23 Feb Symbol blockchain news update – 23/02/24
Hello XYM City! I am back in the UK and after a very long journey, I’ve managed to get some sleep and woken up ready to write 😁 I just realised that I only posted articles recently with no community updates since the 2nd of February so I am hoping that this post won’t be excessively long!
The new way to pay
I saw this tweet yesterday (thank you Radio for posting in English!!). It looks like a prototype Symbol payment device is being developed and entered into the NEMTUS Hackathon this year. I am guessing from the name only that it runs on a Raspberry Pi and uses Near Field Communication to allow touch payment using Symbol. This is really cool, I hope that one day Symbol will be widely accepted as a payment method and everyone will own one of these! 😁
Metal on Symbol V2
Ooh, exciting news! There is a new version of Metal on Symbol currently in development. I actually wrote an article about Metal V1 a long time ago but never published it. it was part of the Annual Report so will see if I can get permission to post before it is out of date! In essence, it allows any arbitrary data to be written to and retrieved from the Symbol chain. Using Metal you can write your favourite PDF, PNG, video, code or whatever you like to chain and a Metal ID will be generated. You can share the Metal ID and other users who can then download the file using Metal fetch.
According to the QUEST log the following features have now been implemented:
– Payload is now binary instead of Base64. This improves capacity efficiency. We have made our own extensions to Symbol SDK v2 to handle the metadata of binary values.
– Reduced header area and expanded payload area to 1012 bytes per chunk. Along with this, additive, which was previously a 4-byte string, is now a 2-byte integer (0 to 65535). version has also been reduced from 3 bytes to 12 bits. Metadata key also changed from 16-byte Hex expression to 64 bits unsigned int (8 bytes).
– CLI/SDK automatically recognizes and decodes V1 Metal. You cannot forge V1 Metal.
– However, the V1 SDK (MetalService) and scrap, reinforce CLI have been saved in the compat folder, so you can call them at will (can be called with scrap-v1, reinforce-v1 in the CLI
It looks like the documentation is now underway and the code should be released soon.
CoinPocket
I missed this previously but it looks like Teria is currently working on a new Symbol wallet which now has a name: “CoinPocket“.
Again this is based on a QUEST so please sponsor if you can 😊
It is still a work in progress but several features have already been added and I am sure that we will see something released in the next month or so as the QUEST deadline is April 8th.
Hackers in training
NEMTUS have run a development camp for budding Symbol developers and according to this tweet, it was a resounding success! Great to see NEMTUS members continuing to disseminate their knowledge and bring new developers into the blockchain world.
How decentralised is Symbol (really)
I urge you all to read this article on Jag’s blog. I won’t summarise it here but he discusses the issues with inequality of balances across nodes and centralisation based on hosting providers which I think I have discussed here in the past too.
Symbol Blog ❤️s data
As you will know if you are a regular reader I am a big data nerd and like to be able to generate and present stats in a more visually appealing way. I wrote a couple of posts last week, one showing the distribution of Symbol node balances and the other giving a basic breakdown of usage of the NEM and Symbol chains.
I also wrote a bit of code to count Symbol addresses with various balance thresholds and I think this may be something that I gather monthly (or backdate historically to the genesis blocks) to see how these trends change over time. Are we seeing accumulation or distribution of wealth over time? I am interested in seeing this so I will put it on my to-do list for next week 😁
Tech Book Fest
Everyone loves a good tech book right? They look good on your bookshelf at least 😁 NEMTUS have applied to attend “Technical Book Encyclopedia 16” so will be bringing the world of Symbol to the masses (or at least the attendees of the event). Good work NEMTUS! 💪
EXYM updates
EXYM is getting an update to improve user experience and make it easier to send the mosaics that you want without having to memorise the correct mosaic ID 😅 By default the XYM mosaic will be sent but if sending another token (e.g. an NFT) you will be presented with a thumbnail image and can visually check that you are sending the correct token to the recipient specified. I like it! 😊
Thanks!
Thanks as always for reading this week’s update and I will be back again soon with some more Symbol and NEM news and hopefully some new stats and code too 🤓
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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