Hydra Public Pre-release Launched, Sidechains Working, Storage Cluster Optimized, New Consensus Algorithm Update, New Marketing Team Member, and New Marketing White Paper Soon!
What an amazing month for Shift: our dev team nailed the Hydra public pre-release and making sidechains functional by end of Q1. Furthermore, they also finished very important optimizations to the storage cluster. On the marketing side, we have some exciting teaser updates and have expanded the team. Over the past quarter, our newest member has been proving herself in helping Shift achieve PR breakthroughs that will soon become visible in press over the coming month. We therefore formally welcome Jennifer F., who brings to the team over seven years of experience at a top PR firm in Los Angeles. A completely new PR project is also being executed by Jennifer which will help increase Shift’s media traction as we solidify the partnerships that will make our Phantom Pilot Program Public Collaboration a success. Finally, our “Introductory Business White Paper” is being finished for release at an appropriate time this quarter. It contains more details about our behind-the-scenes marketing efforts over the past quarter, and how these particular projects are building the foundations for Shift’s mainstream exposure and adoption this year. In more breadth, this community update covers the following topics:
- Hydra Public Pre-release Launched
- Sidechains Now Functional
- Storage Cluster Optimized: Pretty URLs and Strict Node Monitoring
- New Consensus Algorithm Update
- Phantom Pilot Program Public Collaboration
- New Marketing Team Member
- First Animation Video Finishing Touches
- Introductory Business White Paper Coming Soon
Hydra Public Pre-release Launched
Although the front-end code of our website has been available upon request for some time, the back-end code for Hydra has just now been made available through a release in our Hydra GitHub; and we will soon also release the Hydra front-end to GitHub as well, i.e. the Shift website which serves as a blueprint)! Interested developers can therefore download Hydra and start building web content immediately. Hydra has come a long way as a user-friendly CMS: commonly used page content and design modules are pre-included, and it is easy to build websites to host on Shift’s storage cluster without needing to know any HTML – just like creating a site with WordPress, or any other popular content management system.
In this current version, after content is created with Hydra, it can be manually uploaded to the IPFS storage cluster using the Phantom File Manager UI. However, within the next few weeks the process of uploading the data to IPFS will be automated within Hydra. This will make Hydra a fully push-button, intuitive content creation and publishing platform. This is a historical achievement for decentralized site creation and web hosting, since Hydra makes participation in the decentralized web completely accessible for non-technical, “regular” end users.
It is important to note that as our dApp suite has continued maturing to the point of becoming ripe for mass accessibility and adoption, Shift has thereby been able to make more significant strides in PR and partnership efforts. More details about this will be provided in early-to-mid Q2, when our collaborations with our partners have already initiated in their use of our tech.
Sidechains Now Functional
Our dev team promised, and they delivered: Shift has the amazing accomplishment of being one of the first dApp platforms to ever have working sidechains, even before Lisk. More specifically, our sidechain now does all of the following: it can sync with other peers of the Shift network that are running the Phantom dApp; block forging is functional, meaning that every forged main chain block triggers the forging of a sidechain block to be broadcast to the peers; multi-forging occurs at different nodes in sync with a consensus factor of >51, so that a sidechain delegate is able to forge only when it is in sync with the majority of block producers; and atomic swaps between the main chain and sidechain have been achieved in test settings!
In summary, the sidechain is stable and can come out of a fork by itself. A current limitation: the subprocess is not yet completely stable, but restarting the nodes on the private net restores it within minutes. As soon as the sandbox is stable, Ralf will create a UI page in Phantom that people can use to deposit Shift tokens, use them on the sidechain, and withdraw them back to their testnet wallet. We will in the next few weeks provide a sandbox link that shows the sidechain API is active.
In coming weeks, our dev team’s awesome momentum will continue accelerating with further progress on advanced features such as purpose-based transaction types, cross-chain transfers and withdrawals, and bridging functions between the mainchain and the sidechain. Needless to say, the community is very proud and excited that our devs have continued to developmentally outpace even top 20 projects, and they have our congratulations for this huge achievement.
Storage Cluster Optimized: Pretty URLs and Strict Node Monitoring
Craig made tremendous improvements to the storage cluster over the past several weeks. It is important to note that IPFS does not offer any way out of the box to implement custom routing/redirecting for hosted websites. He therefore updated Shift’s custom daemon to support custom URL routing and rewriting. (In the technical perspective, Craig’s implementation of “pretty URLs” is similar to .htaccess, for people who are familiar with apache’s mod_rewrite. He will provide full documentation of this at some point soon.)
This milestone is very important for making websites that are hosted with Phantom completely readable to search engine crawlers, and “normal” in terms of their SEO friendliness. Previously, pages had to be rendered while relying on hashes in JavaScript (for example, requiring “/#/” in the URLs, such as “/#/team” for our website’s team page). Now that “pretty URLs” are supported, URL paths can in other words follow industry standards of SEO that make a site hosted on Phantom just as readable, in the perspective of search engine crawlers, as any other site on the web.
As an added bonus, custom error pages (instead of the very plain and basic IPFS default 404 page) are also now supported. Furthermore, Regex and wildcard support is done, meaning that instead of having to map each URL directly, users can do things like map /file/:id to a certain location, so instead of having to list /file/1 /file/2 /file/3 etc in the routes, they can specify one route (this would also be familiar for people who are used to things like .htaccess). This not only means that the decentralized explorer can soon be hosted on the cluster, but all of this has also helped contribute to providing more flexibility when it comes to using pretty URLs with IPFS.
