31 May Symbol blockchain news update – 31/05/23
Long time no see! I’ve been travelling in Japan for the last couple of weeks, so I apologise for the lack of updates. I have been going through Twitter this morning and have a ton of news so not sure I will get through it all in one post! It’s nice to see that I was missed by at least one of you – thanks Rigel 😁
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to visit any of the Symbol venues I wanted to go to. My wife got terrible food poisoning the first day we were in Tokyo and that put her out of action for more than a week and spent a lot of time in play parks, zoos and on UFO machines with my three-year-old son. I did warn her not to order the “squid entrail” sushi but she didn’t listen – always has to go for the grossest thing on the menu 😂
Anyway, hopefully, the Symbol conference will go ahead later in the year and I can add on a couple of days in Tokyo to do the things that I missed this time and get to meet up with some of the Symbol community there. Sorry, I didn’t get to see some of you and I hope that you are feeling better now Radio!
Time for a change?
Back at the start of the month, the Symbol chain experienced a halt in finalisation which was later fixed. I am not sure whether a post-mortem was released so not sure that I should go into too much detail about the root cause in this post and will point you in the direction of the official explanation once I have located it. One of the big issues with finalisation is that it requires holders with a balance of 3,000,000 XYM or more to start a node, maintain it and participate in the voting process. I am not sure about the stats but according to the richlist there are 276 accounts with a balance of >= 3M XYM. Some will obviously be exchanges but still this is a relatively low number and only 59 of these accounts are running voting nodes which is not a lot when compared to the total number of Symbol nodes.
It looks like the finalisation halt has sparked some discussion and that options to lower the barrier to entry are being considered. I personally like the idea of pooled voting although reducing the balance limit should also increase the number of participants and reduce the risk of this kind of event happening again.
Accelerating progress
This is a long post from Hatchet that discusses the idea of creating an “accelerator” programme which would encourage people to build high-quality applications based on Symbol and NEM. At the moment the core team is tied up with building and maintaining the client and core components such as the explorer and SDKs. Having a group of people working on new ideas and applications would bring visibility to the project which, in turn, may attract new developers to the platforms. I really like this idea, how it would work in practice is another question but Hatchet discusses her vision in the post so go read it! 😊
Juggle
I have written what little I knew about the Symbol-based file-sharing app Juggle in the past on the blog but it looks like a new article has been released in English(!) so I wanted to highlight the project in today’s update. If you are curious about Juggle and what it does then please go check out the post!
Introducing – aLice –
Toshi recently released – aLice –, a smartphone app for iOS and Android that allows you to sign transactions and messages requested from other applications, I assume that this could easily be used as an authentication method proving that you own the address that you are connecting with simply by signing a message from that account using your phone. I haven’t tried it out yet but I will put this on this week’s to-do list 😊
Symbol in print
I’m not sure if this is a first or not but NEMTUS have released printed books about the Symbol blockchain! Apparently, 5 new technical manuals have been released in Japanese including guides to using Symbol in C# and Javascript applications and an archive of NEMTUS learning materials. You can read more about it here.
Exploring mosaics
This is a cool new application created by wecanch. You enter a mosaic ID on the website and it will give you a list of holder addresses and a thumbnail if that information is available. If you’re curious about which other accounts hold a particular mosaic then this is the tool for you!
Supernode June enrolment
A reminder for all of you NEM supernode owners – June is approaching fast and it’s time to re-enrol. Cryptobeliever is on the case and has just revealed the new enrolment address so make sure that you remember to send the transaction or you will miss out on June rewards!
Conference time
NEMTUS were flying the flag for Symbol and NEM at the Open Source Conference in Nagoya last week and it looks like a good time was had by all! Hopefully there was lots of interest in the booth and the technology 😊
Harvest notification
Faunsu has just released this tool for Symbol harvest notifications. It appears to be a Google Apps Script that you can set up with your Gmail account so that you receive a harvest notification every time you make a block.
Mosaic-based authorisation
I really like this. I had been thinking about mosaic-based authorisation for a little while now and when Hatchet put a call out to the community to make a Discord bot that would allow users to be assigned a role based on token ownership I gave it a go myself but I think that Faunsu’s version is nicer. Mine was Python-based and didn’t use SSS but it is a bit more clunky. Maybe I will write it up at some point on the blog.
Ventus updates
Mikun has released a new version of the web-based Ventus wallet that uses SSS to interact with your Symbol account. A new feature has been added in the update which allows you to view thumbnails of on-chain NFTs created using NFT-Drive and there are plans to support COMSA NFTs in a future release. Nice work Mikun! 😊
It’s all heating up
I have to agree that there are some great things going on in the Symbol community and the pace appears to be picking up. We are still small but keep at it, you are making a difference and the world will eventually start to take notice.
There is such a thing as a free lunch
This is great to see. The Symbol community again came together to donate to provide free lunches to children. This time 28 lunches were provided by Sandwich Factory and I am sure that we can do better next time – if someone sends the details then I will promote and donate next time you do it!
Thanks!
Thanks for reading! I will be back again soon with another update and will not be suffering from jetlag (still waking up at 5:00am 😵💫) so maybe my writing will be better! 😁
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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