25 Mar Symbol blockchain news update – 25/03/24
Argh! Sorry for the long delay in getting a post out! I made it to mid-March without breaking my New Year’s resolution for weekly blog posts – forgive me 😅 I am guessing that today I will have a lot to get through 😬
The Importance of Node Maintenance
So I am not 100% sure what happened with finalisation over the last few hours but it stalled and I see several high-value voting nodes (6 or the top 10) appear(ed) to have dropped out of the voting process.
This meant that the 2/3rds of voting power required for finalisation was not met and therefore finalisation stopped.
Hopefully, this is/will be resolved soon and we will be back up and running normally. I don’t know if the nodes went offline, I thought that I harvested a lot yesterday 😂 but if so then I guess this also brings home the problem with the lack of decentralisation of hosting too.
I think that a postmortem will be forthcoming so stay tuned! Whatever happens, there is a large problem with the centralisation of the voting process. I know that several ideas have been put forward in the past, e.g. dropping the voting balance limit for nodes from 3 million to a more realistic value and also allowing nodes to pool the balance of delegates to allow them to vote.
On a separate, related note CryptoBeliever has been monitoring node certificate expires and it looks like several certificates are set to expire in the next month. If this happens then your node will cease to function and you and your delegates will no longer be able to harvest.
Take home message – just keep an eye on your nodes operations and your certificate expiry dates – add them to your calendars so you don’t forget to renew! 😁 As. you can see I had my own issues recently where my node was misbehaving and I had to resync, it took the best part of two days 😬
XYMposium 2024?
It looks as though the captains are starting to think about hosting a second XYMposium event, I hope for this year but perhaps they are getting organised super early for 2025. Jag held a poll on X to see when would work best for the community and from 300 votes September was the clear winner. Maybe we are all impatient and want it to happen as soon as possible 😅 I hope that I will be able to attend and meet more of you in person at the next event – thank you to everyone for your amazing hospitality last December by the way!
Hackathon 2024!
So this is now old news, I spent some time looking at the entries when they were published and it looks like there are some really cool ideas. I have to admit that I wasn’t clear about the ins and outs of some as I don’t read Japanese. If I remember correctly though, many of the entries have an English translation so go check them out here and vote for your favourites (you have until the 28th March to vote).
New Mobile Node Release
If you are running a Symbol mobile node then you might want to think about updating to the latest release. Details can be found in the tweet below. I am still considering buying a cheap Android phone so I can run my fourth Symbol node 😂
XYM Burgers
I think I saw at least one other new Symbol payment venue over the last couple of weeks so if I spot it again then I will include it in my next post. These looked delicious though so I wanted to include them here – two burger venues that accept Symbol payment 🍔 🤤
Just a reminder. You can find a comprehensive list of businesses that accept Symbol payment here. Spoiler alert, you’re out of luck if you want to spend XYM outside of Japan 🇯🇵. I will be out again in May so I will charge up my mobile wallet and will try to make it to another venue whilst I am there.
Happy Birthday, Symbol!
Time flies when you’re having fun. It was Symbol’s third birthday last week and it kind of flew under the radar a little bit. There were lots of community posts and it didn’t go unnoticed so a belated happy birthday Symbol from Symbol Blog (I think the blog is three in June too).
NEMTUS Represent
NEMTUS are at it again, on an unrelenting quest to bring Symbol and NEM to the masses. This time they were attending the Open Source Conference 2024 in Tokyo. I hope that the event went well and you had a lot of interest!
Symbol Storage
Toshi is busy developing again and this time has published an article on “Symbol Storage” with the application live on testnet. It uses Metal on Symbol and I think it provides a web-based interface to allow you to store and retrieve data on the Symbol blockchain. I will have to check this out properly later in the week!
CoinPocket
Wow, Teria is a fast worker! It looks like he has released his new CoinPocket mobile Symbol wallet on iOS TestFlight and also as an Android release. I will have to add this to my to-do list for the week and check it out 😅
Speaking to Symbol’s MongoDB
Good to see some other people digging down into Symbol’s mongoDB and poking around 😁 It’s a really great way of retrieving lots of data very quickly and if you are interested then I also have some notes on querying the database in Python here.
Government-Issued NFTs?
OpeningLine is issuing NFT certificates for participants for the “Digital Innovation Talent Development Program” organised by the local government in Shizuoka Prefecture. Apparently, the NFT includes details such as the program name, graduate’s name, and certifier’s name and is meant to showcase the tamper-proof nature and easy verification of credentials stored on the public blockchain.
To be Continued…
I knew that I would have a lot to cover so I am going to end this post here and then write another update later in the week so this isn’t too overwhelming a read for you guys (and I can make up for my missed week! 😁). See you all very soon!
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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