Theta Network: Testing of the first 100 GN on testnet has been a success, Validator nodes including Blockchain and gumi Cryptos Capital have completed a major network upgrade, SLIVER.tv officially renamed THETA.tv
Biweekly update January 3rd — 17th January
Dear crypto community, as Theta Network enter 2020, one of the key focus areas for the project is decentralization: of governance, protocol design, and development just a name a few aspects. That takes many different forms including community-operated Guardian Nodes and open-source tools to allow anyone to develop on the Theta Network. Another important aspect is decentralizing the Validator Nodes — the core nodes of the Theta protocol that propose and produce new blocks in the Theta blockchain. In addition to the nodes run by Theta Labs, earlier this year Blockchain Ventures launched their validator node on the Theta blockchain, and a few days ago the team announced the next enterprise validator node: gumi Cryptos Inc — the blockchain/crypto venture fund launched by gumi Inc., a leading global mobile game publisher, and developer. There are several more enterprise validators on the way, including a global 100 tech company that has already launched their validator node on Theta Network. The team will share an update soon alongside their public announcement of their long-term strategic investment in blockchain technology.
Good news is, testing of the first Guardian Nodes on Theta testnet has been a success! The team will continue testing in the lead up to Theta Mainnet 2.0 in March.
Theta followers, you can check out the distribution of Pre-Guardian Nodes, Edge Cachers, and Enterprise Validator Nodes in real-time at Theta website! At the time of writing, there are 674 Pre-Guardian Nodes / Edge Cachers and 10 Enterprise Validators. These weeks, validator nodes including Blockchain and gumi Cryptos Capital have successfully completed a major network upgrade, which was supported by Binance. This upgrade allows validators to earn TFUEL, a crucial step to onboarding new enterprise validator nodes.
On January 15th, 2020, the SIVER.tv team announced that SLIVER.tv officially renamed THETA.tv! THETA.tv will now exclusively feature 100% blockchain-based direct livestreams and no longer embed other websites. Furthermore, the community will now collectively decide the top creators on the platform with the brand-new Partner Royale — a season-based streamer XP leaderboard that awards the top 10% of streamers with the coveted Theta Partner title. For those looking to stream on THETA.tv, they will have to get their hands on a stream key and from there work their way up to Affiliate, Partner, and finally Partner Prestige. More information on streaming to THETA.tv can be found below.
And last but not least, the Theta block explorer has a new UI and additional features, staking info, and more! Check it out!
Development
GitHub metrics:
THETA has 8 public repositories and 15 private repositories. Overall, the Project has frequent commits to the collection of repositories.
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Introducing THETA.tv
On January 15th, 2020, the SIVER.tv team announced that SLIVER.tv officially renamed THETA.tv!
Their business has grown and evolved over the years since the team first started in 360° Virtual Reality Esports in 2016, maturing into a giveaway platform for Twitch streamers to grow their brand, finally resulting in the March 15th, 2019 launch of the blockchain-powered live streaming website — SLIVER.tv, powered by the Theta Network.
Almost one year later, this name change allows the team to better match their goals and closely align their brand alongside the flagship product — the Theta Network — their decentralized peer-to-peer CDN delivery infrastructure based on the blockchain. THETA.tv is the first of many video platforms to implement the Theta Network infrastructure, dramatically increasing user engagement and slashing video CDN costs by over 50%. With the THETA.tv team working in-house alongside the Theta Network engineers, they’re afforded the opportunity to improve their technology and gauge the results in real-time.
THETA.tv will now exclusively feature 100% blockchain-based direct livestreams and no longer embed other websites. Furthermore, the community will now collectively decide the top creators on the platform with the brand-new Partner Royale — a season-based streamer XP leaderboard that awards the top 10% of streamers with the coveted Theta Partner title. For those looking to stream on THETA.tv, they will have to get their hands on a stream key and from there work their way up to Affiliate, Partner, and finally Partner Prestige. More info on streaming to THETA.tv can be found here.
The logo remains the same as SLIVER.tv with slightly updated, brighter colors. You may find the new updated brand guidelines and logo download here. The launch of THETA.tv is just the beginning of what will no doubt be a monumental 2020!
Theta Network adds gumi Cryptos as enterprise validator node:
Last week, the Theta team announced that the next enterprise validator node: gumi Cryptos Inc.
gumi Cryptos Inc. is the representative member of gumi Cryptos Capital, which is the blockchain/crypto venture fund launched by gumi Inc., a publicly-traded leading global mobile game publisher and developer. gumi Cryptos Capital offers its portfolio companies a strategic venture capital investment partner with unique access to the Japan cryptocurrency market through its network of investors and management board. Since launching in 2018, gumi Cryptos Capital has invested in many top crypto projects including Origin, Evercoin, Spacemesh, Opensea and Vega Protocol.
