Fluence Project Update October 2018
Meetups wrap up, our first workshop, new advisor, and more!
Hello, Fluencers!
How’s been your fall? Hope you’re somewhere cozy with a pumpkin latte to warm your hands, and here’s our monthly recap to cheer you up!
The super important and exciting news is our proof-of-concept reveal during the first Fluence workshop at the Web3 Summit. During the Summit developers had several opportunities to dig their hands into Fluence code, launch a local Fluence network and run some test queries guided by none other than Dmitry Kurinskiy — Fluence CTO. Read on for the details!
The feedback and the experience we had will help us a lot while we’re moving towards an official test network launch.
Also in October:
- Pitched on the stage of San Francisco Blockchain Week and had a meetup with Golem Project, NuCypher, Perlin Network, and Quantstamp at the Polychain HQ the same day.
- Pondered into the future of smart cities with Streamr.
- Had another great “Web3 stack, what’s next for developers?” meet up with our friends NuCypher, Swarm, and Livepeer.
- Gained a “strike” visiting Epicenter (part of San Francisco Blockchain Week), Web3 Summit, and Devcon in a row.
- Gathered community managers for their own meet up, where we could share our common problems, teach each other a few tricks, and have a quality time.
And, please, welcome the latest addition to our advisor team Addison Huegel!
Proof-of-concept showcase at the Web3 Summit
Here’s our favorite part of this month. Initially, we had an hour-long slot at the Web3 Summit for our workshop, but due to some technicalities and the generosity of the Web3 Foundation we’ve had an opportunity to repeat the workshop at least one more time during the October 22.
We used this time to:
- Give a short tech presentation on what’s under the hood of the Fluence network: architecture, principal components, and how they are connected.
- Launch a local Fluence network (each participant had an opportunity to do it on their own) with a pre-loaded legacy SQL database written in Rust and check its inner workings.
- Test the network with some pre-made SQL queries.
- Probably, the essential part: set up an integration with a decentralized application (a sample ToDo app run in a browser) using the Fluence javascript client.
The last part is crucial because it shows how the developers can use the Fluence network as a backend for their applications and the simplicity of these integrations.
Also, it’s a cool thing that while some people go by the book, others try to “reverse engineer” the workshop and break things. That’s the hacking spirit we hope to keep up at our events!
The workshop code and instructions are available in our GitHub repo. We encourage you to try this at home! Our team would be glad to assist you, so don’t hesitate to ask on Gitter.
And we’ve got a video to help you:
Fluence Events Bingo
We’ve managed to check in at the three major events during the month of October in San Francisco, Berlin, and Prague.
At the beginning of this month, Alexander and Evgeny went to the San Francisco Blockchain Week. Alexander gave a talk on the Fluence architecture and problems of the Web3 technology stack we are solving. The discussion continued in the evening on the meet up at the Polychain Capital office joined by the Golem, NuCypher, Perlin, and Quantstamp.
Check out a super thorough recap of the Perlin talk in their blog.
Thanks to our friends at Streamr, who have invited us to the App city node (Web3 Summit, October 24).
There we had an opportunity to run our workshop one more time and talk about how Fluence fits into the smart cities. Basically, if the city of the future is run by a bunch of applications that monitor and manage everything (for example, water and energy supply, traffic, air pollution levels) these apps could use Fluence as a place to aggregate data from various sensors, share it between each other, and process to make the right management decisions.
Our team was able to develop a demo integration between Streamr and Fluence and share it with the awesome Streamr community. Thanks for all the feedback we got, this gives us a tremendous amount of information! We hope that as our project moves forward, it would be super easy for any developer to create such integrations and use Fluence the way they need.
In case you’re curious, find the Streamr integration code here, but be warned: this code is built solely for demonstration purposes, do not use it in any real-life projects.
Building the future if Web3, one meetup at a time
It seems the questions on the future of decentralized infrastructure are brewing, since the “Web3 stack, what’s next for developers?” meet up gathers more and more people, joined by the projects like: NuCypher, Swarm, and Livepeer this time at the Devcon in Prague.
What really excites us is that the technology delivery finally catches up with the discussion. Thanks to all the talks and the work that we had it won’t be a problem figuring out how the infrastructure we’re building fits together.
By a rough estimate, several hundred people participated in the “Web3 Stack‘ themed meetups during these months, which we consider a pretty impressive result and a good sign that the community is active and growing.
A day before that we had the honors to live stream an Ethereum Magicians Council event, and now you can watch the whole eight-hour discussion:
Welcome our new advisor, Addison
Addison is Managing Partner & Director at BlockPR & Elevator Communications and is a communications and marketing specialist with extensive experience building communities around blockchain, B2B, and B2C applications. Over the years he’s worked with hundreds of companies, from startups to Fortune 500s. In 2015, he served as a communications consultant to the Ethereum Foundation and DEVCON1. More recently he has served as Head of Communications for Zilliqa, actively works with Binance, advisory to Perlin, Republic Protocol, Origin Protocol, Kyber Network and many more. Before entering into marketing and PR, Addison worked in the field of Condensed Matter Physics and has published a number of scientific, peer-reviewed papers. He holds a BA in Physics from University of California, Berkeley.
Fluence in the media
This year the landscape of ICOs and crypto investments has changed, and Evgeny Ponomarev is reflecting on how the more traditional funds and investors influence the market and help the projects to do better. Published in BlockTV.
The news of our workshop got to the media pretty fast, with an overview published in Crypto Reporter and Oracle Times.
What’s next?
It’s been a great month, we’ve finally had an opportunity to show Fluence technology in the fields and gathered a ton of technology-related feedback along with some smart questions we are yet to find the answer.
Now we’re going back to coding to release the test network next. Watch for the news!
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- Go through the workshop.
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