17 Jan Symbol blockchain news update – 17/01/23
Good morning XYM City! It’s been a week since my last post so I have spent the morning catching up on stories from the NEM and Symbol world to report on. As usual, if you have any news that I missed or you would like to write an article for the blog then just let me know! 😊
NEM Supernodes
OK, I know it is a little behind schedule but NEM Supernodes will make their return very soon! From the discussions on Discord it looks as if the preparations are in their final stages and fingers crossed we will see it rollout in the coming days. Unless this changes last minute, the minimum stake for participation is 10,000 XEM with a maximum payout of 24 XEM per node, per day. There is a daily cap of 7,200 XEM so if more than 300 nodes participate then the payout per node will be split proportionally. My node is ready so looking forward to participating! 😊
Fast Apostille
XEMBook has released “Fast Apostille” on Symbol and you can find a link to the tool here! The service allows you to upload a file for which a SHA256 hash is calculated. Then you can record the hash on the Symbol blockchain. This allows you to post a link to the transaction hash and anyone accessing the file can check the file hash against the recorded value, thus providing proof that it is legitimate and has not been altered in any way and providing a timestamp of when the document was added to the blockchain.
The interface is super simple and calculates the hash value for you
This corresponds to the SHA256 hash of the file.
$ sha256sum Nine_Lives_Avatar_Twitter_400px.png
1d34a86a93381b7ea0853f410eccb518a2deb357aad1f3c61ad11df4d6655521 Nine_Lives_Avatar_Twitter_400px.pngThe tool then creates a new Symbol account, funds it with the transaction fee (thanks XEMBook! 😊) and sends itself a message containing the file hash. You can also reveal the private key for that account. I wasn’t aware of this but it follows the NEM Apostille specifications where an initial prefix string FE4E5459 is added to the file hash (thank you XEMBook for clarifying this for me!). You can see my resulting FAST Apostille transaction on the explorer.
CANADE Online
Toshi has released this 3D multiplayer game where participants can perform atomic swaps between CDBP on the CANADE testnet chain with XYM on the Symbol testnet. Nobody else was online when I connected so I couldn’t test out some of the features. It does look really cool though! According to the documentation, players can distribute CDBP to others, perform atomic swaps with testnet XYM, chat, wander around and also shoot people! 😁 This is more of a proof of concept but it shows how powerful this kind of environment can be. You could imagine a virtual marketplace allowing users to sell digital assets and even haggle with each other over the price that they agree on. Maybe if they can’t agree they can shoot it out! 😂
EXYM
ry0_cha_ng is looking for participants to test the EXYM Wallet and to get creative and start creating and customising their own wallet designs. If I remember correctly designs can be made into NFTs meaning that you may be able to sell or trade your designs with other wallet users. It’s a really nice idea so go check out the Discord server, read more about the project and get involved!
Node tracking
It seems that not a week goes by without hanatyan128 releasing a new Symbol project! 👏 This time he has created a “Node Tracker” library which can be integrated into dApps. Generally, when you use any app or write any code that interacts with Symbol you are required to manually specify a node to communicate with. By using Node Tracker you can bypass this issue and choose to be connected with a low-latency node which I assume will customise to your location based on the ping rate to the node list pulled from the Symbol Statistics Service. This is a simple but incredibly useful resource, you can imagine if you have hardcoded a node into your latest project and that node later disappears then your software just won’t work. By selecting nodes by availability and latency you can ensure that the node is live and that you are connecting to a machine with a low latency, thus improving the user experience.
ChatGPT meets Symbol
ChatGPT is taking the world by storm at the moment and it looks like it has now made friends with Symbol. In this article siwon_g shows you how, given simple text prompts, ChatGPT can perform various tasks to query Symbol nodes. This is something that I have wanted to explore since writing the stats article, it would be really cool to provide a service to query Symbol transactions (and perhaps also transactions on other chains) using a simple text-based user query, rather than having the barrier of needing to know how to write SQL or MongoDB queries. Maybe this is something for the future as unfortunately, I couldn’t get an API key before they halted new users 😢
XYM Comic
Just a reminder to keep up with the excellent comic series. Update – of course, the English version is available. I retweeted it the other day! 🤦♂️😂
Thanks!
Thanks again for reading – I will be back again next week with another update! 😊
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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