This week’s update can be short and sweet, as we were pretty heads down focused on two things…
- The Testnet Launch milestone.
- Research, planning, strategy for main network launch.
Testnet Milestone
We’re working through a long list of issues and closed a bunch related to stability, bug fixes, and ease of use. The soft launch of the testnet has been great as we’ve already identified a bunch of issues, but as we work towards the next milestone we’d like to release a stabler version of both the software and protocol that’s a little easier to use and get started with.
Main Net Planning
Some of the challenges that you have to deal with when deploying to the Ethereum main net, with real token, are:
- How do you do protocol upgrades over time?
- How do you do governance to enact these updates?
- What level of “centralization” is optimal for the community at various phases of the project?
- What sorts of failsafes and backstops need to be in place during the early testing phases of the network?
We’ve been researching and planning around all of these issues to get out ahead of them for the future. Of course the priority will be to thoroughly test the protocols on test networks for technical issues, but you won’t really be able to observe the true economics and incentives in action until there is a real network on the line.
Other
We also had a another Q&A with the founders this week and addressed Livepeer apps, real time conferencing through WebRTC, and more:
@yondon wrote a good post about Off chain computation solutions on Ethereum that got some traction with the EthDev community.
@lucy wrote a nice post highlighting one of our community contributors, Ben Crane
And I recorded (and live streamed) a podcast with @evan_van_ness that should hopefully be up in a couple weeks. We had the chance to dig deep into the technical aspects of the protocol and project.