26 Sep Symbol blockchain news update – 26/09/23
Hello world! Hope that you are all well! 😁 I am back again with another Symbol Blog update – you’ll be pleased to know that it is not too long today 😊
On-chain contracts
This is an interesting post demonstrating how a contract was created as a Symbol mosaic using NFT-Drive. Here the NFT data is stored on-chain and can be reassembled into the original password-protected PDF of the contract. The mosaic NFT can then be sent by the originator to the recipient’s Symbol address along with a message confirming that they agree to the contract terms and conditions. The other party can then read the contract and send a message back to the originating party confirming that they are also happy with the contract, thus validating the agreement. All of this is done on-chain and is therefore publicly verifiable.
DataSigil
So, this was really hard for me to understand but I am sure that someone will correct me if I got anything wrong! 😁 Toshi has released a new application “DataSigil” which is pre-compiled for MacOS. It allows users to set up and view a database that utilises the Symbol blockchain. The database administrator can create the database and can set the contents either as encrypted or open. Database access can be shared with other users, e.g. within an organisation.
It looks like database tables are stored as mosaics on the blockchain and I am assuming that when data is added to the database, metadata is written to the mosaic which when queried will return the values entered along with the timestamp of the block that it was written that is converted into a datetime value. I think that database access can be shared with other users by transferring the mosaic and that they can write data to the database through an aggregate bonded transaction that needs to be signed by the database administrator. Again I may have misinterpreted it as I don’t speak Japanese! 😁
Analytics! 🤩
If you know me at all you will know that I love data, analytics and visualisation so this article really caught my eye. I have always queried MongoDB directly to retrieve data but this article shows how to export data from MongoDB to BigQuery and then visualise it using Looker. I have never used any of these tools before so will be doing some reading after finishing this post. It also shows how to update the database periodically, only adding newly created blocks which saves dumping snapshots at specified time periods. I have written a few analytics tools and have always thought that it would be much easier to store data in a local database and then update it as new blocks were created so this might give me some inspiration and hopefully, I will be able to give this ago and maybe publish the tools I have already on a public site.
Nodes on a phone
Just upgraded your phone? Why not put the old one to use and run your own Symbol node! The app is only available for Android phones and can be downloaded here. I hope to see many more nodes pop up now – if you have a spare phone then why not give it a go!
There is also an English article here.
The results are in
So Jag held an informal poll on community sentiment the other day and the results are now in. It seems like the majority of the respondents were generally satisfied with Symbol and NEM technology and that the majority of people only held XYM. Most people who responded had not accessed the Discord channel and the general sentiments about the performance of the NEM Pirates were quite strongly negative 😭. They also show that the highest number of respondents had more faith in the NEM Foundation days than the current Pirate organisation though the results were quite close here. This is an informal poll and I hope that there was no funny business with the voting. I had thought that the majority of the community was supportive of the current structure but maybe this is not the case.
Thanks
Thanks 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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