Skywire Testnet Release Announcement

Important Information For May 22, 2018 Skywire Testnet Release

Time flies. Skycoin is now in its 5th official year of development with the passionate support of the team, developers around the world and our amazing Skyfleet community. What started as an idea in Synth’s notebook has now grown to a network of over 2300 official nodes and many thousands more DIY nodes spread around the globe ready to be connected to create Skywire. This represents an enormous and heroic effort from the entire Skycoin team. We are all working together day and night to bring the vision of a distributed blockchain ecosystem that runs on a brand-new community-owned internet to the world.

The soon to be released formal version of Skywire will allow the Skycoin team to test the functions of fundamental applications, the performance of nodes and various miners, and develop a fair economic system. In the meantime, those who meet our standards for testing will be rewarded with Skycoin in order to incentivize the growth of our ecosystem.

Skywire Software Release Date

The initial release of the Skywire software, along with corresponding installation images for official Skyminers, is scheduled to be available for download and officially released on May 22nd, 2018.

This paramount release marks the beginning of the testnet stage of the entire Skycoin ecosystem.

A community made map of the existing Skyminers

Key Points About Skywire

“The testnet allows the team to ensure Skywire is ready for broader adoption. Operators of official Skyminer and select DIY operators will receive Skycoin for their participation in the testnet. In this phase, the network functions as an overlay — traffic between Skywire nodes must travel over the existing Internet unless the nodes are directly connected over Ethernet or WiFi.” Skycoin Whitepaper Pg. 22

Skywire Software Environment

The coming Skywire software can run on the Mac OS, Linux and Go environments. Meanwhile, we will also provide a special installation solution for Skyminers which consist of a set of images containing an operating system that can be flashed onto the drives, a pre-configured auto-running Skywire. This allows the Skyminer to enter into the Skywire network as soon as it’s powered on.

It is worth mentioning that devices running a Windows operating system are not accepted by Skywire currently.

Skywire Installation method

For devices running the previous alpha version of Skywire, you will need to uninstall the software before reinstalling the formal Skywire testnet release according to the user guide that will be released alongside the software. Users will need to flash the new images onto the micro SD cards of your nodes.

The Skywire code is stored in its Github repository, which will be maintained and updated constantly in the future. Those who want to install Skywire for the first time on their Mac or Linux devices will need to install a Go environment and download Skywire from Github as instructed in the user guide.

The download links to the images for Skywire will be released on Github as well. Users of Skyminer or DIY miners based on Orange Pi Prime can run the latest Skywire by flashing Micro SD cards with new images.

Skywire Manager and Nodes

In a Skyminer or other node clusters, the Skywire Manager can be regarded as the control panel of all the nodes in its LAN. Through various interfaces, the user can quickly find the connection status of nodes, launch and shutdown applications, and perform many more functions in the future including monitoring bandwidth and performance, installing or uninstalling applications, etc.

When the Skywire Manager is absent in LAN, node processes in other devices cannot work properly. This is especially important for Skyminer users.

Skyminer Public Keys and App Keys

In Skywire meshnet, each node has a unique Public Key as its own address. Each application running on nodes has its own APP Key as its own address. This allows node applications to communicate with each other, forming the entirety of the Skycoin ecosystem.

When the Skyminer power is shut off or restarted, the Public Key and the APP key will remain the same once the power is turned back on. However, it is important to note that if the data storage of the device has been formatted or completely replaced (ie. reflashing with the new images), there will be a new set of Public Keys and APP Keys for your miner.

The Public Keys and APP Keys are in the format of 66 hexadecimal digits, leading to an enormous number of possible combinations of available key addresses, more than enough for all the bits created on Earth so far. Thus the keys will neither be used up in theory nor be reused by different parties.

Connect to Node & SSH

The coming version of Skywire will provide two fundamental network applications. These applications are 1. ‘Connect to Node’ and 2. ‘SSH’.

‘Connect to Node’ includes modules of ‘Node’ and ‘Node Client’ and they establish the virtual private network channels between the nodes.

‘SSH’ allows for the remote access and management of Skywire nodes. More detailed instructions will be introduced in the user guide.

Solution to Exit Node Security Issues

Earlier this year, some helpful community members reported a potential security issue to the Skycoin team. With the efforts of the developer team, the threats are now patched in the new version of Skywire.

In networks of many home and companies, all the devices trust each other by default. This allows you to use your voice assistant to control the lights and various common applications. In some internal test versions, when a Skywire node is in such a network, other people who use the VPN services provided by this node had access to the network addresses, including some LAN devices acting as a trusted visitor.

In the formal version of Skywire, nodes proxy services are prohibited to access LAN addresses, putting an end to this vulnerability in the exit node.

The Skycoin team has been placing communication safety and privacy security as our highest priority and we will spare no efforts to strive for a more secure and more private decentralized global network. We hereby express our heartfelt thanks to the community members reporting this issue.

Skywire Testnet Whitelist

In order to encourage rapid development of the Skywire network, during the testnet stage, the stable operation of Skywire nodes will lead to a reward in Skycoin for the user. This is our way of saying thank you to the community members who have long supported the project and to incentivize growth of the network. All the Skycoin rewarded in this process will directly come from the official team, therefore you will need to submit an application to the official team to obtain Skycoin rewards, whether you are running an official Skyminer or a DIY miner. The application form will be put on the official website.

The accepted applicants of Skywire rewards require designated equipment (also known as “Skyminers”) running Skywire continuously. Meanwhile, personal computers and servers are excluded for now.

All the users who have purchased a Skyminer through the official channel will be whitelisted after submitting their applications. As long as the Skyminer stays online for 75% of each period of rewards, the rewards will be issued to the user according to the wallet information submitted.

As for those who have a DIY miner, they will enter a waitlist arranged in a chronological order after submitting their application. When the user maintains an average of 75% uptime for a month of observation, while being at the top of the waitlist queue, they will be accepted onto the whitelist. They will then receive rewards for the coming period on the condition of meeting the 75% uptime during the period.

The current rate of admission of DIY miners from the waitlist will be set to 50 a week. A device with multiple nodes is considered as one Skyminer. The rate of whitelisting new DIY miners will gradually increase in the future with the development of Skywire.

An Important Note

Note: Please submit the newest set Public Keys following a reflashing with the newest images. Otherwise your reward will not be counted.

The whitelist application will be released on the official website on the 22nd of May and it will be accepting applications from the 22nd of May to 31st of May. The first batch of whitelisted public keys will be released on the 1st of June.

In order to reward the early adopters fairly, the reward schedule will be based on a fixed rate of Skycoin as there will not be a high enough density of users at the beginning to be based on bandwidth metering.

Get Connected!

We are excited beyond belief to begin this new chapter in Skycoin’s history with all of you. The Skywire Testnet launches May 22nd. So get your miners ready, get connected, and let’s build a new decentralized internet together.