Regarding Jenga, there were previously issues which sometimes caused the IPFS cluster to crash, then causing a node to not be part of the cluster even though Jenga would check for a health check that already existed, while erroneously thinking that it was still part of the cluster. This has been fixed: now a new health check file is pinned to the cluster every x amount of time, so that when access is attempted, the node’s status as part of the cluster can be verified. This more strict node monitoring solves the underlying issues which previously caused “404 errors” to sometimes appear when loading pages hosted on Phantom. Craig has accordingly set up a new cluster and updated the IPFS-cluster code to the latest version, which is more stable, and our website is now hosted on it. Soon testnet delegates will also be able to join the new cluster. These updates are therefore exciting, major improvements to the platform, which raise Jenga to a very high stage of maturity.
For Shift’s IPFS cluster, next plans include expanding the integration of Shift seeds/keys with the blockchain, so keep your eyes open for further updates from the dev team. Thanks to these fundamental improvements to Phantom and Jenga, it is worth mentioning that Shift’s website will be further improved in early-mid Q2 with better SEO architecture as well as accompanying design and content enhancements.
New Consensus Algorithm Update
Initially, we had set the milestone for a new DPoS consensus for Q1. However, with a strong briefing from Isabella regarding the weaknesses of Crypti-based DPoS systems, the dev team concluded last month that their initial design for a new DPoS consensus algorithm, while interesting, would not in fact truly solve the fundamental problems of DPoS. The Shift dev team’s critical thoughts regarding the current state of DPoS based blockchains are similarly echoed in Vitalik Buterin’s blog article on the subject.
Phantom Pilot Program Public Collaboration
An organization aligned with Shift’s values will be selected to join our public pilot program, for example to host their website through Phantom. The organization will be chosen based on criteria such as its political or organizational mission, as well as its international prominence in the fight to defend democratic principles of free speech and political expression. We have been in discussion with prospective participants and shall release more details when a selection has been made. This initiative fits within our broader strategy for advancing Shift’s market penetration and paving the way for adoption, i.e. by using the press attention that will surround our project’s political and technological relevance to the international community. We expect to finish making our final selection of an allied organization for our pilot program by early-mid Q2.
New Marketing Team Member
We are pleased to formally welcome Jennifer F. to the team as Shift’s dedicated PR Manager. Several months ago, Jennifer came to Shift as a volunteer with over seven years of experience at a top PR firm in Los Angeles. Over the last quarter, she has been behind the scenes knocking down doors at various press outlets in advance of Shift’s forthcoming product milestones, such as the Hydra pre-release. In recognition of her contributions, we are celebrating by making her an official team member, as the fruits of her dedication will soon materialize within the coming month.
Jennifer has also agreed to spearhead our newest PR project, which is a website that will be hosted using Phantom and developed as a complement to Shift’s mission in the fight against censorship. The current phase of the project’s planning is almost complete, and more details about it will be released in coming months.
First Animation Video Finishing Touches
Shift’s first animated video has been completed by the animation studio, and is now undergoing refinements to the voiceover narration and musical soundtrack while we wait for the right market timing.
The purpose of this educational video is to help newcomers to Shift understand blockchain technology, as a starting point for appreciating the value that Shift can offer to the web and file hosting industries.
A second video is also being produced. The first video will release soon this month, with the second being likely to follow within several weeks.
Introductory Business White Paper Coming Soon
The Introductory Business White Paper will explain Shift’s business development strategy, including expanded details about its marketing, PR, and partnership projects for 2018. This white paper aims to communicate Shift’s value proposition and its goals in non-technical language that is easy to understand for average consumers. This white paper partially overlaps with the full Business White Paper that is scheduled for release down the road, but with the key difference that the Introductory Business White Paper aims to present a broad outline, fleshed out with some examples, for how Shift is growing market awareness and adoption in 2018 in the lead up to our final product release for Phantom. This white paper therefore includes a forward-looking preview of Shift’s growth trajectory while highlighting some selected business development measures. Since partnership details that significantly influence Shift’s trajectory are being finalized in early-mid Q2, that is also our planned time for releasing this white paper.
Conclusion
Some items that we haven’t discussed here, such as more details of our progress on the decentralized explorer, will be covered in our next community update. We are grateful for the hard work of the dev team, which in short has simply continued to deliver huge achievements at an incredible pace.
A clear theme from this, in coordination with Shift’s marketing efforts, is emerging: real product development paves the way for real relevance to the world, consisting of actual use partnerships and actions that make a difference on the international political stage. Every month being a part of this project becomes more exciting for those of us in the team, because we’re beginning to break new ground in terms of blockchain adoption in the real world.
As you know as members of our community, we try to avoid hyping the project because we are attempting to create real, sustainable growth for the project. For that reason, it would be against our principles to share details along the lines of “we’re talking to [insert famous tech company here]” or “we’ve met with [insert national political party here],” because we consider that irresponsible when the details of a meeting or a collaboration have not yet solidified into a formal, concrete partnership. So we’ve tried to do our best to just make this clear: as the product becomes ready, we’re doing everything we can to ensure that all of the right marketing, PR, and partnership pieces are in place. We are extremely encouraged by the progress that’s occurring in these areas, and look forward to celebrating the news with you when the timing permits that.
Sincerely, and with gratitude,
The Shift Team
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