Loïc Coenen — a social network that is built according to the standards of the open web and uses Fluence as a backend that provides transparency while keeping the application fully decentralized.
You can try Koos yourself or dig the code. Check out the post by Loïc describing the deployment process on Fluence. This is a textbook example of how we imagine our community growing and developing.
The “Build a REPL” bounty focused on creating new components for the Fluence ecosystem, and in that regard, it’s a huge success. REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) is an application on Fluence (just as a database) that allows developers to create scripts in their preferred language and execute them without compiling into Wasm.
The reward had been split between two projects:
- REPL for Rhai (embedded scripting c-like language for Rust) made by @viraja1;
- REPL for Ketos (Lisp dialect embedded in Rust) by @bakaoh.
Ability to execute scripts, without having to construct a cumbersome backend, (think of it as a decentralized AWS Lambda) and customize their workflow could save a lot of time for the developers building DApps, and having that kind of services created by the community is crucial for the Fluence growing ecosystem.
Here’s a list of components that are already available on Fluence: databases (SQLite and Redis), verifiable random functions library, a ZK-snarks verification component, and now a couple of REPL implementations (Rhai and Ketos).
Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all the participants, we wish you luck next time!
Workshop: Fluid — a Decentralized Twitter-like Feed
This workshop is a result of multiple efforts combined: it utilizes our database components, modular approach (the application on Fluence can be composed of several modules written in different languages), and deployment workflow.
It gives a good sense of how the app development with Fluence looks like:
- How the app components fit together;
- How they could be deployed on Fluence as a single .wasm package.
Follow the workshop in the Docs or read the code on GitHub.
Engineering Highlights
We’re right on schedule with the roadmap launching Kademlia layer, developed earlier, on the Fluence Devnet along with the basics of the interim data storage.
Kademlia is required to enable true peer-to-peer network connectivity (implemented in May), and the interim data storage is designed to distribute receipts from the decentralized storage among Fluence nodes and to guarantee data availability.
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.
