01 Feb Symbol blockchain news update – 01/02/23
Good morning everyone! It’s that time again and I am back with another update showcasing the goings on in the NEM and Symbol world over the last week. I hope that you enjoy 😁
Welcome back!
Oooh the NEM Supernode Programme is back and this time it’s accessible to all. Gone is the high barrier to entry that was a minimum stake of 3 million XEM. Now you only need to have a vested balance of at least 10,000 XEM to take part (and run a node of course).
You can read more about how to set up a NEM node and enrol in the programme here. It looks like there are only 26 nodes signed up so far 😢 (up from 17 yesterday though). Please consider hosting a node, you will receive a daily reward which should go some way towards covering your hosting costs 😊 A number of new supernodes are hosted on Allnodes, it would be good to see some more diversity so why not set up a node from scratch, it’s probably even easier than setting up a Symbol node and there are instructions on how to do it here.
I just checked my node and it failed tests today 😭 Looks like my ping time was too slow.
I think that this is calculated based on communication with 5 other random nodes so I guess geographical location will play a part here – maybe we need more nodes in Europe as it works fine for me! 😁
$ ping 95.216.12.113
PING 95.216.12.113 (95.216.12.113): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 95.216.12.113: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=39.842 ms
64 bytes from 95.216.12.113: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=43.194 ms
64 bytes from 95.216.12.113: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=39.574 ms
64 bytes from 95.216.12.113: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=39.676 ms
64 bytes from 95.216.12.113: icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=43.122 ms
64 bytes from 95.216.12.113: icmp_seq=5 ttl=54 time=42.973 ms
64 bytes from 95.216.12.113: icmp_seq=6 ttl=54 time=43.020 msAlthough every test failed with a ping of ~220ms so perhaps I need to move to a different host!
Hackers unite
I am looking forward to this! Last year’s Hackathon saw the creation of some really great games and I’m eager to see what the brains of our talented community members have come up with this year. I don’t think that there is a specific theme this time so hopefully we will see a diverse set of new applications coming out of the Hackathon! According to this tweet, there are currently 18 entries which is great to see! Hopefully, we will get a few more submissions before the deadline too.
Maybe next year we could give the event some more English coverage and encourage some international entries.
Atomic swaps
faunsu has released an npm package “Atomic Port” which allows simple hashed lock time contracts (HTLCs) between Symbol and EVM chains such as Ethereum and Polygon. This allows atomic swaps between chains and it looks relatively simple to use too! Maybe I will give it a try at the weekend 😊
It looks like it is already being used with (as of today) 85 downloads and I believe that it has only been available for 2 days! Nice work! 💪
DrugN testing
DrugN is looking for testers. Don’t worry you don’t have to be a Guinea pig and take experimental drugs 😂 This is a blockchain-based health app and they are looking for participants to give feedback on the interface and functionality. All participants will be issued with a limited edition NFT that can be used in the app and 50 lucky winners will receive a prize of 500 XYM. I am guessing that this is only available in Japanese so unfortunately I won’t be a very good tester, otherwise, I would be signing up!
Allnodes issues
Here’s a word of caution, or maybe just food for thought from Jag about Allnodes as a node hosting provider. This doesn’t directly impact Symbol and NEM users as the node setup for Symbol uses multisig and for NEM the main account private key doesn’t need to be exposed. However, it is disconcerting that for other chains at least, the private keys of node owners are known and stored by the CEO of the company.
Whatever your view is on this, Allnodes hosts a significant percentage of NEM and Symbol nodes meaning increased centralisation which is not a good thing if the company went bust or their hosting providers had some kind of outage. The chances of both are probably small but it would be great to see some of you Allnodes users take the plunge and host your own nodes. If you are not setting up a voting node then you can even start a node with a zero balance and then delegate to it if you are worried about security or messing something up.
More HLTCs
Toshi is also playing with atomic swaps, this time XYM ↹ BTC! He mentions that this should also be possible with MONA too. It’s great to see all this work going on in the community enabling interaction between chains.
Big in Japan!
We all know that Symbol has a huge following in Japan and I guess that this map proves the point! I am not sure where the data comes from, presumably, Symbol community members provided their Symbol address and postcode and XEMBook produced this map. If this is the case then I assume that this is only a small proportion of Japanese Symbol users, it’s still impressive to see! Maybe we can generate some global stats some time – are there any other Symbol community members in the UK or am I the only one? 😁
Thanks!
That’s it! Thanks for reading this week’s edition. I will be back again soon 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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