Updates from the Dev Cave: Working Testnet Edition

Dear Devs and XYO Tech Fans,

Well, it’s official! With successful integration testing complete, we have a working local test XYO Network!

Whether you’re a hardcore Dev into creating your own dApps, a casual technologist who can’t wait to start Geo Mining, or an XYO HODLer who is still wrapping their brain around what this all means, here’s a rundown by Justin, our resident code-herder and Consumer Product Manager, of what’s been done, what we’re working on, and how we expect this to shake out:

Test Bridges are sharing data with our test Archivist

We have data being collected and shared via our network protocols by our test Sentinels, which in turn off-load that data to our test Bridges. Both our Bridges and Sentinels are currently Android-enabled phones.

The test Bridges are successfully sharing the data our test Archivist, which is indexing the data and storing it in a Graph Database. The Graph Database structure allows us to have highly interconnected data while maintaining the flexibility and scalability to bring on more and more data types.

Currently, our test Archivist is running Node JS and very soon the beta Docker and GitHub repos will be available for everyone.

Next comes the tricky part!

Our test Diviner-to-Archivist interface architecture took a lot of careful planning and implementation. While the API itself is not complicated when it comes to querying the Archivist (basic GraphQL queries run the show), determining how much the archivist should know about the query it’s running becomes a very tricky decision.

Should an Archivist know what question being asked by the client is (i.e. did Justin run into Dennis Rodman last night?), or should the archivist be “naive” and, when queried, provide data about Justin and data about Dennis Rodman?

Rather than going into that deep discussion for the next two hours here in this short update, let me just say we made the wise decision of keeping the Archivists naive to the query and are allowing them to do what they do best, which is store MASSIVE amounts of data and focus their processing power on bringing that data to the Diviners.

Now, we finally have data gathered by interactions between a mesh of Sentinels being stored in the Archivist. At this point the network is nothing more than a distributed data storage network. This is rad in its own right, but we need to bring in the game-changer.

Our test Diviner architecture, currently written in a NodeJS and Solidity, is leveraging our dApploy utility to launch what we are calling our SCSC (Simple Conensus Smart Contract).

We will go into that later, but what you need to know is that the SCSC is where all of the magic happens.

This is the smart contract that can be deployed to any blockchain platform that supports smart contracts, giving us the flexibility and scalability to be a truly platform-agnostic oracle. The Diviner architecture is composed of a series of GraphQL APIs, user interfaces built in React JS, and Solidity ABIs that allow the XYO Network to solve basic queries of whether or not two Sentinels have interacted.

Of course, more complex queries will be capable on the XYO network, however, our current integration test is focused on solving that very basic query. We completed that on Friday of last week.

There you have it, an exciting week for establishing the foundation of our fully integrated test network. As we race toward the end of 2019, our San Diego team of engineers has gone well beyond proof-of-concept and are actively working on the world’s first fully decentralized geolocation network.

But what about our Sacramento team? While a lot of the focus from our side has been on the XYO Network itself, our insanely talented engineers at the Layer One dApp Studio in Sac Town have been cooking up something very special.

Over the course of the last month, the Layer One team has been refining their identity and role in XYO eco-system.

In fact, Layer One will be releasing our first geo dApp later this year — and you’ll get a sneak peek of it at Spatial! It will not only be open source, it will use a lot of exciting blockchain and XYO Dev tools!

Layer One will be XYO Network’s premium, world-class dApp studio where we’ll be producing some of the most innovative dApps around and creating many of the Developer Tools that are needed in the community to build dApps like ours.

We have a few more updates before our Nov. 9–11 conference, Spatial, but until then, visit the XYO Devs hub, follow our Devs Twitter account, and keep plugging away!

Johnny Kolasinski
Head of Community
XYO Network