After two years of active development, the Skycoin Project is pleased to announce the launch of the Skywire Mainnet, a significant milestone and a crucial step toward realizing Skycoin’s vision of a truly secure and decentralized Internet.

The launch will roll out over two months beginning in April, giving current Skyminer operators time to upgrade to Mainnet. (A small Skycoin bonus will be awarded to those who migrate to Mainnet within the first four weeks of the launch.)

Skyminer operators who wish to upgrade may begin the upgrade process by visiting https://github.com/SkycoinProject/skywire-mainnet/wiki

During Skywire’s testnet phase, owners of official Skyminers were required to have all eight nodes online in order to earn full uptime rewards. With the launch of Mainnet, official Skyminers now only require seven nodes to be online at least 75% of the time in order to earn full rewards.

What is Skywire?

As headlines around the world continue to demonstrate the shortcomings of the existing Internet, including privacy violations, censorship, net neutrality concerns, and economic limitations, Skywire provides a definitive solution. Skywire is intended to become a scalable peer-to-peer wireless mesh network, where all traffic is anonymous and end-to-end encrypted.

Skywire uses a software-defined networking protocol (SDN) to route traffic in a unique and efficient manner. The network consists of Skyminers; custom-built hardware devices that serve as nodes providing processing power, bandwidth, and storage space for the Skywire network. There are already over five thousand active nodes deployed around the world, with more coming online every day. Those who choose to operate these nodes are rewarded for their service to the Skywire network through cryptocurrency micropayments executed on Skycoin’s third-generation blockchain.

Welcome Skywire Mainnet

In March of 2019, Skycoin launched the developer’s Mainnet, allowing a command-line based testing of the network software. Now, after a year of dedicated development, public Mainnet is now available to all Skywire users, complete with a user-friendly graphical interface.

In addition to providing an easy way for Skyminer owners to monitor and administer their respective nodes from anywhere in the world, the Mainnet provides a platform for developers to build and deploy decentralized apps that work on the Skywire network. These dapps can take advantage of the security and privacy advantages built-in to Skywire.

Existing Skyminer operators may easily upgrade their version of the Skywire software to the public mainnet using the Skyimager, without needing to manually tweak settings. During the testnet phase of Skywire, those running official or do-it-yourself Skyminers were receiving monthly rewards for their assistance. Those rewards will continue after upgrading to mainnet according to the agreements in place.

Next Steps

Soon, Skywire Mainnet will include a marketplace for bandwidth-sharing based on Coin Hours; an inflationary parallel currency generated automatically simply by holding Skycoin. The addition of small antennas to Skyminers will allow operators to become literal Internet Service Providers to their communities, connecting to other nodes and building a resilient mesh network to which anyone may safely connect via WiFi.

The CXO protocol, Skycoin’s immutable objects library, will also be joined with Skywire in the very near future, allowing for an unprecedented method of secure distributed data storage.