Open Sesame
It’s been 2 years in the making and I am trying my best to contain the excitement! Our team has worked hard — undeterred through the harsher market conditions — and continued on PowerLoom’s mission of decentralizing. We are releasing two things today:
1. All of our code is now open sourced! This means anyone can setup and run a PowerLoom node. We have setup a “one-click” script to easily deploy this on docker. It even works with a free Github codespace, which means you don’t need a beefy computer to try it out. Get started here:
While internally testing this with a few folks, we realized we need to make it accessible to everyone — especially those who cannot afford to run their own Ethereum node. To help demonstrate that, we have shipped a “lite mode” by default which works well with free plan of most RPC providers (even Ankr’s public endpoint). With a combination of low spec machine/Github codespace and a free RPC provider, anyone can run a PowerLoom snapshotter and contribute to the network without additional costs!
2. Private beta access to our offchain consensus service. The offchain consensus system, as the name suggests, consists of multiple peers(snapshotters) that reach consensus for each epoch against the snapshots committed by them. In this system, the consensus layer includes an epoch generator service which the snapshotters query to fetch the latest active epoch.
We have a detailed write up here:
This consensus layer is an external service in this phase of our release, that will be replaced with a decentralized protocol with its own testnet in the next phase (ETA April).
If you wish to participate in consensus, here’s a quick signup form:
Bonus: If you are a developer looking to give feedback, contribute or just try out the whole system, we have provided setup instructions to get the entire system (including consensus) to run on your local machine. Follow these steps:
We can’t wait to see what people build on top of this and help launch our next step towards a full decentralized PowerLoom!
