Introducing: The Sylo Node (Part 4)

Service Peers = Sylo Nodes. It’s that simple.

4 min readJul 21, 2020

A node by any other name would service as sweet…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve shed some light on the topic of Sylo Service Peers in my three part series Peers in the Wild (Pt 1), Lending a Hand (Pt 2), and Sylo Incentivisation (Pt 3).

As a backend developer, having a chance to share my work with the public is a privilege. The decentralised network we’ve built at Sylo is very exciting and I for one, am thrilled to see Service Peers take their first steps into the public domain.

And step into the public domain they soon will!

If you’re following our development roadmap, you will already know that there are some exciting milestones in the near future — one of which, is the opportunity for everyone to get their hands on a Sylo Service Peer and see what they can do for themselves.

With that in mind, I’d like to use this post to talk about an exciting change…

Service Peer → Sylo Node

In preparation for leaving the nest, our communications geniuses have given the Service Peer their full branding love and Service Peers will now be publicly known as Sylo Nodes!

I’m excited about the new naming convention and hope the Sylo Nodes will wear their new title proudly.

Why the rebrand?

Obviously, blogging about something in the midst of a rejig is a bit challenging, but it’s a good opportunity to let our readers behind the curtain a bit and learn about our process.

The term “service peer” arose during early development of the Sylo Network. After all, we were creating special P2P peers that provided additional services to the network. As a developer, the terminology made sense and it stuck pretty quickly.

So while Service Peer is a reasonable name when you’re a developer (looking out at the world from inside the code), it is perhaps not as clear to our users and the expansive decentralised community.

The use of “node” within the blockchain and decentralisation space is commonplace and well understood. There are many existing examples. The notion Sylo Node fits well as a basic building block of the Sylo Network — as nodes are fundamental components of networks.

The term Sylo Node also slots well in with our existing technologies, which have quickly become “must-have” technologies in the decentralised world.

So how does the Sylo Node fit in with our other products? Here’s a quick recap.

Sylo Apps

The Smart Wallet is an example of a Sylo App utilising the Sylo Network. The Sylo Smart Wallet is the Sylo you use everyday. This is the app you have on your mobile device. It’s for crypto wallets, private messaging, browsing Ethereum dApps and making secure audio and video calls.

In the near future, any other apps of ours that will fall under the Sylo Apps umbrella will communicate using the decentralised Sylo Protocol and support a diverse range of services to support countless decentralised products.

Sylo Network

The Sylo Nodes together make up the Sylo Network — the decentralised, peer-to-peer, networking infrastructure underpinning the Sylo Apps.

The Sylo Network is unstoppable. It is completely decentralised and can be run either privately or as part of the larger global network.

The upcoming public release of Sylo Nodes will put the power of the Sylo Network into the hands of the people.

Sylo Token

Sylo Apps consume services provided by the Sylo Network. The Sylo Token (SYLO) is the connection between the two.

The Sylo Token can be traded directly or earned/paid through an upcoming layer two micro-payment mechanism using probabilistic tickets. This incentivisation system allows for rapid pay-as-you-go dApp services, such as storage, relay and peer discovery.