Adding gumi Cryptos Inc. as a validator node is a critical step towards decentralization for the Theta protocol, both to make governance of the protocol less dependent on Theta Labs, but also on a technical and practical level. The validator nodes are directly responsible for producing the new blocks that Theta blockchain is built on, and if more than a third of them are corrupted or otherwise out of consensus, the blockchain cannot function properly. When Google Cloud suffered a massive outage on the U.S. East Coast back in July, one of the Theta validator nodes temporarily went down as well. While the Theta blockchain still operated normally and maintained 100% uptime, it highlights how important it is to have many redundant validator nodes. Diversifying block production across geographies, network architectures, and cloud providers is necessary to prevent these threats, and the addition of gumi Cryptos Inc. as a validator is a strong step forward to that goal.
Welcome gumi Cryptos Inc. as an enterprise validator node on Theta Network!
Theta validator nodes including Blockchain and gumi Cryptos Capital have successfully completed a major network upgrade on January 15th, 2020 as of block 4164982! This upgrade allows validators to earn TFUEL, a crucial step to onboarding new enterprise validator nodes.
Testing of the first 100 Guardian Nodes on Theta testnet has been a success! The team has just added another 100 users to testnet and will continue testing in the lead up to Theta Mainnet 2.0 in March.
Theta Mainnet 2.0:
Why the team is creating the Theta blockchain?
The team’s long-term vision for the Theta Network is a decentralized end-to-end protocol for processing and delivering data, not just video but all types of data. Decentralized data delivery, at the edge, powered by you. That vision encompasses three main components that are to be powered by Theta edge nodes, run by the community:
Data Delivery — Initially focused on video delivery, and implemented on THETA.tv and multiple other video platforms coming soon. But the scope of decentralized data delivery goes beyond video into file updates, game patches, OS and app updates, web content, and any other form of data delivery.
Data Storage — As Theta expands from livestreaming applications to Video-on-Demand (VoD), app updates, and game patches, it becomes necessary to have a decentralized solution to data storage. Theta nodes can cache the most in-demand live and static content and files to ensure they are able to contribute to the network and earn TFUEL.
Data Encoding — By allowing Theta nodes to perform ingest/encoding of raw video and data as close to the source as possible, particularly for live events (professional sports, concerts, conferences, for example), the Theta Network will truly become an end-to-end solution for video and data. Building out this functionality is a natural extension for the Theta team, based on the team’s experience encoding live VR events in 2016 for SamsungVR, Intel IEM, ESL, and others.
Awareness and social encounters
Upcoming events:
No updates.
Finance
Live Network Statistics:
January 17th, 2019
You can now see the distribution of Pre-Guardian Nodes, Edge Cachers, and Enterprise Validator Nodes in real-time at thetatoken.org ! Scroll down to “Live Network Stats”, which will update each time you refresh the page.
Pre-Guardian Nodes / Edge Cachers: 674
Enterprise Validator Nodes: 10
For information on Theta Guardian Nodes and how to join, see the announcement blog.
Information from Theta explorer:
Theta markets:
The information is taken from Coinlib.io.
Binance supported the Theta Token (THETA) network upgrade:
Roadmap
Theta Roadmap:
Q1 2020
- Theta Mainnet 2.0 goes live with Multi-BFT consensus mechanism and growing number of enterprise validator nodes
- Guardian Nodes launch on Theta Mainnet 2.0
- Release of specialized smart contract support
- Theta streaming protocol supports full Video-on-Demand (VoD)
Q2 2020
- Beta launch of decentralized data storage
- Beta launch of decentralized file delivery of any content type, such as game patches, applications, OS updates
- Beta launch of Theta protocol adapted to Smart TVs and IoT devices
H2 2020
- Release of generalized Turing-complete smart contract support
- Beta launch of decentralized encoding protocol
- Production release of the end-to-end Universal Edge Cacher
Check out the latest updates on TFUEL integration with THETA.tv at the TFUEL streaming roadmap — this will continue to be updated as new features are completed and added to the roadmap.
THETA.tv Roadmap:
Partnerships and team members
No updates.
Rumors
Twitter:
Reddit:
PS4 App Littlstar Gets Whistle, New Form, Theta.tv Content.
Other:
Be aware of scammers! Admins of Official Theta Telegram chat will never DM you or ask for private info / keys / seed phrases!
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Theta community continues to grow. There is a slight increase in the number of subscribers of Theta social media channels these weeks.
Official Telegram group — Discussions on development, possible partnerships, etc.
Facebook — 15–25 likes per publication, 1–5 shares.
Twitter — Average number of retweets is 35–40 for one post.
Bitcointalk.org — since November 23rd, 2017. Discussion on mainnet launch, price, roadmap.
There is a slight growth in Theta community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Theta Reddit subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook likes. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
